In Pakistan, the Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of the Prime Minister on corruption charges. Our own top politicians could do with being arrested, to face far more serious allegations of disturbing the peace of the world.
And not just the politicians. One of the questions we continue to pose is ‘do we or do we not have an environmental crisis?’ If we don’t, then it’s business as usual. If we do, then the City of London needs to be shut down at once and everyone from the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Governor of the Bank of England should be in jail awaiting trial for ecocide.
In the midst of the fake ‘economic’ crisis we’re told to worship the wealth creators who’ll see us through. But that would be sloppy accounting, the oxymoronic ‘sustainable development’. You cannot generate additional wealth without deducting resources from nature. It’s a relentlessly double-entry system. The wealth creators are also the nature destroyers.
And they’re in charge. Non-commercial values are being systematically sidelined. One example of that has emerged from the Coalition’s efforts to dismantle the previous administration’s efforts at regional planning. We hold no brief for the Regional Strategies for the ‘South West’ and ‘South East’. Not only was the geography hopelessly wrong but the unelected regional assemblies set up by Blair to draft these plans were abolished by Brown because – can you believe it? – they took too balanced a view. Brown wanted growth über alles. None of that cuddly stuff. But in rejecting the Regional Strategies, the Coalition has done more than take a wrong turn away from a more democratic regional solution.
Just what it has done is apparent from the Strategic Environmental Assessment reports it has commissioned to investigate the consequences of abolishing the eight Regional Strategies outside London. AMEC, the consultants preparing the documentation for the ‘South West’, make plain what these consequences are. Localism is no barrier to growth, provided the right incentives (bribes like the New Homes Bonus) are in place. What is lost in scrapping the regional tier is everything else:
“A number of issues are arguably more efficiently and effectively addressed across wider areas than local authority boundaries, in particular major infrastructure provision, biodiversity planning, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and renewable energy. Whilst the duty to co-operate in principle and practice could well address a wide range of strategic issues, there is uncertainty as to how this might work in the short term, both by topic and geographically. For example, securing agreement on housing and employment levels and distribution could be easier (although not universally so) at sub-regional scales than might strategic infrastructure provision on the same or wider scale. Some issues such as renewable energy, biodiversity enhancement or landscape conservation, which typically benefit from being planned at a wider geographical scale, could be ignored or their potential not realised.”
As we feared then, the anti-regionalism of Cameron and Clegg both denies a voice to non-commercial values and hampers the process of adapting to the irreversible environmental changes that the globalists' love of money is imposing upon us all.
Showing posts with label Justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Justice. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Working for Wessex
Frank Field is the Labour MP for Birkenhead, in Cheshire. Though Labour is his label, he is no mere mouthpiece. The unique depth of his knowledge of matters relating to welfare reform is widely respected across party lines. So when he joined the panel for BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? on Friday night, interesting things were bound to happen.
He told a story about alienated youth in Birkenhead. Approached by some of his out-of-work constituents, he discovered that after more than a decade of taxpayer-funded schooling they still could not read or write. They wanted to work, but not for less than £300 a week. This he questioned, pointing out their lack of qualifications for such employment. And was asked in reply, “So you’d make us take immigrant jobs, would you?”
Field’s anecdote is troubling not so much in terms of its content as in terms of the political system’s failure to grapple with the issues it raises. Can we not organise things better than this? Must we see our countryside disappear beneath urban sprawl because we’d rather import others to do the jobs haughty youngsters disdain to do than challenge them a bit more forcefully?
Of course we can do better. If we are prepared to confront the Left’s dogma that no distinction can ever be drawn between the deserving and the undeserving poor, that the poor are always and everywhere ‘victims’ of ‘the system’. An older Left would have changed the system; today’s just theorises about it and has no practical solutions to offer. It must be right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving poor, just as it’s right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving rich. There are three ways to tackle the latter problem. One is smarter taxation, that targets inherited wealth and unearned income, and tackles evasion and avoidance alike. Another is smarter regulation, that roots out unscrupulous behaviour that harms the environment and society. And the third is smarter public spending, that cuts out things that are of no benefit to us but line the pockets of the contractors who organise them. The defence and foreign aid budgets for a start would raise £45 billion.
But the real big spender is welfare. Excluding State pensions but including child benefit, this amounts to £97 billion a year. (Then add £30 billion for personal tax credits, which are welfare in all but name.) Can we honestly say that every penny is well spent? No? Then what are we to do about that?
