Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
My view on this is informed by two contentions.
1. Democracy is about a lot more than simply voting in elections. The people who advocate simply abolishing the Lords, or replacing it with an elected Senate* are, I think, guilty of placing too much emphasis on seeing democracy = voting, and therefore, more voting = more democracy.
2. What democracy is more fundamentally about, is finding ways to peacefully resolve disputes. You can see that our current set-up does this somewhat poorly, by the way in which it dealt with the vote to leave the EU.
Prior to the 1911 Parliament Act, the division between Lords and Commons allowed Parliament to resolve disputes between two different sets of interests - those of the Lords and the Commons. But since then, we've almost had a unicameral system, as the Lords has been repeatedly weakened to present less of an impediment to the Commons, which represents, most of the time, the will of the largest plurality of the electorate, not particularly giving voice to the divisions within that electorate.
So I believe that we can use our institutions to more easily resolve the conflicts between different sections of society, if we are prepared to use more flexible franchises to elect at least one of the chambers. And, in some respects, this would be to return to the pre-1911 constitutional position, but updated to reflect modern society.
* I am increasingly coming to the view that anyone who suggests replacing the House of Lords with a Senate hasn't thought about the issue properly, otherwise they wouldn't use such a boring name for the second chamber. Similarly, I'd much prefer if the UK Supreme Court had a more distinctive name. Supreme Court is just so dull.
The reason the 1911 Act was needed is because the reactionary Lords was reacting in naked self interest to put their own finances ahead of the needs of the nation. It was not about conflict resolution but an undemocratic minority obstructing everything, similar to the modern US Senate.
HYUFD's style of Toryism was the exact sort of thinking that caused us to lose the American colonies.
No, the Tories just moved to British Loyalist North America which became Canada after the revolution in the American colonies. Indeed some members of the Conservative Party of Canada, especially those from the former Progressive Conservative wing are still called Tories today
Mr. L, what impact do you think disestablishing the Church of England would have?
For most people none, apart from they couldn't automatically get married or buried in their local Church of England Parish Church anymore unless they regularly attended it or had been baptised there
Buried in the local church? Intramural burials have been banned for almost two centuries, the odd aristo or elite person aside!
Even if you are talking about churchyards, many are closed to new burials except sometimes if you have relatives or a lair there already. Off to the secular cemetery. So even less impact.
In our town burial, either of bodies or of ashes, in the churchyard is the responsibility of the parish council. Not the parochial church council.
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished. Burial in the churchyard could be refused to those who had not been regular attendees at the Church of England Parish Church
I’m certain that the last two funerals at our local parish church that I attended, where the bodies were buried in the churchyard, were not of men who regularly attended church. One of them, though could be described as an upright and honest citizen; I’m not so sure about the other one!
Yes because the Church of England is the established church. As long as it remains the established church anyone from the Parish can be buried in the Church of England churchyard
Disestablishment wouldn't prevent the C of E continuing to offer what it does to everyone who asks. Some parishes would probably get snotty, but some parishes manage quite a bit of "of course you can get married here, we'll talk about it once you've done our course" snottiness already.
It would to an extent. Far more Church of England Vicars would take the line of Roman Catholic priests or evangelical ministers who won't marry you in their Church unless you regularly attend it or have been baptised there
But if the local authority is running the churchyard burial business, what does it matter?
It wouldn't be if the Church of England was disestablished, the Church Vicar and PCC could refuse burials in its churchyards to those who had not regularly attended the Church as it would be fully private property, not an arm of the state effectively as it had been for past burials
Have ordered Starlink. Will be interesting to see if it makes a rapid improvement or if its meh enough to be sent back for a refund...
I had it at my place in France before I sold it and it was very good. I wouldn't have it now because Elon is a fucking shitlord.
Elon is Hank Scorpio. But what are we going to do? Boycott Amazon because Bezos is also a fucking shitlord? I have a very simple policy which is to ignore the machinations of business leaders and artists. That way I don't have to cancel JK Rowling or Michael Jackson or boycott Starlink or do some other pointless shit that doesn't impact the supposed Bad Guys but impacts me quite a lot.
I used to work for Nestle. Some leftie friends would recoil in horror and state firmly that they boycott us. "Great! And do you know how much impact that has on the business? None at all..."
