|
A NEW CONSTITUTION To End the Excessive Power of Prime Ministers |
A
CIVIC REPUBLICAN MANIFESTO 2009 For Great Britain VIRTUE FREEDOM ASPIRATION WEALTH PEACE |
DEBT FREE MONEY
To End the Misery of Debt Based Money |
|
SECOND REPUBLIC
REGIONAL FLAG
Comprising the flags of Wales, Britia, Anglia,Scotland and London |
REDISCOVERING BRITISH CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM |
 HERBERT SPENCER Philosopher BRITISH REPUBLICAN |
| For up to date comments on current news stories from a Civic Republican point of view go to | ||
|
"Republicanism is simply this, self-government; the right of every individual to govern himself, either in person or by representation " George Harding (1848) |
||
|
HOME DEBT FREE MONEY INSTITUTIONS IDEALS CONSTITUTION CONTACT |
||
|
etions 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
|
REGIONS AND FEDERAL STRUCTURE
The United Republic of Britain will be a Federation of Autonomous Regions. The word United is retained to indicate the Federal nature.
The reason for a federation rather than a single unitary state springs from the basic principle of Republicanism that there should be a Separation of Powers wherever possible. There is no area where this principle is more important than in the governing of regions and localities and all major modern Republics embody this principle.
America has its States with powerful tax raising powers. Germany has her Landers with control over major policy decisions. France has her Departments and its Regions, and crucially she has a very powerful mayoral system which brings elected power right down to local level.
There is no country in the world were the crying need for a greater degree of regional and local autonomy is more evident than in the Kingdom.
The Kingdom has throughout its history has tended to become more and more highly centralized towards London. This tendency exists even more strongly now as pressure to develop London and the Home Counties continues unabated. The other regions suffer consequently and their character, their problems and their economies are little understood in the metropolis, even if it cares. The metropolis meanwhile suffers desperate problems of overdevelopment.
Much of the housing problem can be explained by this imbalance. Without proper regional policy houses become vacant in the North of England whilst there are not sufficient in the South.
The emphasis on London is due in part to its operation as an international financial center and the shear wealth that this creates has resulted in successive governments biasing all their concerns towards it. Prime Minister Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer set out five tests for joining the Eurozone. One of these was that it was good for the City of London financial center. No test mentioned industry or agriculture.
The North of England and the Midlands have long had a bias towards industry. Other areas such as the West have a bias towards agriculture. Both industry and agriculture have been more and more neglected by the government in London to the point often of hostility. Hostility is the word appropriate to the New Labour Government’s attitude to agriculture. Hostility is the word appropriate to Thatcher’s attitude to industry.
But the main reason for centralization on London is the desire for power and control by the central government. By restricting development of the regions and the countryside and impoverishing them power has concentrated in the center. To continue this tendency has been the desire of all recent Prime Ministers and Blair was no exception. So why did he introduce devolution?
The devolution of certain powers to the Scottish and the Welsh Parliaments is a reality. But the powers they have assumed represent simply the minimum London thought possible in order to preserve the Union. This is made clear by the fact that they unashamedly and blatantly have been given totally unequal remits! If the principle of devolution was thought right, why else would two roughly similar regions be given different powers? The difference is made clear in Scotland having a Parliament building costing over #400 million while Wales only merits one costing #60 million.
Meanwhile, England is thought not to merit its own Parliament at all. To try to paper over this disparity New Labour sought to impose a series of “regional assemblies” across England. These are cumbersome accumulations of five or six counties, that have no recognizable identity. A referendum in Northumberland resulted in the assembly for that region being resoundingly rejected. No further referendums have been held.
The metropolis itself has no regional assembly but it has the London Assembly headed by an elected mayor. Meanwhile Northern Ireland has a quite different power sharing arrangement that corresponds to none of the others.
To summarise we have the following. For London an elected mayor, for England a series of unwieldy, undemocratic regional assemblies, for Scotland a Parliament with useful but limited powers (of course, not including tax raising), for Wales a Parliament with very little power and for Northern Ireland a power sharing assembly. An appropriate way to describe the regional government of the Kingdom is as a Pig’s Ear. Does anybody outside central government really consider these arrangements satisfactory for a modern state? And if such a hotchpotch existed in any other European state, East or West, how would we regard it?
What the regional government arrangements of the Kingdom demonstrate is the fear and paranoia that the center has of the rest of the country. However, if the declared arrangements described above were the only thing that defined this paranoia this would be bad enough. But there is a whole other mechanism of control over the rest of the country that is exercised increasingly by the center. This is through local government. And this operates in two ways.
