Aha, now articles appear about a change to our democracy

Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian and Ed West in the Daily Telegraph, each with their own ideas on how to solve the Scottish question, not that either have thought the subject through – least of all, unfortunately, Ed West. Both appear to have written articles which follow the political ‘policy production method’ – resulting in half-arsed ideas; both of which ignore the ‘elephant in the room’, although Ed West does hint at it when he writes:

“So we have a situation where the main party in Scotland wants an independent Scotland, the main party in England, just as in 1707, has every reason to want an independent England, and the only party with a constituency in both doesn’t believe in nations at all but in super-states, universalism and diversity“.

Ed West does also, in fairness, take Jenkins’ idea further – but compounds the problem with the suggestion of Regional Parliaments, writing:

“If one state (the regions would have to be called that to placate the Scots and Welsh) wants to have variant policies on free schools, church schools or grammars, it can. If one state wishes to set up its own version of Ofsted and have inspections that drive teachers to insanity, or force them to use up more man-hours filling in forms than have been spent over the Israel/Palestine problem, that’s up to them. If they succeed, other states will imitate them; if they don’t, they won’t. The employment protection given to teachers – another problem with the system – could even be decided at state level.“

 Regional Parliaments? Don’t we have enough politicians already? In any event, regional parliaments would just be assisting the European Union with their regionalisation programme. Why have regional parliaments when the powers he suggests devolving could just as easily be devolved to counties – once of course we become a self-governing nation again, because there is little point in devolving power whilst policy is, in general, dictated by Bruxelles.

Ed West comes closest to the benefits of direct democracy when he writes:

“This is just one example of where devolution could introduce diversity (in the true, pre-PC sense) into our political system and take us away from the clunky statism that is currently such a failure. It could be the spur to drastically reducing the size of Commons, combating the mania for unnecessary laws. In turn central government could concentrate on the economy, foreign affairs, defence and maintaining the border – and because it would have so little else to do, it might actually take these issues seriously.“

On second thoughts, I may be being unkind to Ed West as I have the sneaking suspicion that he may have read this blog, that of IanPJ on Politics; and possibly taken a look at talkconstitution.net - and that he is still reading. When finished, one can but hope he will arrive at what is the most logical conclusion – that direct democracy does put the people back in charge and in so doing, curbs political power.

Just saying………

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