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A NEW CONSTITUTION To End the Excessive Power of Prime Ministers |
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CIVIC REPUBLICAN MANIFESTO 2009 For Great Britain VIRTUE FREEDOM ASPIRATION WEALTH PEACE |
DEBT FREE MONEY
To End the Misery of Debt Based Money |
FIRST REPUBLIC Design of Commonwealth Great Seal of 1649 showing Parliament in session.
Wording: IN THE FIRST YEAR OF FREEDOM BY GOD'S BLESSING RESTORED 1649 |
REDISCOVERING BRITISH CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM |
 JOSEPH PRIESTLY Scientist (1733.- 1804) BRITISH REPUBLICAN |
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"There has always been a danger inherent in our constitution that elective dictatorship would take over. We have not practised elective dictatorship because there used to be checks and balances. Increasingly these inherent safeguards have become eroded" Lord Hailsham (1978) |
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The sections can be read in any order but it is best to start with the three INTRODUCTION sections.(Grayed out pages have not yet been posted) --------------------
Economic Enfranchisement Non-aggressive Foreign Relations
Authority to Create Constitution Lower House Upper House Judiciary Supreme Court Public Services Monetary Policy Regions and Federation (to be completed)
Meritocracy Civil Society Crime and Penal reform Vice Cultural and Intellectual Life Church Disestablished Virtue and Happiness Young Generation
Monetary Policy (to be completed) Existing MPC and FSA Banking Money Flow Currency Industry
First British Republic History of Republicanism
Problems of Current System Advantage Votes Electoral System
National Flag Federal Flag
Republican Theory General History of Republicanism in Britain First Republic Period in Britain British Constitution Economics Enlightenment
The Need for a Republican Party
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EXECUTIVE Under Republican Constitutionalism the Executive is one of the recognised Powers of Government. These are also called Branches, Estates or Functions of Government. The latter term is favoured in these pages. Here these will usually be termed "Functions". There are usually taken to be three Functions of Government, viz:
These three were accepted in political philosophy and Republican thought until the nineteenth century. Under the page the Six Functions of Government the argument is put forward that under modern government in the twenty-first century a further three should be added, viz: 4. Protector of the Constitution 5. Monetary Policy Control 6. Public Services Control According to the principle of Separation of Powers each of these functions should be embodied in a separate Institution under the Constitution. Such Institutions may in theory be Civil or Democratic, but in practice in most Republican Constitutions only the first two are Democratic Institutions whilst the others are Civil. In accordance with the principle of Separation of Powers the democratic elections for the first two must be separate elections. The Function of the Legislature is (with a few additions) to make laws. For this task it is divided into two houses which can take on various forms and have various names but for convenience can be referred to as the Upper and Lower Houses. The Lower House is normally Democratic and the Upper may or may not be. It is thus fairly easy to set out the second Function but what of the first, that of the Executive. Adam Smith in the eighteenth century defined it thus, assigning the “sovereign” three tasks: A. “to protect the group from outside violence” B. “to protect individual members of society from the injustices or oppressions of their fellow citizens” C. “to erect and maintain those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are however of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals. . . .”
Or as we might say, more simply: security (internal and external), implementation of the law and public services. As far as the Kingdom is currently governed nothing has really changed fundamentally since Smith's day in this. The only thing in this list he is taking for granted is the raising of taxes and the setting of public expenditure.
Under any Republican Constitution, it is necessary to define precisely the extent and limit of the remit of the Executive. This is something we are hardly used to in the United Kingdom for Function of Executive is pretty well all embracing.
* * *
The office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the Head of Government, is one of the most extraordinary political offices in the whole of the western world and, indeed, amongst Liberal Democracies everywhere. It has powers that go beyond anything any other elected leader anywhere has. The office has been called an "elective dictatorship". That is exactly what it is.
It is ironic that when the Prime Minister shows off this power a little too obviously, he or she is often accused of being "presidential". The people who make this comment are demonstrating the depth of their ignorance of how Republics work. No President, even that of the United States (or especially that of the United States), has within his or her country anything like power corresponding to that of a British Prime Minister.
The point is that whilst the Prime Minister is the Executive they also effective hold four others of the six Functions of Government: the Legislature, Protector of the Constitution, Monetary Policy and Public Services Control. Only the Judiciary is relatively outside their grasp, and we may thank our lucky stars that it is (and always has been) for without an independent Judiciary the people would have no defenses against the power of the Executive except that of being able, roughly every five years, to deny the incumbent continuation of office through the ballot box. However, the incoming Prime Minister has, of course, exactly the same powers as the previous one.
The key to the sweeping powers of the Prime Minister rests on two features of the British constitutional arrangements.
The first concerns the method of election. There are no separate elections for the Executive office as there are, for instance, again in the United States, where Presidential elections are entirely separate from Congressional elections. In the Kingdom the Lower House of Parliament, the House of Commons, is elected and the majority party forms the government.
The internal constitutions of all the major political parties are such that their Leader cannot be easily changed, and the convention is that the Leader will assume the office of Prime Minister. And so the Parliamentary elections are, at one and the same time, elections of the Legislature (or most important part of it, for the Upper House is unchanged by the elections) and the Executive.
Defenders of the present arrangements claim that the Prime Minister and his Government are accountable to Parliament and so to that extent restrained.
In theory, such accountability exists but even the casual observer of the workings of the British systems knows that there is no real sense in which the Commons holds the government to account. Prime Ministers with reasonable majorities virtually do what they want. It only takes a headstrong individual like Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair to hold the office for the weakness of any theoretical checks and balances on it to be laid bare.
Although in theory parliamentary members can vote against their own leader it is rare that this prevents the Executive doing what it wants to do. The only time the Executive may have a problem is if the ruling party has a small majority but under the British electoral system this does not happen very often, or rarely happens to the degree that it makes any difference to the business of government.
And in any case Parliament can only influence legislation. It is a legislative not executive body.
The Prime Minister does a lot simply by decree that does not involve legislation and so does not involve parliament, e.g.creation of the so-called "independence" of the Bank of England, reorganisation of the Home Office, wage war, etc.
The second feature of the British system that guarantees the powers of the Prime Minister is that the Head of State has effectively no authority. The Head of State, the Monarch, constitutionally has enormous powers but Monarchs in the twenty first century are completely unable to wield any powers they have.
