Surveying the wreckage of our constitution strewn across the landscape of this Labour-run political decade the understanding that it cannot be reconstituted comes home.
The existential imperative for the Labour junta and party to remain within the European Union ensures that no altered relationship between the UK and the EU can be expected. The ratification of the new Constitutional Treaty will be driven through, for ratification is an act within the powers of the Crown, ie., the governing regime's Executive, and all we are looking at in resistance to, and acceptance of, referendums, or parliamentary debate, is the window dressing.
Only by remaining within the European Union can Labour prevent Scotland's realignment of the United Kingdom's federal relations, if it is true that Scotland sees independence with European Union membership as the destination of its process of devolution. If Scotland opts for the Norwegian model of relations with the European Union, then the Labour regime can use the force of many other EU member states' opposition to encouragement of secessionist regions to restrain Scotland.
The European Union is essentially a federation of the regions, with power devolved to the lowest competent level and and only residual powers operated at federal level. Accepting this (which is not without advantage in correcting the improper level of centralization of power in the UK), then we could ask: how might the United Kingdom organize regions to reflect our history and regional cultural and economic unities, so that the continued centralization of power in the hands of an undemocratic political elite camouflaged by ostensible regionalisation like that currently in place, is avoided?
The separate nations of Scotland and Wales could be joined by Cornwall, Wessex, the Ridings of Yorkshire, Northumberland and the Borders, the ancient territories of the Iceni, (since Roman times recognised as a civitas of these islands), Lancashire, the Marches, together with other city states to join London - Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds...
Properly elected institutions of governance will drain authoritarian Labour of its central control, as Scotland has shown us. And attempts to retain central power would be undermined by the written constitutional arrangments and the practices of regional autonomy obtaining within Europe.
Labour's continued existence requires that it is European but with the United Kingdom federation frozen forever , deformed into irrelevant sectors, like a country defeated in war .
We need to embrace the advantages of Europe for local democratic responsiveness, the preservation and re-creation of whole culturally identified swathes of our country in the way we wish them to be and to be administered; and the destruction of the Labour Project as complete as their Project has been destructive of our past.
We need to be on the real battlefield, not the field that Labour, and its divide and rule socialism, chooses.
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16 comments:
HG, you seem very sure the EU project fosters regions + maximum subsidiartity.
How do you account for the way it turned on Austria when they had the temerity to elect an 'unfashionable' government ?
Is it not the political equivalent of a pocket-money economy - you can do what you like with these baubles (or not even that if we don't approve) - ?
ND, yes, the UK should leave, it really should never have joined, and taken De Gaulle's Non for an answer. And laughed all the way to a better everything. But what if we are being dangled a referendum (which has no binding, merely advisory, status), which we manage to grab, and do all of the campaigning that a referendum implies, and get the No, and still the intra Party consensus in Parliament accepts the new Constitution?
Real regions under local control would be better than sectors under central control and still in the EU anyway. It's supposed to be regions + subsidiarity.
Blogs are very small surfaces for writing on; it seemed a ball worth rolling; I don't think people who visit here think I'm a UK in the EU supporter. It's rather a sad post really - what can we make of losing?
HG thats a terribly depressing remark and you are always so full of zip and vim. I don`t see a problem I think England would be far stronger without Scotland and this would allow us to negotiate with the EU able to leave .
The Norway deal would suit. Scotland want no such thing they have always made it lcear they want to be snuggled in. Scotland has always looked to the continent. I am slightly sad at the end of the Union but it is far fro over. The Oil will be gone in twenty years and with it will disappear the real reason for the problem .
You should have a look in at Compass whereI have been making deadly enemies . It is a Labour thnk tank active in London.... I think one of them is quite literally going to explode.
N, we are to be crossed with cows, every aspect of ourselves recorded by the police, denied a vote, and patronised by women who Kingsley Amis once described as mad sheep waiting at school gates and raising the question of who could ever have got them with child in the first place (well, something like that).
And Labour is herding everyone onto the field where no battle will take place.
It's necessary to get ahead of them N, not just react. And that can be done only with imagining worlds and choosing goals they don't expect. It would be nice to have real regions handling local affairs in England, regardless of the EU. It used to work something like that and the current appointed regions are there anyway; might as well try to replace them with something more attractive and serviceable.
ND: Watched Alex Salmond et alia on Scottish PMQs yesterday. They're still keen on getting hold of their offshore oil and gas. Maybe Salmond is fly enough to grab the oil and gas reserves and do a Norway, leaving *us* farting around with Europe.
Scottish independence would remove the Labour party from power in Westminster for ever. England (and probably Wales) could then leave the EU and once more control our own lives.