The first is financial. The central government of the Kingdom imposes tasks upon the local authorities and at the same time controls their finances. This allows the centre to put the local authorities in an arm lock whereby the finances are seldom sufficient to do the work. This effectively undermines the local authorities in the eyes of their local electorates forcing them either to raise local rates or to cut services. With the local representatives devalued, the center exerts its control seeking to appeal directly to the populace bypassing the locally elected hard pressed councilors and employees. 1
The second mechanism of control is through legislation. The central government imposes tasks on the local authority and then constantly changes the remits and the conditions under which they work so manipulating the elected representative, offices and employees. This is pronounced in every area but none more so than, for instance, in education where the resulting pressures have become so great that recruitment is a real problem as the work focus shifts away from the primary task of education towards the satisfaction of the centre’s administrative and political objectives.
And in the vital area of planning the newly introduced procedures (Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004) are so cumbersome and complex that few, even amongst professionals, can work out their implications. At the heart of the new procedures is a surfeit of public “consultation”, although the difficulty of understanding them is such that the “consultation” is likely in most cases to be illusory. The real intention behind the legislation is again an attempt by the center to bypass local representatives feigning to appeal directly to the populace so undermining longstanding and well understood institutional structures, consolidating the centre’s control. 2
The manipulation of the regions by legislation is also apparent in New Labour’s Regional Assemblies which were mentioned above. The RA’s represent a long line of modifications to the organization of “regions” in England. Practically every government since World War II has sort to change what was for centuries the organization of the country into counties with a succession of Commissions which each came to different conclusions as to the ideal arrangement. With each expensive change the confusion by the population as to who is governing what has increased to the extent that now the number of laymen in England who could tell you what exactly the function of their RA is is like to be in single figures.
The government has championed the Regional Assemblies as creating more democracy and representation. What anyone who works with their Regional Assembly will tell you is that they are a double edged sword. Whilst they theoretically should provide a means for regional voices to reach the center, the reality is that they are more likely to function as an instrument for promoting policy directives from the center. The confusion of function, of course, works to the centre’s advantage as any void in decision making tends to return to the center to sort out.
The United Republic of Great Britain must follow the precedent of all major modern republics and be a federation of separate autonomous regions.
Each region in turn will be divided into counties, and each county into urban or rural local authorities. Each urban and rural authority will divided into wards or parishes. The counties, local authorities, and parishes can be taken as more or less those that exist already and so this leaves the regions to be decided.
The endless fiddling with the regional organization of the Kingdom over the years may suggest to some that deciding the boundaries of the regions might be a contentious issue. If, however, proper established Republican principles are followed in devising the regions this will not be the case.
The following principles must be followed:
To decide what the regions should be, three already present themselves: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The first two certainly, but probably not the third, satisfy principles one to four. (But see note below on Northern Ireland.) A more difficult matter arises with the rest of the nation, i.e. England.
We are so used to speaking of England as a single unit that we may overlook the fact that it is doubtful if it satisfies principle one, but let us return to this in a moment. It certainly does not satisfy principles two and three as it includes the massive center of London and it so big, diverse and elongated, geographically and economically, as to not admit of being governed “as a unity with a degree of autonomy” to “balance the power of the center”, as all attempts to reorganize regional and local government have recognized. It defies principle four on grounds of its relative size.
This suggests a division of England, but how?
The first division must be to make Greater London a separate region. It has its own problems and requirements and certainly its own economy and its inclusion in any other autonomous region would result in a top heaviness and preserve its dominance through its role as the seat of government.
The rest of England will be divided into the north and the south. This division satisfies principle one as the identities of each are quite different as all Englishmen know. Traveling from one to the other can be almost (but not quite) like traveling between different countries and the character of the peoples, whilst both admirable, are different.
Principle two is satisfied as the nature of the economy of each is different and has been for some hundreds of years. The equation of the north with industry and science might be facile and an over simplification but it contains enough truth to permit us to see that the north could benefit by having its own degree of autonomy, at last free of the constraints of London and the south, and able to decide in great degree its own destiny and rediscover its own character and strengths.
The south of England as a semi-autonomous entity could realise the undoubted virtues that it has always had and resist the massive pull from and subservience to London which has characterized it for so long and forced the creation of disadvantaged communities alongside prosperous ones.
London itself meanwhile will remain the dynamic engine it has become but would have to accommodate the new power of the other five regions. The drift of population, commerce, culture and industry to the regions that would undoubtedly occur would only benefit it and the quality of life for all.
London would remain the state capital but the UR federal constitution would see to it that the central government could no longer run the rest of the country as an extension of London with little understanding and little knowledge of it. 3
Different names have been suggested for the two separate regions within what is geographically England. For the north “Britia” and “Lower England”, and for the south “Anglia” and “Upper England” have been put forward, all with some historical justification. However, in the interests of natural usage probably the best options are “Northern England” and “Southern England”.
