Turn Bankrupt Councils and Mayors back into Corporations
An Easy ‘Goal’ against Burnham
I’m often slightly offended on my future self’s behalf by how much energy I have put into ‘devolution’ as a cause to attack. I am depressingly aware it will be used to furnish bogus intellectual genealogies of Meritocracy to cope with the fact I came up with the Future Government of Mankind at 15.
Like drinking alcohol, I don’t know why I write about this topic; I do not enjoy it and its never been an academic interest of mine. Beyond jokes, I do not really have anything against the North of England or the West of England. The apocalyptic significance I saw within the Brown review has not been evidenced, yet. Perhaps, it is simply the hypocrisy. It is hard to convey how, more than any immigration, the idea ‘Britain is the world’s most centralised country’ is the unifying orthodoxy in Westminster with even the most dogged reformists bringing it up at one point or another.
There’s just something about the idea of ‘localism’ which offends my sensibilities. I inherently recoil from everything about it: the suspicion of ‘bureaucracy’, the spectre of ‘community’, the insistence that small is always best, Democracy, the phoney invention of local identities, the massive corruption – it is like a fusion of the tabloid anti-elitism of the Right and the redistributive politics of the Left. Similarly, localism attacks the good bits of every other ideology: the ruthless Thatcherite developer and the Whitehall civil servant of Mr. Wilson’s white heat. Localism is the opposite of what politics should be about, a narrowing of horizons; a repudiation of the Work of Change.
It was inevitable that the final act of Britpopper rule would be localism. The winter of civilisation follows the winter of Culture. Just as Richard Coles, Mr Bates vs the Post Office and ‘the North’ were the last port of call after Brand Britain proper had fallen into naffness; so too, the failure of Starmerism, the pinnacle of British political thought 2010-20, will precede a miserable capitulation to localism. Localism is the last desperate roll of the dice to sustain the Commonwealth project.
The rational and inevitable way to govern Britain is to centrally appoint officials on the same Meritocracy blockchain to a series of regional governorates with local ‘party secretariats’ underneath them. Swiss-style regional initiatives can provide a certain amount of democratic ‘voice’ and the officials can then compete to fulfill targets of economic growth, lawkeeping and experiment within certain broad powers set by central government. This is the only way to justify devolution of serious powers over health, transport and infrastructure. The governors must not be called something stupid like ‘Lord Lieutenancies’ but shall instead be called something like ‘Prefectures’ or ‘Lower Secretariats’ in order to remind the British people their miserable Anglo-Celtic traditions have Failed and they shall instead become Japanese. Even better, if you follow The Manifesto, these governors can form the upper house with a democratically elected lower house choosing which experiments they like the best when they select a new cabinet after the end of term limits. Policy will be tested before it is implemented on national level.
However, this solution relies on the Meritocracy being implemented in central government first in order to recruit officials and, as such, it is bad idea for any party to adopt it wholesale; we need a stop-gap measure that parties like Reform can adopt before the full Rectification of Names is complete.
Municipal governments which are bankrupt, or above a certain level of debt to HMT or private lenders, should be forced to hold local referenda on conversion into municipal corporations. The debt will be converted into bonds held in the corporations, the current administrators turned into chief executives and boards of directors appointed by the bondholders. All elected officials will be sacked and no new elections shall be held.
