A National Planning Framework for England

Controversial new centralised planning powers introduced by Labour and the Liberal Democrats will not be used by the Scottish government to hijack decisions from local authorities, Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney has declared.

Apart from the "relatively few in number ....projects which are of genuine national strategic significance ...We do not intend to use the National Planning Framework to take decisions that are properly the preserve of local government."

Five- year planning began in the Soviet Union in 1928 and ended in the 1980s with the collapse of the soviet-type system. In the 1960s these plans were imitated by forms of indicative planning, in France particularly, the UK, and in other market economies with large state sectors. They were not compulsory for the private sector and were largely ignored and replaced by ordinary economic policy, further over -ridden by the requirements of the day to day management of the economy.

Since 2000 there has been a consistent determination to put into effect a National Planning Framework for England (after a preliminary report from Manchester University in that year), fitted onto the various unelected Regional Authorities into which England is divided, and projected over the next five decades; Wales and northern Ireland have their own Planning Framework.

Resurrecting obsolete national economic planning goes against the grain of a globalised market economy, is inefficient because it can only interfere by constraint, acting as a straitjacket on private enterprise and hindering economic adjustment processes in the market, is a way of bullying local government authorities, and is (though do they care?), wholly undemocratic.

The Westminster Labour regime is reinventing the (socialist) wheel.