The proposal for a Grand Committee dealing with English and Welsh affairs and excluding Scottish -seated Westminster MPs from the vote is not enough. It relies on third readings being nodded through by the entire United Kingdom Commons as a constitutional practice - and constitutional practice has been shredded under NewLabourNewTwighlight , we have even a Lord Chancellor who sits in the Lower House not the Lords - and can never be relied upon again.
It is not enough either because the Great Britain of the Countries and the Regions is an integral factor in the rule of the Labour party. The Scottish Labour head needs to be torn from the English Labour shoulders, and the Welsh Labour arms need ripping off too.
The Labour party is a wholly unpleasant Left-over, as left-overs usually are, from another economic and social world that ended with the globalised destruction of the United Kingdom's heavy industry and the organised worker- base it generated. That trade union structure has refilled itself with the apparatchicks and nomenklatura of the ever-expanding Labour authoritarian state. There are no more coal miners, or steel workers, or car production workers, or ship builders, or aircraft and defence industry workers but there are, instead, state funded, regional based, arms -length institutions filled with those who should be productive workers: the National Health Service; the education service; regional development; local government; quasi- public (eg cooperative) banking structures; arts bodies; quangoes of all and every hue as long as it's red (well, pinkish); and all imbued with that aggressive, self- assertive notion of entitlement and moral superiority.
And all paid for by London and its globalised economy.
This Honecker-style regime is preventing the growth and putting in place of a popular party of the centre left that could release the use of resources not to retain power in perpetuity for a tiny and disgusting political elite resting on the values and beliefs they would not and cannot subscribe to themselves, but to provide choice and opportunity. Choice and opportunity for all the people to gain an appropriate and interesting education, access to health care that at least matches that available in advanced capitalist societies, that reinstates the civil liberties destroyed to maintain Labour's hold on power and control democratic removal of their rule. Choice and opportunity to end the levels of taxation that cripple every stably- constituted family or the possibility of setting one up, to make house-ownership accessible to the young, and to end a regime that leaves every person present in the country liable to arbitrary and inappellable state action.
Opposition parties' proposals that ameliorate Labour's position are weakening their own, and slowing the growth of a properly constituted democracy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
7 comments:
But wasn't it Europe's plan all along to leave us a headless, limbless trunk? That'll teach us for making them feel they owe us their liberty.
I am more optimistic than you on the prospects of an EGC being a successful evolutionary development.
It would, of course depend on a constitutional convention that no party would vote down its conclusions on third reading by whipping a majority up from Scotland or wherever.
It is also right to say that Labour has played fast and loose with the constitution and, given its gerrymandering predilections, is capable of almost anything in pursuit of power.
But I believe that any party which tried to buck such a convention would risk being annihilated at the next election and this would serve as a sufficient deterrent such behaviour.
I much prefer for reasons I have given (http://tinyurl.com/2y6sco)
the evolutionary approach to the revolutionary and find Rifkind's proposal more consonant with how our consitution develops.
It also has the benefit of being dirt cheap.
And a regionalized trunk, S. The EU choice is a headless, limbless trunk cut up into economically and culturally meaningless regions. And the Labour party's continuance depends on forcing us all into the EU, despite their being re-elected on a promise of consultation.
Rather a whole trunk in different, but not necessarily worse, relations with Scotland. Scotland too may well choose to follow Norway into their pattern of linkage with the EU.
The Labour party has no place in the 21st century; its undemocratic structure and sectionalism with sectional agendas and secret deals and funding is not acceptable as a democratic pluralist political party in an advanced country. It is not like the other political parties in the UK and it is in power because of its micro- management by the current regime, as it took over a democratically voted majority government that it denies is in any way representative of what the current regime stands for and intends to implement.
Their refusal to countenance any popular refusal of further EU integration is merely an indicative part of their intention to preserve their hold on power.
Better a new federation for the UK and the end of this authoritarian statist usurper than the EU and their survival.
Huntsman,
You are right to choose evolutionary change over finding ourselves in wholly new terrain, which is why I thought of at least two tried-out systems for maintaining our relations with Scotland - indeed the Scottish devolution legislation was, perhaps, derived from that used for the devolution of the larger Commonwealth states.
But the Labour regime is not like any other government we have had in modern times. Can the Grand Committee proposals of a perfectly normal Opposition rely on the constitutional stability of those who have declared their intentions repeatedly of setting up a wholly revolutionary, if drearily familiar, set of relations between the people and the state?
Hmm.
"Trust" and "Labour" are words that do not conjugate easily or at all.
That is a given when one contemplates the readiness to cheat that seems now to prevail in every waking thought that the "Labour" Jörmungandr has in its plan to poison the well of democracy itself.
But I suspect that Scots would, apart from the labour bit, go along with such a proposal as being equitable. I am sure Salmond would and the Scots Tories too. I doubt the Scots Lib 'Dems' would have the courage to buck the trend.
The pressure of this issue is now building to a point where even English Labour MPs are beginning to make noises about it, by all accounts. If that is so it suggests that the present gerrymander is playing badly on the doorsteps.
If it acquires the effective support of English MPs across the board then only a Labour administration bent on a de facto putsch would dare to vote down the will of English MPs on English laws.
But your caution is well-merited in the light of experience.
What is so attractive about the idea is the look on Labour faces when they lose control of the Milch Cow that is England. That would be worth waiting for.
Yes, huntsman. "Cheat" and "NuLabour" sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble...
Beatles is ok but Georges Brassens might be too hard, C.
Post a Comment