Eric Pickles is a Tory, and a member of the Coalition Government, and so one would think no friend of Wessex. Yet this weekend, his department flew the Wyvern outside its head office, Eland House in London, to mark St Ealdhelm's Day, the 25th of May. View the photographic proof.
Pickles' politics apart, he has done good work for all who value our traditional shire and regional identities. Having begun by flying county flags outside his office, the Communities Secretary has now stepped up a gear by offering regions the chance to have their flags flown too.
And so the flag of Wessex flew at the heart of centralised government, a bright flame of hope for all who wish to see that system consigned to history. We welcome all cultural initiatives that help to put Wessex on the map, but that Wessex, for us, is not the dead stuff of history. The best days of Wessex are yet to come, when the Wyvern flies above the first Witan of a free folk to gather in nigh on a thousand years, with a thousand years of misrule to correct. What then will be its priorities?
Showing posts with label Witan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Witan. Show all posts
Monday, May 27, 2013
Friday, August 10, 2012
Changing Tack
It’s good news that Tory misgivings over half-baked proposals for Lords reform may now mean a LibDem veto over proposed changes to constituency boundaries. In our view, MPs, if we really have to have them, must represent the will of communities, not arbitrary blocks of territory filled with numbers.
The LibDem proposals for the Lords were so bad that one wonders where all that party’s brains have gone. It used to be home to clever, creative thinkers, who would never have suggested an elected chamber where the members are free to get up to whatever mischief they fancy for 15 years with no possibility of ever facing the electorate’s wrath. Elected, moreover, to represent those ghastly Prescott zones the Coalition pretends not to believe in.
We commend our own proposals for a Wessex Witan, first published in 1982, which were for a two-chamber regional legislature of Assembly and Senate. The balance of argument in favour of bi-cameralism in Wessex, we explained, is based on long-standing usage in British constitutional practice, on the extra manpower made available for committee work, and on the possibility it offers for the direct representation of local authorities, academic institutions and the professions. The devolved Parliament of Northern Ireland (1922-72) comprised a House of Commons and a Senate but its successor, the Northern Ireland Assembly, is uni-cameral. So too are the Scottish Parliament and the London and Welsh assemblies.
The idea that an elected second chamber at Westminster is ‘a good thing’ has taken off to the point where it’s now considered rude to ask why. Having more politicians must mean more democracy, mustn’t it? Well, no. It depends what they do, and especially whether they cancel each other out, so that all we get is noise. The first duty of a good legislature is to make good laws. And for that to happen, it needs to be composed of the best folk to make those laws. Quality matters. That is why campaigns to make our elected bodies more ‘representative’ in a purely statistical sense are so stupid. As well as being insulting to the voters by demanding the screening and filtering of the candidates for whom they’re allowed to vote. Let’s have more women, more minorities, more disadvantaged. Yes, if they’re the best candidates for public office. And if they’re not, then let’s not have them. Allow the voters to decide.
Which, in broad terms, is fortunately how those responsible for executive decisions are still elected. But there is more to organisation than executive decisions. Just as in left/right brain theory, so organisation has its own executive/sensory nexus. Current decision-making needs to be shadowed by other thinking focused on monitoring and review, research and longer-term development. Short electoral cycles are notoriously poor at delivering that. They’re all about advantage and cover-up. Posterity doesn’t have the vote.
A non-elected second chamber can help redress the balance, provided that those who comprise it are there on merit and widely respected for their expert knowledge and experience. Its role isn’t to stop bad laws, but to query them. It isn’t to pick a fight with the first chamber, but to remind it of the bigger picture. It isn’t to govern, but to scan the horizon.
You can have politics. Or you can have wisdom. Ideally, if we can manage it, we need both. Clegg’s proposals guaranteed more of the first and less of the second. And all the while they reinforce the crazy idea that only by gathering folk up and taking them to London can good self-rule be achieved. Successful constitutional reform requires more searching questions about what the Lords is for. But first there must be an answer to the question of what Parliament itself adds to our quality of life in Wessex that we ourselves could not more satisfactorily achieve by other means.
The LibDem proposals for the Lords were so bad that one wonders where all that party’s brains have gone. It used to be home to clever, creative thinkers, who would never have suggested an elected chamber where the members are free to get up to whatever mischief they fancy for 15 years with no possibility of ever facing the electorate’s wrath. Elected, moreover, to represent those ghastly Prescott zones the Coalition pretends not to believe in.
