One option for renewing and strengthening our democratic institutions is to lessen the stranglehold Westminster has upon the whole country; and to further devolve powers away, in a more decentralised manner. This is a particularly acute issue in England which has been overlooked whilst the very necessary home rule aspects of government have been created in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However, the time is really fast approaching when we need to modernise our whole cranky system and bring the United Kingdom out of the 19th century and into the 21st. And one obvious way in addressing the very obvious democratic deficit we have in this overbearingly and obsessively centralised country is to fully embrace a form of federalisation. This system works well in many (if indeed not most) western mixed market and liberal democratic capitalistic nations. There is absolutely no reason why it wouldnt do so here. The seeds have been sown by creating national / regional assemblies for three of the home nations of our rather disunited kingdom, and the process really needs to continue. With England being the largest, and by far the most populous, of the four entities that make up our nation state - it is England that really needs examining first - even if only to catch up with the others. Personally, I completely fail to see what value an English Parliament would be, other than a short term solution, because it would really duplicate so much of what the Westminster Union Parliament already does. No - what is needed is a spreading out of the power and decision-making to the various regions of England. This situation is already understood by the powers that be in their dealing with Europe. There are 12 so-called First Level Regional tiers of government already in existence. They came into being in the 1990s. But they have never been formalised or properly explained to the British population and whilst existing as entities - they actually have no councils or administrative bodies of any significance to make them work. But they do, however, provide a good starting point (see a link below for the history of this development). Three of them are actually Scotland, Wales and Ulster. A fourth is the Greater London area which is a city region. But the other eight only exist as geographic boundaries within England which go by the truly uninteresting and uninspired civil servant devised titles of: North East; North West; Yorkshire and the Humber; East Midlands; West Midlands; East of England; South East and South West. Now it is hard to imagine many people rallying to the cause of greater autonomy for the English Region of the North East. It is not like being Scottish or Welsh or Irish or even English. But our own history can largely resolve this problem of nomenclature since the whole of England was once various kingdoms with admittedly every-changing boundaries - but essentially representing the similar territories to which the current European sub-divisions apply. In order to get people interested in the business of regional assembly government almost the first thing one has to do is to give them better and more appropriate sense of identity. I have done this in the maps below. And personally I prefer the word province (because we often speak of the provinces); as opposed to regions or inappropriate words like states. Just as France has its departments and Germany its lander and indeed American and Australia have their states - England more akin to Canada; could have the following Provinces named after our ancient kingdoms:
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 12:53:03 +0000
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