As ever, the problem is one of over-centralisation. Once, welfare was organised at parish level. Later it was organised at borough or county level. Only in 1948 was it taken over by the central State. Centralisation has both plus and minus points. An undeniable plus is that the burden of welfare is spread evenly. Centralisation made sense to the generation that had been through the Great Depression. Communities suffering over 50% unemployment had to fund welfare by taxing those few still in work, depressing the local economy even further. But centralisation also means bureaucratisation. Rules and entitlements take the place of discretion and incentives. The system costs more to administer and its unconditional nature means that idle labour, a community’s prime asset, goes to waste.
Suppose parishes were put in charge. To avoid the pitfalls of the Poor Law, the money could still be raised centrally, or perhaps regionally, and allocated annually, on a per capita basis, as a block grant to each parish or town council. In larger urban areas without parishes, ward committees of the borough or city council could take on the same role. The key point is that there should be interaction at a human level between the poor and the politicians, so that each side understands the constraints faced by the other. If we divide £127 billion by the UK population (63,182,000) then a parish with 500 inhabitants would have £1 million to spend each year as it saw fit.
The money could be used to provide unemployed residents with a life of luxury. Or it could be made conditional on them doing something. It could pay for training or apprenticeships, or remedial education. It could pay for work on environmental projects. No-one knows the local area better than its parish councillors. What needs doing? Drainage clearance? Path mending? Hedge laying? Tree planting? Repair of derelict buildings? Let us look beyond artificial limits. Should only public assets be included? We don’t want local businesses using the system to get free labour but what if the cost were to be entered as a land charge against their premises, to be recovered if and when the premises are sold? Can district or county councils provide plant and materials to enable work to be carried out that would entail a long wait were it to be done on a more professional basis? What about projects of more than local importance, such as clearing old trackbeds for the re-opening of rural railways? Site preparation works for new housing or community buildings?
Local control of funds would turn the problem of unemployment into a limitless opportunity. Decision-making would move from bureaucrats with no motive to look outside the box to community leaders with good cause to ask searching questions and demand credible answers. One other consequence would be a different kind of parish councillor: real power would attract the most highly motivated individuals to stand for election rather than stand back.
A vision of empowered parishes shouldn’t stop at welfare-to-work. Parish councils should be the housing management authorities for their areas, responsible for allocating all social housing as it falls vacant. Village after village is being scarred by little developments of new ‘affordable’ housing, even where the village has plenty of social housing already. The problem is that existing housing is allocated at district level on the basis of assessed need, meaning that villagers cannot be housed because what housing there is gets given to townies in distress. So more housing, this time with local occupancy conditions attached, gets built to overcome that problem. It’s about time towns were made to solve their own housing issues within their own boundaries and only look to villages for help if the villages have spare room.
And then there’s local justice, which is in a sorry state. The continuing role of JPs is under pressure. At one end of the spectrum, fewer cases are coming to court as police get to issue on-the-spot fines (contrary to the spirit of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which requires any punishment to be imposed by a court). At the other, district judges (what used to be called stipendiary magistrates) are muscling in on the more complex cases. Magistrates’ courts are being closed, benches amalgamated. Local justice is becoming less and less local, with savings for the public purse being made at the cost of increasing inconvenience for defendants and witnesses who have to find their way to distant venues.
So why not establish parish or ward courts, made up of the local councillors, to deal with all those petty civil and criminal issues that touch upon the smooth functioning of the neighbourhood? Breach of the peace, vandalism, noise and public health, problem family matters, truancy, empty properties, non-payment of rent, eviction notices, planning enforcement. Lawyers would hate it. They’d protest about the potential for victimisation, inconsistent standards, the need to separate the executive from the judiciary. But against this must be argued the gain to the community in terms of the resurrection of responsibility and the sheer economy in speed and cost for all involved. We have a top-heavy society, weighed down with process, and we need to think radically about how best to simplify it.
Don’t expect the Coalition to do any of that, despite their penchant for tinkering at the margins of welfare policy. Don’t expect them to turn the political pyramid the right way up. Last month, the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles castigated parish councils for a 3% rise in their spending plans. Why? That’s precisely what’s needed, matched by a much, much more than 3% reduction in the spending plans of Pickles’ own bloated, London-obsessed government. Parishes across Wessex should be demanding: ‘give us our money back and we’ll do an incomparably better job than you’.