In this respect it is important to distinguish between power and authority. Power is endowed on an office by virtue of a constitution. Authority is endowed on an individual by virtue of respect. The kind of respect necessary can be gained, these days in Great Britain, by virtue of either a democratic election or a valid appointment procedure. In the past, a Monarch could achieve authority by virtue of birth or marriage, but those days are long gone.
The result of this is that the Monarch has power but no authority to enable them to wield that power. As a consequence, all their constitutional power flows into the office that does have authority, that of Prime Minister. This additional power vested in the Prime Minister has a formal title - the Royal Prerogative. Thus, for instance, the Prime Minister has effectively the power to dissolve Parliament at will and to declare war at will.
There is nothing that comes under the Functions of Executive and Legislature that is not within the gift of the Prime Minister to promote or deny. But it does not stop there. The Prime Minister also assumes the fourth Function, that of Protector of the Constitution.
Protector of the Constitution, means perhaps a little more than the term might immediately convey. It means deciding on detailed matters of interpretation of the law and the constitution, and crucially it means power to change constitutional arrangements and procedures and even the Institutions of State.
Officially the former of these functions falls to the Upper House, the House of Lords, and this does work. However, the other more important role of making constitutional changes falls to the Prime Minister and their Government.
To take a case in point, there are proposals afoot to change the make up of the House of Lords, and to decide whether all the Lords should be elected, or appointed, and so on. In order to enact these changes it is sufficient to pass the matter through Parliament. There is no external independent Protector of the Constitution, in the form of a "Supreme Court" or a "Constitutional Court", which must approve the changes.
Admittedly the House of Lords itself has a theoretical right to amend the changes and this is important and does, indeed, constitute a check on the activities of the Executive of the kind favoured by Republicans. But it is simply not powerful enough and no one seriously believes the Executive will not have its way in this kind of measure*.
Another current case of major constitutional change, is the proposal to create a "Supreme Court". This is explicitly not an American style Supreme Court which, of course, is there as Protector of the Constitution. Its role will be mainly to take over the legal role of the House of Lords, as the "highest court in the land" which is felt to be incompatible with the revised House of Lords as conceived. The role of Protector of the Constitution will thus remain with the office of Prime Minister.
So there we have it, five Functions of Government, Executive, Legislature, Protector of the Constitution Monetary Policy* and Public Services Control wrapped up effectively into one office. It is little wonder that Prime Ministers when faced with all this power tend to lose touch with reality.
But the foregoing is far from exhaustive as an account of the Prime Minister's power in the Kingdom. We must go on.
It is in the gift of the Executive to make pretty well any changes it wishes with the way the Local and Regional Authorities are arranged. The impulse to tamper with local government has proved far too strong for most administrations since the Second World War and so we have seen a succession of modifications.
Without needing to labour this point, it is only sufficient to remind ourselves that in 1986 Prime Minister Thatcher abolished by decree the Greater London Council. An entire local government machinery was dismantled at the Prime Minister's say so. Imagine the President of France abolishing the office of Mayor of Paris, or the President of the United States abolishing the office of Mayor of New York and all the administrative apparatus that went with it.
But the local government offices and institutions have no basis in the constitution and so have no power to resist such changes. The expensive disruption caused by this sort of arbitrary action is never, of course, costed, and the sometimes catastrophic effect on the lives of the employees not considered.
These almost absolute powers of the British Prime Minister are amplified by a little appreciated facility to backdate, yes backdate, any changes or any laws they enact. So if you did something, say, two years ago and a new law is passed that makes that action illegal whereas before it was not, if the Prime Minister wishes to use their powers to backdate new legislation you can be prosecuted. But surely this power exists in theory only and would never be used?
Not so. In the late eighties as part of her attack on established British Institutions, Prime Minister Thatcher decided to abolish tenure for academic staff in universities and this was backdated for a period of two years so annulling contracts that the universities and their staff had previously and legally entered into. It seems the subjects of Kingdom in order to avoid falling foul of the law need to be able to read the future.
It is difficult to bring to an end any discussion of British Executive power and we are far from finished. We have described the Prime Minister's constitutional power but the absolutism of their power also covers the structure of the Government they preside over in the Cabinet.
Within the enclave of their own Cabinet, they choose personally who is to have what post. At any time, they are free to hire and fire at will. The rather gentle expression "cabinet reshuffle" in reality means a purging of perceived enemies, honouring of favours and manipulation of opposing forces within the party.
The "off with their heads" mentality often seems to grip Prime Ministers with the result that a few years into office sees a formidable line up of wasted talent on the back benches, while the remaining Cabinet members frequently attract the accusation of being lightweight.
The disposable attitude to colleagues in the official Cabinet goes hand in hand with a further tendency that has become more and more evident of recent years. This is the increasing reliance on "inner cabinets" or "kitchen cabinets". So the British Prime Ministers now habitually have around them their own coterie of advisors and communicators. Frequently these individuals have the ear of the Prime Minister more than the elected colleagues in the official Cabinet.
While those holding official Cabinet posts are obliged to defend policies publicly and put their heads on the line, the members of the inner cabinet have no such responsibilities. The "kitchen" cabinets are unofficial having no constitutional status, but they create an intermediate tier between the Prime Minister and the official Cabinet. The effect is to insulate the Prime Minister further from the polity and encourage the Fürherbunker mentality whereby the consequences of policies and decrees are less and less seen or felt.
The Prime Minister's inner cabinet, because it has absolutely no constitutional status, can be filled up with the Prime Minister's chums and confidants picked from any field. Indeed, this personal status is crucial to the inner cabinet's operation for they are people with whom the Prime Minister has to feel closer than those in the "real" Cabinet and whose advice he or she will take before those of his or her ministerial colleagues.
This two tiered Cabinet arrangement inevitably leads to backbiting and suspicions. But the Prime Minister has little to fear, such is the hold they have on the careers of the Cabinet members. The only danger to a Prime Minister comes if they lose support of a figure in their cabinet who has enough authority to bring them down.
This is what happened to Prime Minister Thatcher when the then Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned over her ruling out Britain ever joining a European currency. (Ironically she was ousted for one of the few sensible policies she had ever espoused.) Prime Minister Blair avoided a similar fate at the hand of Gordon Brown as the latter knew that the route to assuming Blair's office which he coveted did not lie outside of government.
