Wednesday 21 October 2009

Look At The Bigger Picture

Mark Reckons 'has a go' at open primaries and one gets the impression he believes that this is the only method available to bring about better government. Having said that, he does make one important point in this passage:

"What is does do however is allow people like David Cameron to look as if they are grasping the reform nettle and doing something about it. The truth is that Cameron wants to do as little as he thinks he can get away with whilst putting maximum spin on the paltry measures he has taken. It is clear that he will never implement any sort of radical political reform. In a way I can't really blame him. If he just sits tight and waits for a few more months, he will likely be Prime Minister with a decent (perhaps very large) majority and the chance to be Prime Minister for 5 years, possibly even a decade or more. He will not want to do anything that might introduce a more pluralist element into our politics and heaven forfend actually have to win the argument on something before being able to legislate on it."

From what I have read and heard David Cameron, like Brown and Clegg, no more wants devolution of power - due to his love of central control - than he wants another proverbial hole in his head! !

When considering devolution of power what does annoy me though is the concentration of discussion on Open Primaries, which were first proposed by Hannan and Carswell in their paper The Plan, as if this is the only method available. If national government only dealt with national affairs and left everything else - like fox hunting, smoking in pubs, alcohol abuse, crime & punishment, education, health care and the method of raising local funding, to name but a few - to local authorities it would immediately make people more interested in local government, whilst delivering the type of society in which local people wished to live.

This may well mean that different local areas had different local laws, but hey, how many local areas can you live in simultaneously?


2 comments:

Sue said...

God forbid, that would actually mean "democracy" and that would never do.. not under the EU!

They're all determined to centralise control and ride the gravy train from Brussels.

There are very few people that I trust in politics these days. I really don't understand what Dan Hannan is doing in the Conservative Party to be honest!

Anonymous said...

I agree entirely.

None of them can deliver sufficient localism for it to be worthy of the name - due to the EU.

The Tories know it, but they assume (probably correctly) that most people are not politically astute enough to pick that up.

Ditto, Sue.