He told a story about alienated youth in Birkenhead. Approached by some of his out-of-work constituents, he discovered that after more than a decade of taxpayer-funded schooling they still could not read or write. They wanted to work, but not for less than £300 a week. This he questioned, pointing out their lack of qualifications for such employment. And was asked in reply, “So you’d make us take immigrant jobs, would you?”
Field’s anecdote is troubling not so much in terms of its content as in terms of the political system’s failure to grapple with the issues it raises. Can we not organise things better than this? Must we see our countryside disappear beneath urban sprawl because we’d rather import others to do the jobs haughty youngsters disdain to do than challenge them a bit more forcefully?
Of course we can do better. If we are prepared to confront the Left’s dogma that no distinction can ever be drawn between the deserving and the undeserving poor, that the poor are always and everywhere ‘victims’ of ‘the system’. An older Left would have changed the system; today’s just theorises about it and has no practical solutions to offer. It must be right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving poor, just as it’s right to distinguish the deserving and the undeserving rich. There are three ways to tackle the latter problem. One is smarter taxation, that targets inherited wealth and unearned income, and tackles evasion and avoidance alike. Another is smarter regulation, that roots out unscrupulous behaviour that harms the environment and society. And the third is smarter public spending, that cuts out things that are of no benefit to us but line the pockets of the contractors who organise them. The defence and foreign aid budgets for a start would raise £45 billion.
But the real big spender is welfare. Excluding State pensions but including child benefit, this amounts to £97 billion a year. (Then add £30 billion for personal tax credits, which are welfare in all but name.) Can we honestly say that every penny is well spent? No? Then what are we to do about that?
As ever, the problem is one of over-centralisation. Once, welfare was organised at parish level. Later it was organised at borough or county level. Only in 1948 was it taken over by the central State. Centralisation has both plus and minus points. An undeniable plus is that the burden of welfare is spread evenly. Centralisation made sense to the generation that had been through the Great Depression. Communities suffering over 50% unemployment had to fund welfare by taxing those few still in work, depressing the local economy even further. But centralisation also means bureaucratisation. Rules and entitlements take the place of discretion and incentives. The system costs more to administer and its unconditional nature means that idle labour, a community’s prime asset, goes to waste.
Suppose parishes were put in charge. To avoid the pitfalls of the Poor Law, the money could still be raised centrally, or perhaps regionally, and allocated annually, on a per capita basis, as a block grant to each parish or town council. In larger urban areas without parishes, ward committees of the borough or city council could take on the same role. The key point is that there should be interaction at a human level between the poor and the politicians, so that each side understands the constraints faced by the other. If we divide £127 billion by the UK population (63,182,000) then a parish with 500 inhabitants would have £1 million to spend each year as it saw fit.
The money could be used to provide unemployed residents with a life of luxury. Or it could be made conditional on them doing something. It could pay for training or apprenticeships, or remedial education. It could pay for work on environmental projects. No-one knows the local area better than its parish councillors. What needs doing? Drainage clearance? Path mending? Hedge laying? Tree planting? Repair of derelict buildings? Let us look beyond artificial limits. Should only public assets be included? We don’t want local businesses using the system to get free labour but what if the cost were to be entered as a land charge against their premises, to be recovered if and when the premises are sold? Can district or county councils provide plant and materials to enable work to be carried out that would entail a long wait were it to be done on a more professional basis? What about projects of more than local importance, such as clearing old trackbeds for the re-opening of rural railways? Site preparation works for new housing or community buildings?
Local control of funds would turn the problem of unemployment into a limitless opportunity. Decision-making would move from bureaucrats with no motive to look outside the box to community leaders with good cause to ask searching questions and demand credible answers. One other consequence would be a different kind of parish councillor: real power would attract the most highly motivated individuals to stand for election rather than stand back.
A vision of empowered parishes shouldn’t stop at welfare-to-work. Parish councils should be the housing management authorities for their areas, responsible for allocating all social housing as it falls vacant. Village after village is being scarred by little developments of new ‘affordable’ housing, even where the village has plenty of social housing already. The problem is that existing housing is allocated at district level on the basis of assessed need, meaning that villagers cannot be housed because what housing there is gets given to townies in distress. So more housing, this time with local occupancy conditions attached, gets built to overcome that problem. It’s about time towns were made to solve their own housing issues within their own boundaries and only look to villages for help if the villages have spare room.
