EU Referendum


The Harrogate Agenda – local government


26/07/2012



county hall.jpg

"All politics is local", a former US Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, once famously said.

In the Wikipedia entry on the subject, we are told that politicians must appeal to the simple, mundane and everyday concerns of those who elect them into office.

It is those personal issues, rather than big and intangible ideas, which are often what voters care most about, the entry continues. The concept is contrary to the notion that most people, somehow, in local elections are casting votes to "send a message" to the highest levels.

Focused very much on American politics, Wiki then tells us that the principle predicts that most people will not vote for local politicians simply as a means to act on feelings about higher politicians. The prediction is that most people who vote, or debate issues, are focused on resolving their local issues.

That may be the case in the United States, but when you really think about it, one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the British people is the fiction that we actually have local government. We don't. What we do have is a series of central government agencies, administering centrally defined law locally.

Local government units are centrally defined, by Act of Parliament. They owe their existence, their boundaries and their powers to the diktats of central government. They are funded primarily from the centre and the nature of monies which are collected locally are directed by the centre, as well as the amounts and terms of collection.

This, by any definition, is a top-down society. And, as a result, local elections have become little more than extended opinion polls on the performance of central government. There is no point in getting excited over the election of local officials when almost the entire extent of their powers is determined by national law.

Understandably, therefore, local government "reform" featured at our Harrogate conference, although the very idea of reform is otiose. How can you reform something you don't have? We need to build it anew, ground up, providing the British people with something which is truly local and which is also government in the proper sense of the word, not just local administration.

To that effect, our aim must be no less than to reverse the entire structure of the British state. Instead of the top-down construct, we need to focus locally and determine a bottom-up government.

To achieve this, the fundamental status of local government units must change. Instead of being statutory bodies, under the control of central government, they have to become constitutional entities, their existence, powers and revenue-raising capabilities defined by the people via the medium of a constitution.

A logical approach would be to adopt the counties as the basic building blocks of the state, and we have something of a template for this from Stuart Noyes, via Witterings from Witney. He offers this:
Each County shall adopt a democratic constitution. This requires the approval of the People residing in each County and must be capable of being revised if the majority of those eligible to vote so request.

The Counties are sovereign except to the extent that their sovereignty is limited by this Constitution. All domestic law and taxes applying nationally at the time this Constitution comes into force shall be enacted within each County, except international law, treaties with other nations, maritime law and matters of national defence which shall reside with the National Government.

All taxes shall be collected by each County within their borders for their own use, except any new national tax levied by the national government on citizens of voting age. The national government shall not distribute its own taxes to the county legislatures other than for natural disasters or other such emergencies and then only at the request of the county legislature.
From this it will be seen that, as opposed to Mr Cameron's ersatz localism, each county becomes a sovereign legislature, taking powers back from the centre and making much of our domestic law.

There is a certain parallel here with the structure of the United States, to the extent our country become the United Counties of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (or UC for short). This is true devolution, where power resides at the lowest practical level.

In some respects, this also solves some of the Member of Parliament problems. One might expect seats to be apportioned on a county basis – approximately one per 120,000 head of population – with the details left to the electors of the county, embodied in each local constitution and implemented by the local legislatures.

MPs would not be paid from central funds, but by their counties. It would be for each county to decide how much their representatives were paid, and how much should be allowed by way of expenses, and how they should be held accountable.

At the heart of true localism is, of course, taxation. Arguably, with local authorities becoming legislatures in their own right – and assuming many of the duties of the state, including social security, health provision and unemployment benefit – they should become the primary tax collection bodies.

Personally, I would prefer a system where tax is collected locally and then a subvention is paid to central government, in a similar manner to the way precepts are negotiated and paid to the likes of police, fire services and transport.

Instead of the system where only a fraction of their income is collected locally, local authorities would be financially self-sufficient. Then, what would vary would not be amount of subsidy paid by central government, but the amount paid to the centre.  The centre becomes dependent on the local, reversing the current situation.

Now comes the hard part – framing all this, or something like it, on one pithy demand, to fit in with the Chartist format. I would suggest borrowing from Stuart Noyes, with something in terms of:
in each of the current local administrative areas (we demand that) local government structures should become sovereign legislatures, with their powers and responsibilities defined by their own democratic constitutions, approved by the electors of the areas so defined.
There are probably better ways of putting it, but at least we have a start. Next, we look at direct democracy.