I thought Id share this piece, as to me it sums up exactly why the Westminster system has to be changed. It was written more than two years ago as a reply in some online news forum, and I thought it was so well worded that I saved it. Some of the DevoMax references are now out of date, but the dysfunctionality of Westminster is still clearly demonstrated. The poster went by the username of Harribrian: The biggest political problem facing the UK is Westminsters dysfunctional monopoly of power. Westminster will not hand over powers voluntarily (nobody ever does - Blair was pushed into devolution by the EU), hence the steady drip of scare stories about Scottish Independence, the peddling of the financial dependency myth and its refusal to consider the undefined but popular option of Devomax. The SNP obviously want more power in Edinburgh. For comparison: local councils in the UK are allowed to raise only 25% of their own revenue (which is why they ramp up parking fees), the Scotland bill will allow Holyrood to raise up to 35% (while taking away some powers), meanwhile local municipalities in Denmark, nearly 100 of them in a population of 5.5M, raise 60% of their own revenue, and in Sweden it is 70%. There are other ways of sharing, for example the German regions receive about half the VAT and income tax receipts of their region. Struggles for power are always dirty and Westminster wants to keep it all, even though its very monopoly is what renders Westminster dysfunctional. Unlike in the other European democracies, we have no other centre of authority, except perhaps Holyrood, whose electoral system was specifically designed never to yield an overall majority and which has less revenue raising ability than a Danish municipality. In England Westminster interferes with bin collection and how often nurses make their rounds, for gods sake. Powerlessness and lack of local responsibility turns citizens into whingeing children: you cannot run a medium sized business like this let alone a complex modern country. The peoples of England Scotland and Wales have many things to be glad about but Westminster isnt one of them. Monopolies tend to incompetence and corruption. The corruption, with one major party in hock to the city and the other to the public sector unions, shows not just in the rush of ex-ministers and party donors to lobby for and benefit from further sell offs, but in the scandals such as MPs expenses, News International, the power of unregulated banks, or the lack of regulation for private pensions. The hilariously inconsequential, Carry on, Westminster style, public inquiries dont help. The incompetence of Westminster shows in the numbers. This failure is clearer the further you get in any direction from London and wider travel plus the internet have made the comparisons easy to draw. Google almost any economic measure - GPD per capita, percentage industrialisation, balance of payments history, balanced budgets, external debt levels - and all the North European countries, (except France and Finland on some measures), outperform the UK. The UKs long term economic failure versus its Northern European competitors is being achieved despite reduced union bargaining power, significant privatisation, and it being made easier to sack staff than in any of them, and also despite repeated devaluations (a factor of 5 compared with German currencies of the last 40 years). The UK has had North Sea oil and still achieved a permanent trade deficit: genius. For most social indicators - life expectancy, obesity, cocaine usage, teenage pregnancy, % GDP spent on Health, % of the population in prison, etc - the UK is nearly always the worst, and the more time you spend in Northern Europe the more you sense this. The internet also reveals that the same is true for less obvious indicators - social mobility, Gini index, percentage of women in positions of power, pay differentials, pension regulation, percentage of youth in training, liveable cities, renewable energy capacity, etc. But despite the crowded trains, the cracked pavements and pot holed streets that catch your eye when you return here, Westminster will not make the comparisons: it thinks in terms of its own importance, total GDP - were 6th in the world, rather than that of its citizens, GDP per capita - were poorer than everyone in Northern Europe. It is not just Westminster that is dysfunctional: so is the underlying, debased Great British culture of its political and chattering classes, a culture that is encapsulated in its veneration of the polar explorer Scott, whose men died of starvation and who lost to Amundsen, whose men put on weight. Costly and outdated assumptions are not challenged, as if Britain somehow deserves its UN security council seat, as if it can afford Trident and its military spend, and so, from Suez to Iraq, murderous, self-important adventures are accepted as normal. Most disabling are the myths - Westminster being the mother of parliaments has nothing to learn from other democracies - and distorted narratives of identity - we won WW2 and have little to learn from our neighbours. The arrogance of empire without the fact. The current British state works well for the metropolitan chattering and political classes, who, even if they do not believe all the myths, buy themselves out from sharing the health and education services of their fellow citizens, and who, looking only to the USA, enjoy empire by association: meanwhile, unlike the successfully capitalist countries of Northern Europe, the UK is simply not earning its living in the world. As a result it can afford less and less of the modern goodies, like infrastructure investment, market regulation, targeted welfare and wide access to education and training: this leads to its making worse use of its only asset, its people, who become relatively less resourced, educated, numerate, healthy, and less socially mobile and less united in purpose, which in turn leads to relatively less wealth creation, which in turn leads ... etc, etc. With its secretive ways (if you live in Scotland look up the McCrone report, which by the way also has a comment on the inevitable failure of regional policies), and massive centralisation of power, Westminster is failing the individual populations of England, Scotland and Wales. In Scotland the SNP are quite rightly looking to the more successful countries of Northern Europe as their model, because it would be almost impossible to be more dysfunctional than Westminster: in whatever form it comes, Independence or Devomax - the more power that is taken from centre the better.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:08:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015