Presumably though, you working for them did have an impact on the business. That was nice. My Mum was in Madagascar in the 70's working on nutrition, and Nestle had convinced all the young mothers to purchase their filthy tinned milk because they said it was better than breast milk.
They're the evil empire. Then again, me working for a UK business division in the 2000s has sod all to do with an African division in the 1970s. And opting to boycott KitKat in 2023 does literally nothing either to what happened in he 70s or elsewhere in the world or to the bit of Nestle that makes KitKats in 2023.
And yes. My conscience is perfectly intact thanks.
After standing up against expansionist, authoritarian regimes, a party pledging to break up the big monopolies would be my second voting issue.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
My view on this is informed by two contentions.
1. Democracy is about a lot more than simply voting in elections. The people who advocate simply abolishing the Lords, or replacing it with an elected Senate* are, I think, guilty of placing too much emphasis on seeing democracy = voting, and therefore, more voting = more democracy.
2. What democracy is more fundamentally about, is finding ways to peacefully resolve disputes. You can see that our current set-up does this somewhat poorly, by the way in which it dealt with the vote to leave the EU.
Prior to the 1911 Parliament Act, the division between Lords and Commons allowed Parliament to resolve disputes between two different sets of interests - those of the Lords and the Commons. But since then, we've almost had a unicameral system, as the Lords has been repeatedly weakened to present less of an impediment to the Commons, which represents, most of the time, the will of the largest plurality of the electorate, not particularly giving voice to the divisions within that electorate.
So I believe that we can use our institutions to more easily resolve the conflicts between different sections of society, if we are prepared to use more flexible franchises to elect at least one of the chambers. And, in some respects, this would be to return to the pre-1911 constitutional position, but updated to reflect modern society.
* I am increasingly coming to the view that anyone who suggests replacing the House of Lords with a Senate hasn't thought about the issue properly, otherwise they wouldn't use such a boring name for the second chamber. Similarly, I'd much prefer if the UK Supreme Court had a more distinctive name. Supreme Court is just so dull.
I definitely agree 'democracy' is about much more than voting. Eg I believe some fundamentals of our society should be embedded such that it's very hard for elected politicians to change them.
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
County Councils and larger unitaries (such as London Boroughs, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham) are businesses with budgets of excess of one billion per annum.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
The problem is that councils have frequently shown their complete inability to run their operations and finances.
This is because they have been neutered, so they don’t attract high calibre people. It is also the case that they were neutered in attempt to prevent such disasters. The cure is the disease.
(Cheeky answer) So when is Westminster being shut down?
(Less cheeky answer) FPTP, with its tendency for one party states at local level, isn't helpful here.
The other thing that doesn't help is how little day-to-day media scrutiny councils get. In part because local press and radio have shrivelled to a shrivelled up thing in many places.
Yes it's boring, yes there's not much in it, but go and buy your local paper, people.
While I'm less convinced of the suitability of PR for Westminster with time I'm more convinced of its value at local level.
I cite my borough, Newham, as a perfect example. At least the Greens won two seats in May 2022 albeit from 17% of the vote. The Conservatives got 14% of the vote and nothing - Labour got 61.5% of the vote and 64 seats.
I'm not disputing Labour's right to run the Council but 64 out of 66 is ridiculous - Labour should have 41 seats, the Greens 11, Conservatives 9 and others 5. Labour would still have a majority of 16 but other voices would be heard - Green voices, Conservative voices and democracy benefits from plurality - Councils benefit from hearing a plural range of opinions, local democracy benefits if everyone feels their voice is being made and heard.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
That's a bit Alien v Predator though. I don't see why we can't devise a 'Sanity & Reasonableness Check' body with a diverse selection of good and able people without all the bloat and privilege and cronyism of the Lords.
Indeed. How did those old families get where they are? By theft, rapine and manipulation of the law. Your example oif the commons is an excellent instance.
Hereditary peers in the Lords can't be in the House of Commons by definition as it is the House of Commoners, unless they renounce their peerage as Tony Benn did or their family no longer has a Hereditary seat in the Lords which enabled Viscount Thurso to become a Liberal Democrat MP
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Wasn’t that plan for most of the power to come upwards from local authorities, rather than downwards from central government? So it was an extra bunch of politicians to be paid for, but with the power ending up further from the people.
As I recall it, yes, you are right. Might well have been part of the reason it was defeated. However, I can’t see regional assemblies replacing counties.