It has been a general rule that the official Cabinet be made up of members of Parliament from both Houses. As a result it was and is frequently the case that a high office of state is held by someone whose entry into the job is by virtue of being the {male} offspring of a hereditary peer. However, the Prime Minister is free to take whoever they wish into the Cabinet.
Prime Minister Brown has recently exercised this freedom with his policy of "government of all the talents" and has chosen people for his Cabinet who are not in Parliament. In a laudable spirit of ribaldry the Conservatives have christened these people "GOATS". This practice echoes the way that, for instance, the American President, chooses their Cabinet from pretty well wherever they wish. The cabinet members do not have to be elected, indeed, they cannot be members of Congress for this would cut across the Separation of Powers principle. However, there is one very important way in which the "GOATS" are different from members of an American Presidential Cabinet. Under the American Constitution, the members of the Cabinet have to be approved by Congress. Congress may not choose members of the Cabinet but the power of veto over the choices the President makes is a powerful check and balance on Presidential power.
The President will not normally choose someone who would be unacceptable to Congress. American Cabinet members have to have a reasonable track record.
A discussion of Prime Ministerial office cannot be concluded without mentioning two other big other advantages it has over the Head of State (which is effectively what he or she is) of any other Liberal Democracy. One is that the Prime Minister can call the moment for a general election whereby they might achieve a further term. This gives them a crucial advantage over their challengers. The other is that there is no limit on the length of time they can spend in the office, or on the number of terms they can serve.
We may like to think that we are more sophisticated than a new democracy like, for instance, the Russian Federation. In fact, Russia has a reasonable Republican Constitution although unfortunately she does not have a sufficiently well developed Civil Society in place to support the functioning of that Constitution. Nevertheless, President Putin will have to stand down at the end of his current term as he cannot present himself for reelection.
Under the Russian Federal Constitution he cannot, in the immortal words of Prime Minister Thatcher, "go on and on".
* * *
The combination of excessive power with isolation from the real polity is something that tends to happen regardless of the type of state. It happens in ruthless tyrannies as well as Liberal Democracies like the United Kingdom. However, the British Prime Minister still holds all the cards and has one card in particular to play that no one can trump. Perform on the world stage.
The neurosis produced by estrangement from the domestic political life can be treated by transferring attention to foreign affairs and foreign engagements. Concerns of the Foreign Secretary in the official Cabinet can be swept aside and their role largely usurped. Such international gestures rarely achieve positive results but, at least, they give the Prime Minister a higher world profile, and the possibility of a lucrative, prestigious placing abroad should they loose office at home.
No politician wants their term in office as to be seen as a failure and international activities can bolster their sense of their own legacy, hopefully overshadowing any manifest failures in the domestic British scene.
But it is at the mention of the word "legacy" that we touch on the one weakness of the office of UK Prime Minister has. It is a democratic post and so is subject to rotation. The absolute power of the Prime Minister's office transfers directly to the next holder of the office who can then unpick anything that their predecessor created in fairly short order. And so for any Prime Minister to leave a permanent legacy is not easy - at least, not one they might wish to leave.
The threat of an abrupt loss of office and the transfer of total power to another person of another party creates a further source of neurosis in the holder of the Prime Ministerial Office. This leads to distortions in policy-making favouring of the grand gesture or the irreversible historic moment. The war in Iraq and Blair's (unrealised) desire to join the euro come into this category.
The favouring of this type of history-making gesture goes hand in hand with a disfavouring of solid long term policy making that could bring real benefits to the country.
* * *
A conspicuous example of the lack of solid long term policy making exists in regard to any kind of transport policy for the nation. A basic problem is that any initiative on transport requires long periods of gestation and implementation - a length of time quite outside the electoral cycle. It is very difficult for a British Prime Minister to leave a legacy of, say, creating a new TGV (High Speed Train) rail system, such as exists in France, for an incoming new Prime Minister could simply ditch the idea at the drop of a hat and, in fact, is very likely to in favour of shorter term projects that align better with the electoral cycle.
Why should a democratic Presidential system not have a similar bias towards short termism? This is where we need to think carefully about the implications of a Republican system with a Separation of Powers and checks and balances between the Institutions of Government.
Let us suppose the Executive wishes to address the transport issue and create, let us say, a TGV system for the country. (Bear in mind this kind of system involves laying a lot of new tracks to make the speeds possible.) This might take upwards of fifteen years to implement from the moment of conception, and even then the network might be far from complete. Under a Republican Constitution, the Executive could not, as often happens in the Kingdom, simply set up a Quango to do the necessary research, grab a few headlines and steer the project along (and into the inevitable dead end), as would probably happen in the Kingdom.
The exact process under a Republic would depend on the details of the Constitution but, typically, approval for expenditure would have to be granted by the Lower House, and then the Upper House would have a committee to establish the viability and need for the proposal. Being a major project it might need new statutes and even some kind of addition to the Constitution to enshrine the principles of operation. If this were the case the Supreme Court (or whatever body assumed the function of Protector of the Constitution) would become involved.
Thus, the project although it might be the brainchild of the Executive would have to carry a lot of the political system and the Civil Service with it to succeed and it would be subject to rigorous testing and argument.
Does this all sound too complicated? Why not just do it by Presidential Decree and Quango?
The processes need not inevitably be over lengthy or cumbersome for once the idea took hold it would enter the body politic and acquire its own momentum. But the real point is that by all the various Institutions of Government participating in the system of checks and balances, the project acquires a validation that then becomes, even in the long term, difficult to reverse.
Thus, the seeming reduction of power in the Executive in fact translates in a republican system to an extension of power, for the project he or she set in train is pretty certain to run out to a conclusion way beyond his or her term of office and even beyond their lifetime.
This is Republicanism at work. Republican Institutions create a flywheel effect that ensures a degree of continuity. In a sense, as the illustration shows, this does not deprive the Executive of power so much as demand that that power be broadly seated in the political will of the nation.
Is not this rather conservative? Yes, it is "conservative" in the best sense.
Would it not lead to a greater dependence on the unelected Civil Service? Yes, in the sense that employees of Government tend to be around longer that many (but not all) politicians. But Republicans do not carry with them the intellectual baggage that automatically dismisses the role of the Civil Service. A properly developed meritocratic professional Civil Service is not to be feared. If we want long term planning we need the Civil Service and we need to value it.