By the by perhaps HG you or your readers can give me an answer to this question, what advantages does GB gain from continued membership of the EU, and why are all three major parties in thrall to the EU and will not even discuss our membership.
Sackers - I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that all UK oil & gas is Crown property until produced under a licence to 'win and sell', when (upon production and payment of royalties etc) it belongs to the licence-holder.
For the Scots to get ahold of 'their' oil/gas they will either need to bargain for it around the constitutional conference table, or somehow declare UDI, leave the Kingdom altogether and get some international ruling on where the relevant territory lies. I have no idea where such an attempt would lead.
Sharing of oil & gas tax revenues (such as they are these days, though certainly not trivial) would be altogether easier to discuss.
Thanks Nick - but would that be the property of the English crown, or the Scottish one, now that the scone of stone is gone North? "They have laid a knife on the things that held us together," if I've got the quote right. Maybe best transfer all the rights to the estate of the Duke of Normandy.
It would be nice to have real regions handling local affairs in England, regardless of the EU.
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I see HG , I`m afraid I am so used to thinking of regionalisation as an EU plot which it is . If you meant the re empowerment of local government these are my musings
They are such small and extreme versions of the country that the hegemony of the majority uis impossible to call democracy . Take Islington where 50% are in social accommodation and over a third on benefits. The paid vote is so huge that other factors cannot out weigh it . There are other Boroughs which would be Muslim dominated, think on that. The loony left Councils of the urban centres were broken up for good reason and little missed their contemporary equivalents might well be even worse
The other problem is that for Local authorities to wield real power they would have to be allowed to raise real taxes . This would it be accepted unless it was a tax neutral reorganisation and no government can afford that because its legitimate regional policies would be undermined . In the case of the Labour Party its unacknowledged income redistribution by area s would be come transparent as it already is . These are large problems and before you even begin to tackle them you have to realise that those like the Liberals and the Labour Party who are contemplating differing sorts of progressive taxes , ( on income and house value respectively ) will not be trusted to make the effect neutral. I notice in so many ways that we have reached a point of such distrust in Politicians that all change is to be regarded as a Trojan hose a s a default reaction
If you try to solve this by creating a further larger tier of government firstly it will be expensive, secondly it will pull local powers gravitationally to it, and most importantly, it will be become another source of sinecures and influence for the government . Gordon Brown , for example has not announced that he is unpicking the tiny privatisation in the NHS he has merely let it be know that a generous attitude to local authorities who abandon the programme will be taken. Most candidates are chosen not elected and the lucrative committee work that defines the country would take us down a Southern European mode . In the great days of Municipal government 9 Birmingham ois always mentioned ) the state was miniscule by today’s standards and so the conflicts were far less oprobelematical
Overall I would favour giving local councils back some powers and seeing how it went , slowly developing checks and balances. Despite the attractions of regions I would be against it on balance and as in reality it is financed by groups in the EU orbit I am entirely and vehemently against it . EU regions are always designed to attack nationhood which I value .
Hegemony and democracy deserves its own post N, or perhaps its own library.
If we have a state with power concentrated centrally and checks upon it weak and vulnerable to dismissal, with no redress against abuse of power, and no constraints on the expansion of the state's area of action, then the ideology of those holding such a state is crucial to our well being. We would be alright with the Earl of Onslow and all wrong with Stalin.
We have such a state: a constitution made up of convention, practices, and noblesse oblige, a head of state whose function is defined by keeping out of it, a parliament supine in the face of whipping and Executive patronage, and an Executive made supine by answerability of the Leader resting with a party, not with them or with the parliament; if power can be grasped in the UK there is little to stop a party Leader doing anything they choose
Onslow's state will concede power if the understood rules say it's another's go, after all, it is a small state and the concession of power has limited effects on the lives of the people, but Stalin's state will use power to maintain itself in power permanently, justifying ignoring the rules on the very grounds that it is an enormous state so that transference to others will affect every aspect of the lives of the people, and to their detriment.
The crow bar the Scottish people have driven into one of the largest fissures in the monolithic centralized state was handed to them by arrogant presumption of party hegemony;
the regionalisation of England has been imposed to minimize any kind of regional coherence along older fault lines because such an assumption of party hegemony cannot be made. Wales is a proper country and notably was only just contained after the last elections ( disappointing, Wales, the language thing and divided goals, must try harder), so there is another crow bar being wielded in another fissure. More are needed.
At the moment the writ that runs in Islington has not been extended uniformly across the country so you can move to Lewes and escape. Give the Stalin state time, it's had only ten years; in ten more will you be moving again? Or will there be nowhere that isn't Islington?