Yes, I would devolve more power to counties, and make them raise more of their own money. They can co-operate on projects that cross boundaries, such as transport infrastructure, and can compete with each other on property taxes and business rates.
Which counties?
All of them! I’d reduce income taxes, perhaps to rates of 15% and 35%, but reduce subsidy to local authorities by the amount lost, allowing them to raise local taxes instead.
So you’d bankrupt half the LAs in the country. Granted just a speeding up of what successive governments have done for the last couple of decades, but people might actually notice.
It would result in the same income for LAs, just that council tax would go up significantly and central government subsidy would fall.
It would also encourage housebuilding, as the LA would see more money for every new house built.
It really wouldn’t. It would massively exacerbate what’s already the case. Local taxes in areas of greater deprivation are almost certain to fall short.
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/English-local-government-funding-trends-and-challenges-in-2019-and-beyond-IFS-Report-166.pdf … Spending cuts per person in the most deprived tenth of council areas have averaged 31% (£432), compared with 16% (£134) in the least deprived tenth. This reflects the fact that between 2009–10 and 2015–16, the system for determining how much central government funding councils should get did not fully take into account how much councils relied on such funding relative to their own council tax revenues. Changes to the way grants were allocated from 2016–17 have remedied this issue since then – but not undone the previous pattern. Spending cuts have also varied across regions, again largely driven by differences in reliance on central government funding. For example, spending per person has fallen by 30% in the North East compared with 15% in the South West. Spending per person has fallen by 32% in London reflecting the fact that the government also significantly reduced funding for the Greater London Authority to subsidise buses and tubes, and councils in London have generally taken less advantage of the scope to increase council tax in recent years. However, despite larger cuts in more deprived areas, revenues and spending are still higher. For example, spending per person in the most deprived councils is 1.3 times the level in the least deprived – although this is down from 1.6 times in 2009–10. We cannot easily say whether the new or old funding and spending relativities are more appropriate though. To do this would require three things: (1) defining what we expect from councils in terms of service range and quality; (2) a robust way of estimating how much councils need to meet these expectations; and (3) a subjective judgement on how much it is appropriate to redistribute revenues in order to help all councils..
Ironically, this can also be read as counter to the argument you are trying to make.
Westminster controls the purse strings so ruthlessly that it can effectively immiserate dissenting provinces.
The Union, inside England as much as for the Nations, needs to provide a level of solidarity funding. But beyond that, we need to unlock British local government from its current death grip.
There are probably three or four things the country needs to do if it wants to arrest its current entrenched decline.
This is one of them. (The others are planning reform, fixing a bias against capital investment, various supply side reforms, export promotion, and improving trading links with our nearest neighbours).
By the way, whoever on here recommended the musical version of War of the Worlds -narrated by Richard Burton - thank you.
Absolutely bloody brilliant.
I have been listening to it, and enjoying it, all weekend with my bose headphones and I even bought the original H.G Wells paperback at Waterstones yesterday as well.
Loving it. Amazing.
I think that was me. Burton's narration is just superb.
I very much hope it has got you in better humour. You have not quite been yourself of late.
Thank you.
Extremely stressed at work. Weeks feel like 7-8 days and weekends 1 day. Become very angry and snappy. Wife made an intervention last night.
We'll see about whether current job works out. I'll give it another 6 months.
Good man. You have always been prone to the odd mood swing (who isn’t?) but yesterday was quite out of character
If your job is making you that unhappy and frustrated it ain’t worth it. For you or your family
Also, having England the only part of the UK with no devolved Parliament/Assembly, and with voters in English constituencies having dramatically less voting power (from memory, England is about 85% of the population) than everywhere else is not something that can be considered remotely fair or justifiable.
As well as abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected Senate, I also suspect Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies in England without referendum to complete the New Labour project Blair started as PM when he abolished most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords and created the Scottish Parliament and Welsh, Northern Irish and London Assemblies
If you remember John Prescott, as minister for the regions, after the north-east, its own assembly and in a referendum, it was turned down, if I recall correctly, 85 to 15.
Yes, hence Starmer would push through elected regional assemblies without referendum this time from the North East of England to the South East
Is Essex big enough to be a region on its own or would we be combined with East Anglia? Or perhaps with Hertfordshire?
Essex would be combined with East Anglia and Hertfordshire to form an Eastern region Regional Assembly
What about Cambridgeshire?