* * *
This example displays how the office of Prime Minister within the Constitutional Monarchy that is the United Kingdom is at once extremely strong and extremely weak. It is strong because it genuinely has its hands on practically all the levers of power and weak because the next holder of the office controls exactly the same levers and so can reverse any measures he or she inherits. There is a flywheel effect in the system only to the extent that those measures that play well with the electorate will be adhered to and to the extent that pressures on parliamentary time may prevent changes to inherited arrangements.
The office of Executive in the Kingdom is thus strong in exactly the way we should not want it to be strong and weak in exactly the way we should not want it to be weak.
It is not that the Republican Constitution should weaken the role of the Executive to the extent that it becomes a diminutive or ceremonial office that carries with it no or little respect. The Executive by its nature must be strong. It must have authority, prestige and dignity. For one thing, if it is not these things it would not attract the right quality of candidate.
But it becomes strong in the right way when it is subject to checks and balances by the other Institutions of Government.
These checks and balances cannot apply to all the Executive's decisions, but there are certain crucial areas where they are necessary. These are as follows:
1. Foreign agreements, both military and political 2. Reorganisation of the Civil Service 3. Reorganisation of the Public Services (including sale or their assets or sale of Services wholesale) 4. Reorganisation of regional and local government 5. Long term capital projects 6. Constitutional changes 7. Taxation 8. Government Expenditure 9. Waging war
It will not be necessary to discuss all these in detail here but a few remarks will be made on them. (It is being assumed in the following that law making remains the prerogative of the Legislative Assembly which will continue as the House of Commons and House of Lords, the Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament.)
* * *
In any nation, it is usual for foreign agreements, entered into by a President, or their Cabinet member dealing with foreign affairs, to have to be ratified before they become binding. This is usually done by the Upper House. In the Kingdom, of course, the word "ratification" is not one that is often used for the Prime Minister can sign foreign agreements at will with only a token necessity to "inform the House of Commons" by announcement.
The purpose behind ratification is not to tie the hands of the Executive but to make the agreement binding or more binding in the long term. For one thing, this is better for the foreign party or parties to the agreement for they do not want to see it reversed willy-nilly by a change of government.
The reason for relying on the Upper House for ratification of foreign agreements is that it is normally constituted to have a more solid (perhaps less democratic) long term status than the Lower House, and so gives more weight to the ratification than the Lower House could. In the United States for example it is the Senate not the House of Representatives that ratifies foreign treaties and this is constitutionally sound.
* * *
Items 2., 3., and 4, all concern reorganisation. Successive, never ending reorganisations decreed by the Executive are the bug bear of the Civil Service, the Public Services and Local Government in the Kingdom. Every time a government is thrown out of office they leave behind them a whole host of modifications to these services that result from their attempt to "fix" perceived problems. The valid principle of: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", is seldom applied.
Of course, the real but unstated aim of such reorganisations is not to improve the situation but to control it. The people who suffer in the process are not only the public but also the employees, the public servants, in the services. The latter's' interests are seldom assessed in the reorganisations, except insofar as these interests are deliberately challenged and made insecure.
People enter the government services mostly with the aim of making a career there. Such people make a personal life commitment and should have a right to expect that career paths are relatively stable so that there is a good chance that the efforts they make and the abilities they demonstrate may be rewarded with promotion. Reorganisations inevitably cut across established career paths so hammering the moral of the public servants and depriving them of merited advancement.
In promoting reorganisations, the Executives make full use of their beloved Quangos, for Quangos seldom have valid appointment procedures, and so can be staffed with people hand picked by the Executives, generally parachuted in from the private sector. The quango can then disrupt the established public servants overriding their experience and commitment. The expansion of the scope and number of Quangos under New Labour has, as one would expect, been huge.
The other favourite way of engineering reorganisation, that again has been given full vent by New Labour, is by using management consultancies. These private companies seldom have respect for precedent and staff interests and little conception of the need for long termism in government services. They are above all driven by a brief which demands that they find things to "fix" and so have little motivation to identify what is valid in current arrangements. Their services do not come cheap and so have to be justified by proposing changes that may well be of a radical nature.
Of course, such is the power of the British Executive that lengthy studies and reports are not needed to effect changes. The Executive can simply operate by decree. The decisions by Prime Minister Thatcher to sell off wholesale some public services was done virtually by decree, although technically some legislation was required.
The decision by Chancellor of the Exchequer Brown in 1997 to take banking regulatory control away from the Bank of England and to give it to a newly created body, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), was done by instant decree with no fuss or argument. The Bank of England said nothing, partly because it could not and partly because it was compensated by "control" over interest rates.
The resulting so-called "independence" of the Bank of England is, of course, a farce because it has absolutely no constitutional validity and so can be reversed at the drop of a hat if the Bank does not please its masters in the Executive. In any case, it is starting to look like a poison chalice as the FSA appears to be asleep on the job of regulating banking activities. In the Northern Rock case, the FSA had turned a blind eye to "unconventional" practices, leaving the Bank of England to cope with the resulting mess, much to the chagrin of its Chairman, Mervyn King.
Another case of reorganisation by decree took place in 2007 when what was the Home Office was unceremoniously split into two: a reduced Home Office and a Ministry for Justice. No report, no parliamentary committees, no justification was considered necessary. It was assumed that the long suffering Civil Service would simply rise to the task of engineering the change. The fact that many members of it would be left jockeying for positions in the new departments, with all goalposts moved, was surely not considered or, if it was, it was thought desirable to "keep them on their toes".
Without discussing here on the many, painful and dubious reorganisations of regional and local government, and the messing around with the National Health Service, the schools the Universities ... (the list is endless), that have occurred over the last fifty years (and have continued at a pace under New Labour), it can be appreciated the reorganisations are a more or less permanent feature of government of the Kingdom.
We are so used to seeing these changes, even if we never really understand their implications (unless we work in these services), that we think they must be normal to governments everywhere. This is emphatically not the case. In Republics, like France and Germany, the Executive cannot simply order changes as they can in the Kingdom, They do not have the power. They do not have the mentality.
The new Republican Constitution will put a stop to arbitrary reorganisations of the Civil Service, the Public Services and Regional and Local Government by insertions of Quangos into existing structures, by implementation of faddist, management guru brainchilds, or by straightforward Executive decree.
It is not that reorganisations will never be able to take place. But that they can only take place following a proper consultation procedure. The presumption should, however, always be in favour of evolution rather than revolution. Republicanism is conservative with a small "c".