And then there’s local justice, which is in a sorry state. The continuing role of JPs is under pressure. At one end of the spectrum, fewer cases are coming to court as police get to issue on-the-spot fines (contrary to the spirit of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which requires any punishment to be imposed by a court). At the other, district judges (what used to be called stipendiary magistrates) are muscling in on the more complex cases. Magistrates’ courts are being closed, benches amalgamated. Local justice is becoming less and less local, with savings for the public purse being made at the cost of increasing inconvenience for defendants and witnesses who have to find their way to distant venues.
So why not establish parish or ward courts, made up of the local councillors, to deal with all those petty civil and criminal issues that touch upon the smooth functioning of the neighbourhood? Breach of the peace, vandalism, noise and public health, problem family matters, truancy, empty properties, non-payment of rent, eviction notices, planning enforcement. Lawyers would hate it. They’d protest about the potential for victimisation, inconsistent standards, the need to separate the executive from the judiciary. But against this must be argued the gain to the community in terms of the resurrection of responsibility and the sheer economy in speed and cost for all involved. We have a top-heavy society, weighed down with process, and we need to think radically about how best to simplify it.
Don’t expect the Coalition to do any of that, despite their penchant for tinkering at the margins of welfare policy. Don’t expect them to turn the political pyramid the right way up. Last month, the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles castigated parish councils for a 3% rise in their spending plans. Why? That’s precisely what’s needed, matched by a much, much more than 3% reduction in the spending plans of Pickles’ own bloated, London-obsessed government. Parishes across Wessex should be demanding: ‘give us our money back and we’ll do an incomparably better job than you’.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Resentment & Resistance
BBC Radio 4 this morning picked at the dilemma facing the Coalition over planning. On the one hand are those concerned, genuinely or for electoral reasons, that our environment is being serially degraded by development and that something needs to be done about this. Handing control to local folk seems like a good start, though such ideals are always corrupted by whatever strings remain attached. On the other hand are those, led by the Chancellor, who insist that economic growth has to take priority, given the Government’s choice that it will place the bankers’ interest above all else. The bankers are winning, development is proceeding, as we would have expected. The City of London has always punched far above its weight in numbers because these are folk who know other folk who matter.
A government truthfully committed to localism would have been bolder by far. It would have started by abolishing the Planning Inspectorate, the agency that costs £45 million a year to run, the agency that sends Inspectors into our communities to over-turn the decisions of locally elected councils at the behest of the development industry. A mafia with briefcases. And if local democracy isn’t allowed to keep the developers out, where do locals turn next?
Next year will see the first elections for the post of Police & Crime Commissioner, or PCC. The plan is for there to be one for each local police force outside London, making seven for Wessex. (Two will be cross-border, taking in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall respectively.) The exact demarcation of powers between the PCC and the Chief Constable has yet to become clear, as have the rights of the Home Secretary to continue to interfere in local decisions. What is clear is the potential for these elections to result in PCCs publicly committed to using whatever discretion they do have to defend their communities instead of attacking them in the name of London-imposed laws. Developers who have obtained planning permission on appeal could discover that helping them remove squatters from their sites is no longer a police priority. In fact, we might even begin to see the first fair shoots of justice poking through. It has to start somewhere.
A government truthfully committed to localism would have been bolder by far. It would have started by abolishing the Planning Inspectorate, the agency that costs £45 million a year to run, the agency that sends Inspectors into our communities to over-turn the decisions of locally elected councils at the behest of the development industry. A mafia with briefcases. And if local democracy isn’t allowed to keep the developers out, where do locals turn next?
Next year will see the first elections for the post of Police & Crime Commissioner, or PCC. The plan is for there to be one for each local police force outside London, making seven for Wessex. (Two will be cross-border, taking in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall respectively.) The exact demarcation of powers between the PCC and the Chief Constable has yet to become clear, as have the rights of the Home Secretary to continue to interfere in local decisions. What is clear is the potential for these elections to result in PCCs publicly committed to using whatever discretion they do have to defend their communities instead of attacking them in the name of London-imposed laws. Developers who have obtained planning permission on appeal could discover that helping them remove squatters from their sites is no longer a police priority. In fact, we might even begin to see the first fair shoots of justice poking through. It has to start somewhere.
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