Or Huntingdonshire?
Or the Soke of Peterborough?
(My take is that there are lots of things that could/should be devolved from Westminster. England is too big get the benefits from that, and many counties are a bit too small. Administrative Regions as we have them are unloved and unlovely, but voluntary groupings of counties could be sorted in a day or so, if we wanted. I'd still start with the ITV / BBC local news regions as a starting point. Probably before the Oxford and Cambridge programmes were cut.)
It is Treasury “wisdom” that many counties are too small to devolve to.
I call bollocks on that. It is easy to point to successful entities around the world that subvert that idea, from Rhode Island to Iceland and the Australian Capital Territory.
My preferred model is to devolve to the “counties and metros”, which looking at England alone, creates about 50 sub-national units.
In that model, Huntingdonshire steps up as a county. I would leave the Soke as a city/district of Northants to which it properly belongs.
Very much most of what we want done at a sub-national level could operate on this basis.
You have to wonder which 1973 counties, or even current ones would be 'too poor, too wee, too stupid' to function as such units. It might not be that many. Cornwall and Cumbria, perhaps. Rutland and Herefordshire of current counties. But some, like Kent, Sussex, Essex, Staffordshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire would be a fair match certainly for Wales and Northern Ireland and arguably for Scotland in terms of population and economic importance.
It does rather break down when you consider how badly many counties have been run - but then Stormont and Y Bae are hardly an advert for devolution but nobody's seriously suggesting abolition.
Depends a lot on what responsibilities and powers are being devolved. After all, right now, county councils largely have responsibility (e.g. social care) without power. As Sir Humphrey put it, the prerogative of the eunuch.
County Councils and larger unitaries (such as London Boroughs, Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham) are businesses with budgets of excess of one billion per annum.
Yet Whitehall rules them with an incredibly tight leash - Councils have no control over how much tax they can raise, or on what they can spend their money. They are given responsibilities without adequate resources (public health) and led much of the visible public response to Covid from building temporary mortuaries to providing food for those forced to shelter. In addition, they are told when and how Councillors are elected.
Councils are forced to bid for targeted packets of money from the Treasury often having to complete convoluted business cases for "approval" by Whitehall as well as having to provide vast amounts of information to central Government.
I'm not suggesting a free-for-all - there is a place for central coordination but the current heavily centralised system supported by consecutive Conservative and Labour Governments is no longer fit for purpose. If Newham or Elmbridge want to elect councillors using PR, why shouldn't they? If a Council wants to raise its Council Tax by 10%, let it consult the local electorate. There are plenty of responsibilities which belong much closer to the people than either Whitehall or Westminster.
The problem is that councils have frequently shown their complete inability to run their operations and finances.
This is because they have been neutered, so they don’t attract high calibre people. It is also the case that they were neutered in attempt to prevent such disasters. The cure is the disease.
(Cheeky answer) So when is Westminster being shut down?
(Less cheeky answer) FPTP, with its tendency for one party states at local level, isn't helpful here.
The other thing that doesn't help is how little day-to-day media scrutiny councils get. In part because local press and radio have shrivelled to a shrivelled up thing in many places.
Yes it's boring, yes there's not much in it, but go and buy your local paper, people.
While I'm less convinced of the suitability of PR for Westminster with time I'm more convinced of its value at local level.
I cite my borough, Newham, as a perfect example. At least the Greens won two seats in May 2022 albeit from 17% of the vote. The Conservatives got 14% of the vote and nothing - Labour got 61.5% of the vote and 64 seats.
I'm not disputing Labour's right to run the Council but 64 out of 66 is ridiculous - Labour should have 41 seats, the Greens 11, Conservatives 9 and others 5. Labour would still have a majority of 16 but other voices would be heard - Green voices, Conservative voices and democracy benefits from plurality - Councils benefit from hearing a plural range of opinions, local democracy benefits if everyone feels their voice is being made and heard.
Indeed and Labour got 13% of the vote in Epping Forest last May too but not a single Councillor (albeit I suspect they may elect 1 or 2 in May)
Have ordered Starlink. Will be interesting to see if it makes a rapid improvement or if its meh enough to be sent back for a refund...
I had it at my place in France before I sold it and it was very good. I wouldn't have it now because Elon is a fucking shitlord.