Democratic politicians love to attack the "weight of bureaucracy", but they never do anything with all their radical changes or tamperings to reduce this "weight" by a single ounce. They only ever add to it and make it more complicated and "bureaucratic"..
Under the Republican Constitution, reorganisations will be subject to checks and balances. This could take the form of approval of the Upper House, or the Lower House or both. The necessity for such approvals would no doubt in some cases discourage an Executive from initiating a reorganisation for they could not see such a thing as the headline grabbing "quick fix" they do now.
If this is so, so much the better. Then we can all just get on with our jobs, and our lives, and making things happen that need to happen. And not have elected politicians using the apparatus of the government services as a diabolical political football.
Before leaving this subject it must be noted that under this heading of "reorganisation" must also be included sell offs of state assets and public services. Prime Minister Thatcher was able under the constitution quite legally to sell off wholesale public services without seeking any meaningful approval from any of the Institutions of Government. The short termism of this measure beggars belief as the administration squandered the receipts on tax breaks and social security payments made necessary by the other parallel defunct economic policies of the time. The aim of having Public Services not state owned has paradoxically produced the result that they are increasingly still state owned, it just happens to be by a foreign state not our own.
If you look around for long term capital projects that we are benefiting from that resulted from the sell off bonanza you will look in vain.
* * *
The problem of initiating long term capital projects has already been discussed in the example of how it is difficult for any British Prime Minister to focus on the long term interests of the country when the distractions of short term electoral gain are more directly pertinent to his or her political life.
As an acute commentator on the American Constitution, Noah Webster, wrote in 1787: "It is impossible that an executive officer can act with rigor and impartiality when his office depends on the popular vote". Whereas we might not go all the way with Webster in challenging the idea that the President should be elected, we could perhaps agree that the office should be designed in a way that prevents it having a too heavy a concentration on the electoral cycle.
The lack of long term planning is everywhere evident in the Kingdom, in the dilapidated infrastructure, the loss of crucial industries (e.g. the car industry), ill-trained work force (forcing in recent years a heavy reliance on foreigners who are properly trained), botched constitutional arrangements, declining agriculture, badly resourced armed forces, and so on, and so on.
A particularly salient example of this occurred under Prime Minister Thatcher when the coal industry was sacrificed in order to "defeat" the unions, and this in a country with 300 years supply of accessible coal within its shores, the fourth largest reserves of any country in the world. Energy Minister Heseltine subsequently made the scandalously short term decision to replace many coal fired power stations with cheap gas fired power stations, guaranteeing a rapid gobbling up of the North Sea gas reserves that we then possessed. Gas is a very high quality fossil fuel that is too good to use for power station and Heseltine's action has left us now dangerously exposed to the politicking surrounding gas supplies from Russia.
Meanwhile the once in a lifetime gift of North Sea oil which loaded the Treasury coffers with tax revenues was squandered on vote winning tax breaks and compensating for and obscuring the disastrous effects of the economic policies pursued by Thatcher and her successive Chancellors: Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and John Major .
Norway is a country that similarly benefited in the 1980's from revenues from North Sea oil. There, the decision was made to invest the money in improving the national rail network and Norway now has enviable railways. To even try to imagine such a straightforwardly wise decision being made in the Kingdom at any time under any government is to feel you are entering the land of make believe.
The well advertised admiration by New Labour for the Thatcherite model has resulted in a replication of the near absence of any long term planning. Transport, energy and housing policies, ten years into the New Labour administration, are still in a state of flux.
Initiatives when they do occur are piecemeal never addressing the big long term issues. The promotion of wind farms does not provide any kind of solution to the country's long term energy needs. Isolated transport projects like London's cross rail link while valuable in themselves are narrowly focused to produce a short term fanfare of approval leaving the big picture of crumbling transport services undisturbed.
The proposals for a chain of new "eco towns", by Prime Minister Brown will do little to address regional imbalances, and in any case the whole concept is oxymoronic. A new town by its nature will have to be primarily served by road transport and so any theoretical gains in energy saving in the design of individual buildings will be more than negated by the additional load imposed on the road network, not to mention the commitment to long term petrol consumption and pollution that is inevitably built into any new town.
As already suggested, the only way to rectify this situation is for the other Institutions of Government as well as the Executive to participate in decisions on major long term capital projects. Amongst other things in this process should be the (preferably fully appointed) Upper House. In the immature context of the polity in the Kingdom the cry inevitably goes up for the Upper House to be democratically elected. But this carries with it (amongst other fundamental problems) the fact that the Executive and the Upper House would then be chosen by the same constituency and so the republican principle of checks and balances could not work properly.
And a proper constitutional systems of checks and balances on the Executive needs to be combined with the development of increased professionalism in the Civil Service, (this is not intended as a criticism of the individuals that currently make up the service) created by a formal training institution probably taking its cue from the Ecole Nationale d' Administration (ENA) in France. Slurs on the Civil Service of the unfunny "Yes. Minister" kind should be set aside in favour of measures to develop the best qualities the service (one of the oldest and most admired in the world) already embodies.
Whenever you return to the Kingdom from abroad you are inevitable brought up fast by the impoverished infrastructure that is part of daily life in the Kingdom.
Arrive at any of the Kingdom's airports, and you will suffer a shudder of embarrassment as you inevitably compare the state of the British airport with the one you have just left (almost wherever the latter happens to be).
Arrive by ferry or tunnel with your car, and you are soon bumping along on the poorly specified surface of the Kingdom's trunk roads or motorways, the contrast with the sleek, slick surface on continental highways you have just experienced, a reminder of the nature of British political inadequacy, and indifference to the image the country portrays to the rest of the world*.
To understand the root cause of these deficiencies you have to look to the all-pervading nature and inadequacies of British Executive power.
* * *
In a Republic the Constitution is held above everything and everyone. In a sense, the Constitution is the nation, is the state. Individuals come and go but the Constitution outlives us all. It is an essential part of the enduring continuity of our people, our culture and our land. The Constitution is capable of revision and amendment but, in either of these, one principle must be inviolable.
Revisions and amendments must never be carried out in order to serve particular political aims of individuals or parties. They are only ever made in the interests of the nation as a whole. Once the Constitution becomes a "political football" of specific interests we are truly lost.