Each region will require a capital and a parliament as Wales and Scotland have capitals and parliaments and there is more than one candidate for this role in both the north and the south. (The possibility of a new town for either capital should not be countenanced.)
The United Republic of Great Britain will therefore consist of the semi-autonomous regions of Greater London, Southern England, Northern England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. (Northern Ireland may stay in the UR indefinitely or it may not but this is not matter for primary policy of the RPGB.) (The Regional Flag will represent Southern England, Northern England, Scotland and Wales. London can be safely taken as read.)
The exact powers to be assumed by the regions will be a matter for careful consideration and the experience of USA, France, Germany and others will provide plentiful experience for guidance. Spain, too, whilst a constitutional monarchy, not a Republic, has recently created autonomous regions that also might provide useful models.
For the present purposes there are six important principles that the regions must have. These are
These will be dealt with in turn.
1. The right of secession. This is a fundamental, unalterable right of the regions that must be incorporated into the United Republic constitution without compromise.
This is not a radical idea. Even within the existing UK, as the right of, say, Scotland, to choose independence democratically is not challenged by the center. (However, the question of Northern Ireland makes the waters muddier for it is not clear that it satisfies principle one.)
The right of secession makes the UK as the future UR truly unions. If this right did not exist, membership of the union would be compulsory and so it is no longer strictly a union. For instance the European Union is a union as a member state can secede at any time. Without this right of secession it would not be a union but either a nation or an empire.
The right of secession is hardly an issue within the neighbouring republic of Germany, and in France the only region where secession is seriously mentioned is in the island of Corsica, and in Spain, again not a republic but useful model for the rights of regions, secession is only an issue in the Basque country (although the status of these two “separatist movements” as springing from truly popular general sentiment, rather than local interests of questionable legitimacy, is far from certain).
Whilst not always given due weight, in the United States of America secession rights of states were effectively abrogated by the American War of Secession 1861-5, often erroneously referred to as the “American Civil War”. However we may judge the issues surrounding slavery in nineteenth century America (and these issues are more complex than much orthodox history would have us believe) the states that formed the Southern Confederation, joined the Union as free states on the understanding that they could leave it as free states. This right was denied them and other states of the Union waged bloody war on them to prevent them doing so. Their reasons for wishing to secede, whilst certainly more complex that the desire to preserve slavery, were in any case irrelevant to the constitutional principle.
The UR will prove so advantageous to all its members that secession will hardly be an issue, certainly much less so than under the UK. But it is vital that right of secession be made explicit in the constitution and preserved as inalienable. Without it the character of the Union becomes quite different and the USA should serve as an example for it has never recovered from the secession conflict and perhaps never can.
2. Balance of power between the center and each region. A fundamental point concerning the balance of power that should exist between center and region is as follows.
In Republican thought the balance of power between center and regions is just that – a balance. In the foregoing the way the regions and local government can counteract power of the center has been referred to predominantly for within the Kingdom excessive power of the center has been the problem.
But likewise the center needs to balance any tendency to excessive power in the regions. Power tends to extend itself and accumulate wherever it exists and it is the function of the constitution of the state and the institutions it contains to ensure that that accumulation does not become too great.
Where excessive power occurs in national form it is characterized by dictatorship to one degree or another. Where excessive power occurs in local form it is characterized by what are often referred to as “local mafias”, that is to say, local oligarchies comprising local officials, elected representatives, commercial interests and (in the worst cases) corrupt members of the judiciary. This description may sound extreme but the tendency it refers to is familiar to those who have a close acquaintance with local affairs.
Nor should the tendency be wholly decried where the interests being defended are genuinely those of the locality as a whole and its people as a whole and, it goes without saying, where it is being done in a legal way. But should the tendency become excessive and citizens or collections of citizens in the region or locality wish to remedy the situation, their proper recourse is to the center and the national judiciary it supports. In this way the national government acts as the defender of certain citizens’ rights and interests against particular assaults on these, and this is, of course, one of its vital roles.
(It is worth pointing out that regions and their governments have since the creation of the European Community an additional level of security, and this can result in centrifugal tendencies within nation states. To take Scotland as an example, the separatist movement there took on an additional impetus in the 1970’s following the Kingdom’s joining the EU (or Common Market as it was then). Small nation states naturally feel more secure within a Union of this nature than cast into a global context. However, they should be aware that principle three applies within a Union as much as within a federation.)
3. Tax raising powers. Without some tax raising power, regional power is dead in the water. There is nothing more amenable to a malign central government than the bestowing of political “democracy” on a locality or region without giving it likewise some fiscal independence.
|
SIGN UP FOR FREE WEEKLY
EMAILED NEWSLETTER Your email address: ------------------Go to previous Newsletters ------------------ Press F11 to read FULL SCREEN press F11 to undo ------------------
*See P25 The Grip Of Death by Michael Rowbotham
|
