Regional government is John Prescott's political dream, one he shares with the European Commission.

However, it is not an idea that has found much favour in the South-East, the one English region lukewarm about it.

Tory leaders have accused ministers of starving big-spending authorities to push through regional assemblies.

And East Sussex could lose £40 million in a shake-up of council funding which will alter the way Government cash is distributed to the regions from next April.

Regions are, however, about more than politics or money. Perhaps the South-East has lost a fierce sense of regional identity that characterises other places.

Perhaps the South-East, among Europe's most successful economies if it were an independent state, has become little more than the hinterland of London.

Neither are likely to be true. Even in the 21st Century we are not as rootless as it appears.

A recent report by the Downing Street Performance and Innovation Unit found four out of ten people in Britain still lived in the local authority area where they were born.

While Brighton and Hove City Council leader Ken Bodfish makes the case for regional government, he does not ask if the counties are still important to us.

County councils need to be improved. They are the glue that keeps the counties alive and reform would be wiser than losing them altogether.

Our sense of place is more important than the streamliners and the modernisers tend to think and it is Sussex, not the South-East, that is the bedrock of our identity.