And "truly lost" in respect of our Constitution is where we truly are in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Few Prime Ministers, glorying in the excessive power that they undoubtedly have, can resist the temptation to start fiddling with, or, worse, radically changing, the constitutional arrangements. In this respect New Labour has excelled over all the twentieth century administrations and has declared the business of constitutional reform part of its special mission.
The matters of House of Lords reforms and the creation of a Supreme Court have been touched on. And regional power has been "devolved" on a strikingly unequal basis including the creation of a new Greater London Council with an elected mayor (which apparently no other major city merits). Now Prime Minister Brown has decided to take it upon himself to "shift power away from the Executive".
Whereas some measures broached may seem to hold attractions in reducing Executive power, they all suffer from one fundamental fault: they can, under the Kingdom's constitutional arrangements, be reversed in an instant. Any constitutional arrangement or Institution in the Kingdom suffers the threat of being done away with arbitrarily.
Of course, usually the Executive exercises its enormous power more subtly than that. It will typically shift power to its own advantage by creating a new department so realigning existing authority. An almost pantomime example of this was the now defunct "Deputy Prime Minister's Office" which was created as a personal fiefdom of Prime Minister Blair's trusted ally, John Prescott, usurping powers from the Department of the Environment, plus a few others bolted on. When Prescott fell foul of a typically sleazy scandal and had to go, his department disappeared with him.
To have the constitution manipulated as a means to give grace and favour, to court electoral advantage or to settle old scores is a national scandal that shames the nation and shames us all. And all these machinations provide fodder for the salacious appetite of the press so colouring our political life in a shocking hue.
Any constitutional change should be settled by a procedure that includes all the institutions of state. If it is major it must involve a popular referendum.
However, major constitutional changes, or foreign agreements that involve major constitutional changes, can, and are, made by Executive decree with no discussion or popular vote. Prime Minister Brown's decision to sign the new European Constitution without any consultation, leave alone a referendum, is a case in point. And he is totally within his rights to do so.
Clearly, there are minor amendments to the Constitution that should be able to happen without a referendum but it is dangerous if major amendments can occur simply by being passed by the Executive and the Legislature.S
If Constitutions provide a loophole for the increasing of Executive power, it is inevitable that at some point an Executive will exploit it. In respect of the Kingdom's present constitutional arrangements, of course, we are talking, not of loopholes, but a wide open situation that the Executive dominates. The new Republican Constitution needs to be framed with a full regard to the dangers posed by the tendency of an Executive to want to change the Constitution to their own and their successors' advantage.
* * *
In the polity of the Kingdom there are no subjects that are more alive than seventh and eighth items from the above list: 7. Taxation 8. Government Expenditure These two items are together what economists call fiscal matters.
Oh, what a field day the established parties love to have with whether or not you should "tax and spend", "not tax and not spend", "tax but not spend" or "not tax but spend anyway". Accusations fly between the parties over who can get the balance right, when the reality of the history of all governments is that they leave the same record of, on the one hand, increased or barely changed taxation and, on the other, inadequate public services.
No matter who is in power, the country gets deeper in debt and the public services and infrastructure are never sorted out. Oh, woe!
The fact that the parties bang on about tax all the time in an attempt to lure voters is a symptom of their bankruptcy of ideas. This is, or course, particularly true of the post-Thatcherite Conservative Party which has ditched the broadly based, one-nation ideology of the old Conservatism in favour of shallow, single issue, thoughtbite messages.
But to concentrate on the specific question of deciding on the level and distribution of taxes and the level and distribution of public expenditure, we encounter in the Kingdom of today the familiar picture of the Executive having total control. There is no necessity for the Executive to gain approval from the House of Commons, and certainly not the Lords, for its tax and spend proposals, there is only the requirement that they should be announced in the Lower House.
In the United States the Constitution specifically denies the President the power to decide on taxation and expenditure as the Framers understood that this would provide an important check on Executive decisions. After all, it is one thing to decide to do something but if the expenditure necessary for it is not there, there is not much you can do.
Under the Republican Constitution of Great Britain this principle should be enshrined. Whether tax and spend measures should originate in the Executive or Parliament is discussed eslewhere, but the principle of not allowing one Function of Government to take such decisions alone without any checks or balances is essential.
The Upper House, the House of Lords, should probably play a role in this for its constituency under the Republic (whether appointed or elected, i.e. whether it is a Civil or Democratic Institution) will be different and separate from those of the Executive. As referred to above, this is essential to preserve the principle of Separation of Powers.
* * * The problems of taxation and expenditure can never be resolved by the present parties for they are incapable of addressing the fundamental problem of why we have the never ending merry-go-round of trying to "balance the books". This fundamental problem is in the way we create money.
Money is created in our economy - lots of it. In fact the amount of money in the economy is currently increasing at around ten per cent per year. The problem is that all that money (except for a miniscule amount) is created as debt. A large chunk of that extra ten per cent is made up of mortgage debt and so for every pound created someone somewhere in the country is having to pay interest on that debt.
More debt means less to spend, as we all know from our personal finances. The effect of all the extra debt in the economy is colossal and results in a tightening on the cash available and so the overall purchasing power is reduced. Even if this might be first felt in an individual family budget, the effect spreads out so that it is felt everywhere including in government finances. The increasing amounts of money that is spent in the economy, not on goods and services but, on servicing debt results in a general impoverishment.
This is why the aim of "balancing the books" can never be achieved under the prevailing money creation regime. This is why taxes always seem too high and why the amount available for the government to spend always seems too low.
Only with the solid constitutional base provided by a Republic can the enormous vexed question of how to create regulated debt free money be decided. Only then can questions about how to tax and spend be taken out of the hands of the Executive and given a broad decision-making basis.
* * *
It is not so long ago that the kind of discussion here about how to reform the British constitutional system would have regarded the question of waging war as very much a side issue, albeit an important one to address. However, over the last ten years, war has become, if mercifully not a familiar part of life for civilians, certainly a familiar part of political life and life in the services.
No wars have been declared. That quaint custom of telling another country that you were going to attack them, sometime before you actually did so, has long died out, in the process sparing us those sonorous announcements by the head of state informing us that we were now in a "state of war" with whomever.
But, nevertheless, the desperate business of war has become an almost continuous aspect of the running of the nation, and this refers not just to the wars we are actually in but others that are talked about with a sense of immanency that a previous decade would not have recognised.