We commend our own proposals for a Wessex Witan, first published in 1982, which were for a two-chamber regional legislature of Assembly and Senate. The balance of argument in favour of bi-cameralism in Wessex, we explained, is based on long-standing usage in British constitutional practice, on the extra manpower made available for committee work, and on the possibility it offers for the direct representation of local authorities, academic institutions and the professions. The devolved Parliament of Northern Ireland (1922-72) comprised a House of Commons and a Senate but its successor, the Northern Ireland Assembly, is uni-cameral. So too are the Scottish Parliament and the London and Welsh assemblies.
The idea that an elected second chamber at Westminster is ‘a good thing’ has taken off to the point where it’s now considered rude to ask why. Having more politicians must mean more democracy, mustn’t it? Well, no. It depends what they do, and especially whether they cancel each other out, so that all we get is noise. The first duty of a good legislature is to make good laws. And for that to happen, it needs to be composed of the best folk to make those laws. Quality matters. That is why campaigns to make our elected bodies more ‘representative’ in a purely statistical sense are so stupid. As well as being insulting to the voters by demanding the screening and filtering of the candidates for whom they’re allowed to vote. Let’s have more women, more minorities, more disadvantaged. Yes, if they’re the best candidates for public office. And if they’re not, then let’s not have them. Allow the voters to decide.
Which, in broad terms, is fortunately how those responsible for executive decisions are still elected. But there is more to organisation than executive decisions. Just as in left/right brain theory, so organisation has its own executive/sensory nexus. Current decision-making needs to be shadowed by other thinking focused on monitoring and review, research and longer-term development. Short electoral cycles are notoriously poor at delivering that. They’re all about advantage and cover-up. Posterity doesn’t have the vote.
A non-elected second chamber can help redress the balance, provided that those who comprise it are there on merit and widely respected for their expert knowledge and experience. Its role isn’t to stop bad laws, but to query them. It isn’t to pick a fight with the first chamber, but to remind it of the bigger picture. It isn’t to govern, but to scan the horizon.
You can have politics. Or you can have wisdom. Ideally, if we can manage it, we need both. Clegg’s proposals guaranteed more of the first and less of the second. And all the while they reinforce the crazy idea that only by gathering folk up and taking them to London can good self-rule be achieved. Successful constitutional reform requires more searching questions about what the Lords is for. But first there must be an answer to the question of what Parliament itself adds to our quality of life in Wessex that we ourselves could not more satisfactorily achieve by other means.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Localism, R.I.P.
We have long been critical of the Coalition’s localism agenda. Not because we disagree with it in principle. Far from it. We would devolve power further and faster, and instead of dismantling those anti-democratic regional institutions we would democratise them in the form of a Wessex Parliament – the ‘Witan’ – an accountable voice for the region able to mount an effective challenge to Whitehall bullying.
We disagree with the Coalition’s plan because we don’t believe a word of it. It was always going to be a one-way street. (For example, giving communities the power to allow more housing than the local council wished to see but not less.) Now we are hearing phrases like ‘guided localism’ to describe what the Coalition really wants. Nick Raynsford, a former Labour minister, said that “for all that ministers want to talk the localism talk, they find it hard to resist interfering in local decision-making when it suits their wider public relations agenda”. And as a former Labour minister, Raynsford knows about that temptation, all too well.
The Localism Bill is still making its way through the Commons but George Osborne admitted this month that the Tories, like Labour, may promise people-power but all they will deliver is profit-power. What he is reported to be saying is that he wants to make it much easier for companies to obtain planning consent for new projects – even if they go against the wishes of local residents. When this sort of thing happens in China there’s an almighty stink about human rights violations. When it happens here, protesters are labelled ‘deficit deniers’ and plainly told that there’s no alternative to rebooting the same failed system that got us where we are.
There you have it. Did you vote for these crooks? Will you be doing it again? And again? And again?
We disagree with the Coalition’s plan because we don’t believe a word of it. It was always going to be a one-way street. (For example, giving communities the power to allow more housing than the local council wished to see but not less.) Now we are hearing phrases like ‘guided localism’ to describe what the Coalition really wants. Nick Raynsford, a former Labour minister, said that “for all that ministers want to talk the localism talk, they find it hard to resist interfering in local decision-making when it suits their wider public relations agenda”. And as a former Labour minister, Raynsford knows about that temptation, all too well.
The Localism Bill is still making its way through the Commons but George Osborne admitted this month that the Tories, like Labour, may promise people-power but all they will deliver is profit-power. What he is reported to be saying is that he wants to make it much easier for companies to obtain planning consent for new projects – even if they go against the wishes of local residents. When this sort of thing happens in China there’s an almighty stink about human rights violations. When it happens here, protesters are labelled ‘deficit deniers’ and plainly told that there’s no alternative to rebooting the same failed system that got us where we are.
There you have it. Did you vote for these crooks? Will you be doing it again? And again? And again?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