Elon is Hank Scorpio. But what are we going to do? Boycott Amazon because Bezos is also a fucking shitlord? I have a very simple policy which is to ignore the machinations of business leaders and artists. That way I don't have to cancel JK Rowling or Michael Jackson or boycott Starlink or do some other pointless shit that doesn't impact the supposed Bad Guys but impacts me quite a lot.
I used to work for Nestle. Some leftie friends would recoil in horror and state firmly that they boycott us. "Great! And do you know how much impact that has on the business? None at all..."
Presumably though, you working for them did have an impact on the business. That was nice. My Mum was in Madagascar in the 70's working on nutrition, and Nestle had convinced all the young mothers to purchase their filthy tinned milk because they said it was better than breast milk.
They're the evil empire. Then again, me working for a UK business division in the 2000s has sod all to do with an African division in the 1970s. And opting to boycott KitKat in 2023 does literally nothing either to what happened in he 70s or elsewhere in the world or to the bit of Nestle that makes KitKats in 2023.
And yes. My conscience is perfectly intact thanks.
After standing up against expansionist, authoritarian regimes, a party pledging to break up the big monopolies would be my second voting issue.
I've given the post a like though there are two little problems: 1. We can't break up global monopolies. They simply base themselves somewhere else. 2. Which means do do the post-Thatcher settlement - breaking up and selling off UK companies so that what little is left is owned by someone else.
Which also likely leads to RefUK representatives in Parliament and an elected Senate willing to block legislation from the House of Commons
Surely it is democratic for all views to be represented. If RefUK, or other small parties gain representation, some people, who currently feel unrepresented, will be included. It may not be to the long term advantage of the small parties for voters to see them in action. For example, Scottish Green policies have been shown up to be impractical and badly thought out.
Woukd be interesting to have a poll on Isabelle Oakshott and what she did. Frankly, I hopes she never gets a gig again. Journalists have always been held in low esteem. Oakshott just drags the profession closer to.the gutter.
It’s pretty shocking.
It’s always fun to embarrass Hancock but she was given this information for a specific purpose and under an NDA.
She has clearly demonstrated that she simply cannot be trusted
you got your panties in a bunch luv, the sheer horror of her perfidy is breathtaking. She Outwitted and outed a turnip headed clown.
The obvious thing to say about this is how would you feel if you had all your personal and business emails and messages gone through, and released in a manner, and with a commentary, designed to make you look bad?
If I was as rotten to the core as Hancock who has been hoist by his own petard, then she has done the public a service and deserves a medal. The weasel has such a high opinion of himself and is so stupid he handed them over, Nothing is too bad for the odious little creep.
Don't put it in writing. They can't leak your WhatsApp messages if you didn't sit there typing the bad shit in the first place. As for passing them over to Oakeshott, would have been more secure had he commissioned Led By Donkeys to write his book. What a moron! Oakeshott FFS - she's the primordial slime we evolved from.
That's a really naïve position to take. What is 'bad shit' when you are facing a situation like Covid, and having to make decisions? *Whatever* he wrote would be pulled apart by one faction or the other, especially in such partial interpretations as this 'journalist' and the Telegraph is giving them.
If you believe in honesty and democracy, you should be arguing exactly the opposite: for everyone with any power to put their decisions and thinking in writing.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
An elected Upper House, on any basis whatsoever, is a profound and radical departure from the current system.
It would certainly set up a jostle for power between the two, with both appealing to its own legitimacy.
I’m against. But get rid of the hereditaries, and reform appointments.
PS Sorry to hear about your work issues. I think we can all relate. Lucky you have an understanding family.
1. Sunak knew that Eat out to spread Covid was a stupid idea, but didn't care that more people would catch Covid and die as a result.
2. Bozo is innumerate.
On 1, I was saying this at the time, as were many others. On 2, I think we already knew this.
On Eat Covid to Catch Covid, it had the same impact on the industry as giving someone crack cocaine. A brief buzz, followed immediately by a crashing decline. They could have found other ways to keep hospitality afloat which actually kept hospitality afloat without spreading the pox.
Probably yes. However we still didn’t have a vaccine in summer 2020. If we knew for sure it was coming, we could have just kept things shut and paid for it. But we didn’t, and eat our to help out was part of trying to live with covid with mitigations, but without either (a) widespread disease acquired immunity or (b) vaccination.
Far too many people just know what we should have done, but a lot of it is based on hindsight.