Yes to all the problems of revenue raising, the rise of local hegemonies and the need to settle the proper areas of state authority ; but the hegemonic nature of an improperly extended state is precisely the problem, and breaking off large areas of it, and getting them under local control, is an evolutionary answer with some institutional and financial ooomph behind it, offered by an EU of which we are part and parcel, like it or not, and which we should use .
Stalin's state will use power to maintain itself in power permanently,
That is exactly what I see and I fear. No sorry HG for all that I detest brown and his National Socialist One Party project he does at least have to be elected by what is a semi functioning demos.
Not so EU Mandarins whose malign wish to break up the state so as to create a superstate and rival the US , is the true end of their regional Policy.
Its too tricksy .Defeat Brown , and it can be done , get out of the EU9 or at least retreat to the position avaiable to a country who can and allow Scotland to cede if they want to .
Maintain miatary coopereation over the UK and we will all be better off. You over value these institutions.The EU is only a giant GLA without which we did perfectly well as we did without Heath and safety entirely until the late 60s.
On the subject of the GLA I think Kens agreemtn to a blank cheque for Londoners iro the Olympics is going to prove a hostage to escalating costs
(PS Yesterdays revelations were reported in Private Eye Literally months ago)
...and don`t you accuse me of white flight Ms ExPat ...
I have little faith in EU institutions operating in English circumstances, N. And I notice the Scots are reserving their position on EU referendums and membership until there has been a party (SNP) discussion and an evaluation of the various options; (the government has an extremely smart panel of economic advisors, they've even got Mirlees according to the list I was reading, now that's serious advice not Balls).
But do you truly think this Westminster regime can be stopped from ratifying the new Constitution? I don't, they must. And even if by some miracle it is prevented, the rest of the EU will find a way forward, it suits most of them after all, and they don't care for UK european policies anyway. Reading the Italian view of Brown's administration's behaviour is to see incandescent contempt for anti-European wreckers and some sympathy for the view that if the people of the UK don't want to be in, why on earth are they so consistently tricked, forced and denied voice?.
I'm not an ex-pat, got the badge (well the passport).
The GLA is a special case that deserves some concentrated discussion and fruitful exchanges of views, not to say venom.
Insofar as I understand you (it sometimes seems as though political discussion is becoming an arcane subject like particle physics), I think both N and HG are making brilliant arguments.
Perhaps synthesis lies in what I perceive to be your underlying agreement that we need (a) a proper Constitution with clear checks and balances that cannot easily be subverted by tjose temporarily in power; (b) an economically coherent and militarily defensible nation-state; (c) fairer representation of the will of the people, while preserving the rights of the dissenting minorities.
I don't see either the EU or regionalisation as offering any of the above.
Yes to all those points S. Who could say No? Well, the maintenance in power of the current regime militates against every one of them. So they certainly say No.
The UK must be inside the EU or the EU institutions and legally conferred rights will tear apart, or can be used to tear apart, the UK federation under a 'Labour' regime - that is what is happening now.
The dissolution of the UK federation results in a nation- state -England and Wales (?) hardly viable as 'economically coherent and militarily defensible'.
Arguably London alone is economically viable, after all it generates the entire wealth of England, but not militarily defensible.
The 'rights of dissenting minorities', I offer as an exemplar the people of England, are neither here nor there to the current regime whose primary objective is the pursuit and control of power in their own interests and enjoyment.
The lack of the famous 'checks and balances', and the void that is the office of the head of state, do not help.
Yes, the departure of Scotland would make us a far less militarily defensible unit. I always thought that one of the effects, if not an aim of the EU, was to destroy this cohesion.
Possibly you have noticed, S that the movement of nuclear materials and, in particular, nuclear warheads, on Scottish roads is being challenged by the Scottish Government under European Union environmental, and health and safety regulations; The prime minister, First Minister Salmond has called for a conference on the advisability of continued acceptance of Trident being based in Scotland and the organisation of non-acceptance of the Trident renewal programme insofar as it involves being sited on Scottish territory.
There has been already a rejection of Westminster government plans to bury nuclear waste in deep holes in the ground in Scotland and an invitation to put the holes in England.
It is European Union policy to decentralise power to regions and downgrade the importance of the nation state, thopugh member states do not feel threatened particularly by this because of their long standing historic and economic regions. People seem proud of their regional and more local provenance while equally identifying with their nation. It is the concentration of power in UK central government and institutional systems that makes the EU so inappropriate, but I still think breaking up that power concentration is the key to restoring some democratic balance and control in the UK.
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