EU Referendum


UK politics: politicracy vs democracy


23/09/2014



This is a joint post with Autonomous Mind 

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 A busy week gets busier, as we prepare for the Dawlish CIB meeting on Wednesday - another in our series on how to leave the EU. There has been an encouraging uptake but there are still places for anyone wanting to attend. You can contact Peter Troy for details.

We also have planned another Harrogate Agenda workshop, this one to be held on 18 October. The venue is the Best Western Consort Hotel in Rotherham, and you can get booking details by e-mailing Niall Warry. I'll write again on this shortly.

Meanwhile, the essence of Harrogate Agenda is tasking shape under our very eyes, as the English constitutional settlement comes under scrutiny and detailed questions are being asked about how we are governed.

Leaping into the fray is Matt Ridley in The Times (paywall), who offers an interesting addition to the media coverage of the political class and its new found interest in answering the West Lothian question.

The piece serves as a reminder that the declared wishes of the political parties, be it English votes on English laws or regional assemblies, has little or nothing to do with correcting the constitutional injustice that sees Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs vote on legislation that doesn't affect their own constituents.

What we are seeing is the servicing of narrow political interests, whether that is attempting to bring back the idea of EU-driven regional government, or attempt to ensure MPs from the three smaller home nations can still vote on English matters when it is politically expedient. Certainly, as Ridley points out, we want nothing of their damn regions:
… in 2004 the people of the northeast spoke with one voice, or at least by a margin of almost four to one, against the idea of a regional assembly. Why? Because, although they like localism, they feel loyalty to England rather than any artificial entity called the northeast. The inhabitants of Sunderland or Berwick or Stockton have less than no desire to be governed from Newcastle. In 2004 they knew a bureaucratic white elephant when they saw one.
Neither solution, of course, has anything to do with democracy. Rather, the kratos (power) is joined at the hip with the politicos, the politicians, making this yet another example of politician power, or politicracy, as we have come to call it. And, as usual, the rest of us, the people, don't get a look in.

Decisions on the table are not being taken by voters. Whether it is Labour MPs and councillors who held a private meeting on English devolution (link) or David Cameron's handpicked attendees who met at Chequers, any "settlement" that emerges will not be of our making. What should be our decision will instead be an imposition.

Nevertheless, there is some hope. With Matt Ridley telling us that the last thing England needs is another expensive tier of government, a number of prominent politicians have been advocating a solution for England that lends itself to the evolution of real people power – democracy and accountability.

In order to ensure that English identity is not sliced and diced for EU convenience, we need to see real devolution, with control moving from the centre to the cities and counties, with sufficient flexibility to devolve further as suits the needs of the local community.

Such a move would relocate decision making to a local level, from where voters can take control of the decisions and bring about democracy. Thus says Ridley:
Proper financial accountability at the level of the county, rural or metropolitan, would transform local democracy and attract better councillors. Single-tier counties (many of which are bigger than some American states) would start to compete on price or on quality of service instead of competing, as they do now, on their ability to extract largesse from central government. We should emulate the way America uses state government as a laboratory to test policy.
This is a vision which is not so very far from The Harrogate Agenda. And it is the agenda that makes clear why membership of the EU runs contrary to real democracy - the EU's idea of representative democracy is wholly incompatible with vibrant direct democracy. Ridley adds his own views on the potential conflict:
Of course, there is a heck of a lot that counties (and nations) would not be allowed to do by Brussels: compete on VAT, abolish agricultural subsidies and so forth. But at least we would flush this out. At the moment nobody realises just how many of the decisions that politicians pretend to take are in fact handed down by unelected Eurocrats to unelected Sir Humphreys with a token nod through parliament. Genuine English home rule would soon clash with the technocratic version offered by Brussels. Another reason to like it.
Creating an English Parliament, or giving power to the regions, will not transfer power to the people. They will have no direct part in decision-making. People have to be part of the process if politics is ever going to mean anything to them, and that means direct democracy.

The interesting thing is that people are demonstrating that they are not tired of politics. They are tired of politicians or, more particularly, they are sick to the hind teeth of being taken for granted by politicians. They are sick of being taken for fools.

The city and county model already enjoys cross party support, with Tam Dalyell speaking in favour of its implementation across the whole of the UK, not just England.

Labour's Hilary Benn has advocated the same solution, as did Conservative MP, Jeremy Lefroy and this, of course, is where Owen Paterson stands. For the first time in a very long time, we might finally have the makings of a fair fight between politicracy and democracy – and the weight of numbers is on our side.

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