Of course we knew that a vaccine was coming. Just about every pharma company in the world was busy working on it. The correct course of action would have been to hunker down until the vulnerable groups were protected. We'd done the hard part, getting through the first wave. Instead of keeping things that way the government (Sunak) devised a scheme that almost seems to have been devised specifically to bring on a second wave.
That’s incorrect. We knew we were trying to produce viable vaccines, not how effective they would be, nor how soon available.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
My view on this is informed by two contentions.
1. Democracy is about a lot more than simply voting in elections. The people who advocate simply abolishing the Lords, or replacing it with an elected Senate* are, I think, guilty of placing too much emphasis on seeing democracy = voting, and therefore, more voting = more democracy.
2. What democracy is more fundamentally about, is finding ways to peacefully resolve disputes. You can see that our current set-up does this somewhat poorly, by the way in which it dealt with the vote to leave the EU.
Prior to the 1911 Parliament Act, the division between Lords and Commons allowed Parliament to resolve disputes between two different sets of interests - those of the Lords and the Commons. But since then, we've almost had a unicameral system, as the Lords has been repeatedly weakened to present less of an impediment to the Commons, which represents, most of the time, the will of the largest plurality of the electorate, not particularly giving voice to the divisions within that electorate.
So I believe that we can use our institutions to more easily resolve the conflicts between different sections of society, if we are prepared to use more flexible franchises to elect at least one of the chambers. And, in some respects, this would be to return to the pre-1911 constitutional position, but updated to reflect modern society.
* I am increasingly coming to the view that anyone who suggests replacing the House of Lords with a Senate hasn't thought about the issue properly, otherwise they wouldn't use such a boring name for the second chamber. Similarly, I'd much prefer if the UK Supreme Court had a more distinctive name. Supreme Court is just so dull.
The reason the 1911 Act was needed is because the reactionary Lords was reacting in naked self interest to put their own finances ahead of the needs of the nation. It was not about conflict resolution but an undemocratic minority obstructing everything, similar to the modern US Senate.
I didn't say the 1911 Act was a mistake, but it arguably signalled that the time for landed interests to be explicitly represented in the legislature had passed, and Britain would have been better served by a new second chamber at that time that represented an interest group that it would have been useful to have explicitly represented.
Being in their own words 'somewhere near the middle of the pack' on tax at the moment rather than low tax is not so bad as the financial markets collapsing sterling due to the huge tax cuts for corporations under Truss and Kwarteng which were not matched with spending cuts and expanded the deficit
Tory governments, eh? Watchagonna do?
Sunak and Hunt are running a Tory government, Truss was effectively running the UK's first Libertarian government not a Tory government (indeed according to the Times today Truss even wanted to abolish the remaining hereditary peers!)
Gosh, how awful, wanting to abolish hereditary peers. Shocked to the core that we don't want Government by people whose very distant ancestors proved their ability of being better at killing people than others.
Yes but you are a Liberal not a Tory, Tories support the hereditary principle.
Hereditaries families have a vested interest in the land, their families having managed much of the land in England on their estates for generations
This Tory finds the hereditory principle impossible to argue for.
Then by definition you are not a Tory then, just a free marketeer who is pro Brexit within the Conservative Party.
Inheritance and the monarchy also work on the hereditary principle
Of course I'm a Tory. I've pounded the pavements for them for nearly half a century to get councillors and MPs elected. I don't reall doing so for any Peers of the Realm....
Your view of the Conservative Party is Victorian, at best. It is a very broad church indeed, as evidenced that it still permits itself to include you.
If you oppose hereditaries you aren't a Tory. You might be a member and activist for the Conservative Party which is a combination of Tories, those who would have been free market Liberals and Peelites in the 19th century like you and now Brexiteers. However being a supporter of and voter for the Conservative Party doesn't automatically make you a Tory
That’s very much a case of No True Scotsman.
I know it's very old-fashioned but I can't say I've ever been bothered by the hereditaries.
I'd far rather have an ancient English family, who's tied to the land and people, as a voice of rural and community interest in Parliament than a corrupt Russian or Arab oligarch who's bought a peerage.
Interesting that you mention land. One possible approach to electing the Lords on a different basis to the Commons, would be to create constituencies of equal-area for the Lords. 500 Lords at just under 190 square miles for each Lordship constituency. Scotland would get about one-third of the Lords, England a bit more than half, Wales just under a tenth and Northern Ireland a bit more than a twentieth.