For a Constitution, as for many things, wars provide an ultimate test of viability and strength. At present the situation is simple. It is the Executive, usually the Prime Minister plus a few close advisors, that decides whether or not to start a war, or take defensive action against attack, or perceived attack. No approval of the other Institutions of state is necessary at the outset or later, only the requirement to inform the House of Commons that young lives and resources are to be committed to military adventure.
The war that at present looms the largest on our political landscape is, of course, the Iraq war, although the war in Afghanistan is increasingly moving up on the scale of importance. At least with the Iraq war we can imagine the exit from it, a situation that seems ever more remote in Afghanistan.
War is something we all fear, although with the day-to-day lives of most of us, if we are honest, hardly effected by the sacrifice of young outstandingly courageous young men and women in far off places of which we understand only a little. It is not something that preoccupies us to extent that we all feel it should.
As far as the Constitution is concerned, the way wars are decided and managed, however, must be quite central. If we do not know how we are to cope with war, this deficiency will be all too readily apparent to outsiders who may or may not have our interests at heart. In any case, it is part of the pride and resilience of a nation to know, in itself, that it has the will, the capacity and the leadership to wage war, should the real, proven, inescapable need be there.
This point exposes a radical failing in the present constitutional arrangements for in this century we experienced at least three years under the leadership of a Prime Minister that did not have the authority to wage war. The important word here is "authority". Prime Minister Blair, of course, never lost the political power to wage war, but his authority which depends on a relationship of reciprocal trust with the nation was all burnt up.
This happened because in order to take us into one war he had lied, and everyone knew it. This meant that a decision to enter any other war could not be enacted as the public would not trust the reasons given. The fact that the country could be held rudderless in this way in the face of any possible threats exposes a fundamental, totally unacceptable defect in the constitutional arrangements as they exist.
Prime Minister Blair, with his compliant Cabinet, was able to stay in power, regardless of the parlous state of security that his tenure of office created. No mechanism for challenging his position existed or exists. There is no impeachment procedure for a British Prime Minister (of which more in a moment) and no Cabinet colleague had, at any time, the wherewithal to stand up to him. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook nobly and wisely resigned but, as an isolated case, that had no effect on the policy. To the shame of the political establishment and of the constitution, the country remain defensively hobbled for an appreciable period for the sake of the vanity of one man.
In the new Republican Constitution, as a rule, the waging of war should not be possible without some sort of approval from Parliament. Again the Upper House, in view of its more permanent and experienced nature, should probably be primary. But as in the United States, it may be appropriate for the Lower House to have control over expenditure on military actions.
However, to avoid leaving the country open to surprise attack an exception to such approvals, however they might be designed, will have to be made.
The Executive must have the power to create a state of military emergency instantly without delay or consultation. There may be different grades of states of emergencies but the principle is clear. Once declared, the state of emergency can remain in place for up to, say, two months, and approaching the end of that period the Executive may apply to Parliament for an extension which then must be justified. If the state of emergency and ensuing actions are seen to have be in retrospect unnecessary then the Executive will have to be judged on the matter and will suffer accordingly.
* * *
There are several words and phrases that will have to enter the home political vocabulary with the founding of the new Republic. To those already mentioned must be added a further one that may at first seem a little strange in the British context: "impeachment".
"Impeachment" applies principally to the Head of State and other key offices of state, and the reason for this is that these offices being above everyone else in terms of constitutional power have no normal political mechanism whereby they can be removed from office due to wrongdoing, in advance of the next election. Consequently a special and exceptional procedure is reserved for their removal and it is only in special and exceptional circumstances that it is ever invoked.
The question of impeaching the Head of State, the Executive, is the most important matter for framing in the Constitution and so this will be discussed here, although the remarks apply, in principle, equally to the other lesser offices of state.
In the Kingdom the nominal Head of State is the Monarch and there is no procedure available for impeaching the Monarch, however, damaging or reprehensible their behaviour might be. The question of impeaching the Head of Government does not arise for theoretically they are politically accountable to Parliament and so Parliament has the power to remove them by a "motion of censure". In practice, if they have a sound majority, the chances of them loosing office in this way are slim, for their party's MPs who vote for the motion would be offering themselves for an early election as well.
And so the effective lack of any formal way of removing the Executive, which is the de facto Head of State, is a further way in which the Prime Ministerial office has a power unrivalled in any other Liberal Democracy.
Under the Republican Constitution a procedure for impeaching the President will have to be put in place, as exists in all Modern Republics.
It is sometimes argued that the Prime Minister is vulnerable to loosing office, thanks to a vigilant and resourceful press. There have been many cases over the last twenty years of Ministers loosing office through scandal and so why should this not apply to the Prime Minister. Comparisons are made with the American situation, where, of course, there is a procedure for impeaching the President. Such comparisons are interesting but they do not bear out any superiority of the British system.
If a pub quiz contestant in Britain was asked to name the only American President to be impeached since the Second World War the likelihood is that they would plump for President Nixon. In this they would loose a point as Nixon resigned before the impeachment procedure was completed. The correct answer is a President that now enjoys as much prestige as any past-President, President Bill Clinton.
It has been argued, in favour of the British system, that Clinton would not have survived the onslaught of publicity surrounding his case if it had occurred in Britain. Clinton was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice in the House of Representative and so the impeachment stands. The perjury charge arose from Clinton's testimony about his relationship to Monica Lewinsky during a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by one Paula Jones. Because of the system of checks and balances, however, for a President to be removed from office, the case also has to go for trial in the Upper House, the Senate. The Senate duly threw it out.
If we tend to think that the case would have brought down a British Prime Minister, it is primarily because of the salaciousness of the whole affair not because British procedures and justice would be better. It is true that a Prime Minister, hounded as Bill Clinton was at the time, might well succumb and be forced out. But is this really a sign of a superior system?
President Clinton lied about a fairly trivial matter, survived in the United States, but probably would not have survived in Britain. When Prime Minister Blair lied about WMDs in Iraq and took the country to war on a false pretext, he deceived the nation on a matter of the highest importance, but he survived. Of course, President George W. Bush has survived a very similar offence, but this does not negate the fact that a Head of State should not be allowed to survive such conduct.
For one thing, as previously argued, it means the country has a leader without the authority to take the country to war, should it be necessary, so leaving it vulnerable.
* * *
The all-penetrating reach and staggering power of the office of British Prime Minister is one of the greatest defects of the constitutional arrangements in the United Kingdom - if not the greatest. We cannot go on like this any longer.