I feel like the point of having two chambers is so that they can represent different interests, and so we could set it up with a House of the Old and the House of the Young, or a House of Men and a House of Women, or a House for rural areas and a House for urban areas, or even a House for net Taxpayers, and a House for everyone else.
We could be much more imaginative.
I like that idea.
As a conservative (small c), I value stability and tradition and want to respect the heritage of our institutions, and work with its grain rather than abolish it.
My view on this is informed by two contentions.
1. Democracy is about a lot more than simply voting in elections. The people who advocate simply abolishing the Lords, or replacing it with an elected Senate* are, I think, guilty of placing too much emphasis on seeing democracy = voting, and therefore, more voting = more democracy.
2. What democracy is more fundamentally about, is finding ways to peacefully resolve disputes. You can see that our current set-up does this somewhat poorly, by the way in which it dealt with the vote to leave the EU.
Prior to the 1911 Parliament Act, the division between Lords and Commons allowed Parliament to resolve disputes between two different sets of interests - those of the Lords and the Commons. But since then, we've almost had a unicameral system, as the Lords has been repeatedly weakened to present less of an impediment to the Commons, which represents, most of the time, the will of the largest plurality of the electorate, not particularly giving voice to the divisions within that electorate.
So I believe that we can use our institutions to more easily resolve the conflicts between different sections of society, if we are prepared to use more flexible franchises to elect at least one of the chambers. And, in some respects, this would be to return to the pre-1911 constitutional position, but updated to reflect modern society.
* I am increasingly coming to the view that anyone who suggests replacing the House of Lords with a Senate hasn't thought about the issue properly, otherwise they wouldn't use such a boring name for the second chamber. Similarly, I'd much prefer if the UK Supreme Court had a more distinctive name. Supreme Court is just so dull.
By the way, whoever on here recommended the musical version of War of the Worlds -narrated by Richard Burton - thank you.
Absolutely bloody brilliant.
I have been listening to it, and enjoying it, all weekend with my bose headphones and I even bought the original H.G Wells paperback at Waterstones yesterday as well.
Loving it. Amazing.
I think that was me. Burton's narration is just superb.
I very much hope it has got you in better humour. You have not quite been yourself of late.
Thank you.
Extremely stressed at work. Weeks feel like 7-8 days and weekends 1 day. Become very angry and snappy. Wife made an intervention last night.
We'll see about whether current job works out. I'll give it another 6 months.
No job is worth that, it is just a job , you do your best and if tehy don't like then two's up to them just go elsewhere.
Comments
I cite my borough, Newham, as a perfect example. At least the Greens won two seats in May 2022 albeit from 17% of the vote. The Conservatives got 14% of the vote and nothing - Labour got 61.5% of the vote and 64 seats.
I'm not disputing Labour's right to run the Council but 64 out of 66 is ridiculous - Labour should have 41 seats, the Greens 11, Conservatives 9 and others 5. Labour would still have a majority of 16 but other voices would be heard - Green voices, Conservative voices and democracy benefits from plurality - Councils benefit from hearing a plural range of opinions, local democracy benefits if everyone feels their voice is being made and heard.
Westminster controls the purse strings so ruthlessly that it can effectively immiserate dissenting provinces.
The Union, inside England as much as for the Nations, needs to provide a level of solidarity funding. But beyond that, we need to unlock British local government from its current death grip.
There are probably three or four things the country needs to do if it wants to arrest its current entrenched decline.
This is one of them.
(The others are planning reform, fixing a bias against capital investment, various supply side reforms, export promotion, and improving trading links with our nearest neighbours).
If your job is making you that unhappy and frustrated it ain’t worth it. For you or your family
NEW THREAD
1. We can't break up global monopolies. They simply base themselves somewhere else.
2. Which means do do the post-Thatcher settlement - breaking up and selling off UK companies so that what little is left is owned by someone else.
If you believe in honesty and democracy, you should be arguing exactly the opposite: for everyone with any power to put their decisions and thinking in writing.
It would certainly set up a jostle for power between the two, with both appealing to its own legitimacy.
I’m against.
But get rid of the hereditaries, and reform appointments.
PS Sorry to hear about your work issues.
I think we can all relate. Lucky you have an understanding family.
At the time many said it would be years, if ever.
To say anything else is hindsight.