Neither New Labour nor the Conservatives challenge the existing situation, for they know that to do so is to challenge the very Constitutional Monarchy under which we live. Moreover, they covet the Excessive Power of the Executive for themselves even if, as the foregoing has made clear, that, in spite of the lure of its addictive power, it is in some ways an unfulfilling, unhappy office.
As stated, the origins of the Excessive Power are two: one, having a combined election to the Legislature and the Executive; two, having a Head of State, the Monarch with no authority, so forcing all their power to flow into the Executive. These origins can only be cut off by a full Republican Constitution, of a kind most of the developed world lives under.
The Monarchy, in itself, is not the problem. But its constitutional role must be abolished to establish Republican constitutional principles and an Executive with the right kind of power and the right amount of it.
It may seem that here the office of Executive is cast often as the "villain of the piece", and that it should be diminished. This is not so. By the Executive having properly constituted powers it would achieve, in some ways, more power, and certainly more prestige. By seating its decisions in broadly-based Constitutional arrangements, those decisions become validated and enduring.
The combination of the Executive's ridiculously overinflated and overextended power together with a fragility of tenure of office and an inability to embed decisions in the political fabric of the nation, creates a fertile culture for the growth of an unstable, malign, political psychosis at the heart of government.
The problems of Excessive Executive Power has been at the centre of Republican theory and practice since the founding of the first Republican state in Rome, some 2500 years ago. Then the decision was somehow arrived at (we will never know quite how) to get rid of the Monarchy and replace it with a leadership of two Consuls who were rotated ever year. Alongside this, a Constitution operated where there existed from the early days some Separation of the Functions of Government, some Democracy, and the makings of a Modern Judiciary.
The earliest states of any kind as far as we know suffered from Excessive Executive Power. Indeed, they had nothing else but this, and possibly could not have had. From the founding of the Roman Republic on, every sincere attempt at formulating constitutions has addressed this problem.
The First Republic of Britain arose out of the abuse of Excessive Power by the Monarch, Charles Stuart, Charles I. The King had difficulty in controlling Parliament as it refused to go along with his unfair tax raising measures. He had also set up his own rival Judiciary in the notorious Star Chamber which dished out arbitrary cruel "justice" to his subjects. Charles sought to impose on the country his own desire for virtually absolute rule along the French model and when Parliament refused to yield he declared war on it.
However, Parliament rose to the threat and formed an army that was to defeat the King, in the first Civil War. It was not the initial intention of Parliament to abolish the Institution of Monarchy or challenge Charles's right to the throne, but Charles schemed and plotted and started a second Civil War which he also lost. Thanks to Charles's intransigence, ten per cent of the English people died in these wars. However, it became clear that his determination would not relent and he started plotting with foreign states who had an interest in seeing kingly absolutism in Britain.
It was only when it became widely accepted that he could never accept a proper constitutional resolution that it was resolved to try him for his crimes and this lead to his execution. Parallel with this, the First Republic was established. The English experience of the seventeenth century confirms the necessity of Republican preoccupation with Excessive Executive Power and how the Executive tends to seek to have more and more of it.
What we do know for sure is that, if we do nothing to address this problem and implement no safeguards, Executive Power will just grow and grow. The politics of the twenty first century Kingdom are a testimony to this inescapable fact as much as the politics of the seventeenth century Kingdom. We have few checks and balances on Executive Power and so it invades every office and every responsibility. And things are not getting any better.
The pity of this is that, while the enlargement of power continues at a pace, the diminution of the office occurs alongside, for the psychosis of excessive power is ultimately as damaging to the ruler as to the ruled.
To be clear, we need Leaders. We need a Leader. The alternative of faceless apparatchiks is not very appealing.
If the Leader's power is properly framed within the Constitution, the position of Executive will attract people of the highest possible distinction in public life. The worst scenario is of a Constitution that does not deliver sufficient and appropriate power and dignity to the office, so resulting in "London Mayor" type candidates, that is to say, politicians of the third rank who see the office as a means to achieving a dignified dead end to a lackluster career.
The office of President will not lack pomp and colour and great architecture. Buckingham Palace will become the Presidential Palace and so foreign dignitaries can be received in style. And the route between the President and Parliament along The Mall, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall will become a frequent scene of governmental movements to remind the people that their government has at last moved into the Modern age.
But this grandeur and interaction must be matched exactly by the constitutional powers and restraints of the office.
For instance. the image of "number ten", 10 Downing Street, as the residence of the Executive can be respected only for its "British reserve". But this is a conceit, for its understatement in no way corresponds to the real authority of the occupant.
The office of President cannot carry on this duplicitous mismatch between image and influence. Emerging from his or her residence, by the ordinary front door, of an ordinary house, onto a side road, in an ill-fitting suit, will not do for the office of President under the Republic.
The Presidency is decided not royalty, but most Modern Presidents do not shirk from some of its trappings. Nor should they. The Presidency provides a focus for the life of the nation. The office must gain our affection as well as our admiration. It should be capable of knowing our hearts as well as our minds
It will be palpable, visceral and visual.
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*One important reason why the Lords lacks power is its methods of selection, which are three, do not carry with them authority. Lords are selected either by inheritance, position or appointment. Inheritance does not convey authority for nobody can these days take it seriously. Position, e.g. by being a bishop, might earn respect but not much political authority. And the appointments procedures have been undermined by unproven allegations of corruption of the "cash for honours" type.
* The Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee in spite of its name is not responsible for Monetary Policy. Interest rates are set by the MPC but only to achieve an inflation rate decided by the Government. They are only in charge of what interest rate is necessary to achieve the desired interest rate - in theory, only a technical matter.
*The poor quality of the surfacing of roads and pavements is one of the most irksome aspects of life in the Kingdom and this is always underlined by a visit to practically any other first or second world country where we can temporary experience the joy and pride of being able to negotiate our way on foot or on wheel smoothly and without hazard. Technically the reason for the difference is that elsewhere concrete subbases are invariably used for major pavements and roads so guaranteeing a rigid stable final surface. The reason always given for concrete subbases not being used in the Kingdom is that they would be too costly too dig up when the utilities require access to their main! On the continent the utilities are expected to lay their mains once and for all with the required access manholes at the required time. The slipshod approach in the Kingdom results in a major universal degradation of the environment and an embarrassment to all who care about the image of the country.
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