Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

OK, this might seem like a bit of an incongruous title given that I’ve just professed my support for the English Democrats’ goal of establishing an English parliament to deal with English matters in the same way as Holyrood, Stormont and Cardiff already do for Scotland, N.Ireland and Wales respectively, but bear with me. As promised, this post sort of takes as its starting point this one off ‘The Devil’s Kitchen’, and what I wanted to pick out specifically here was the last of Douglas Carswell and Dan Hannan’s proposals, the one about devolution of power.

I agree that a major priority in this country (and I’ll get back to what I mean with that in just a bit) is decentralisation of power, or more accurately perhaps, the introduction of a system by which local authorities gain the ability to influence and (if necessary) veto proposals by the central administration that drag rights, duties and resources away from the lower administrative levels and instead add them to the ever-growing list of powers focused on the central executive. It would be easy to launch here into a tirade about NuLabour and Gordon Brown’s micromanagement fetish, but the problem has been around for a lot longer than that. The systems I have my eye on when I write about ‘empowering’ the local councils and communities (and as always I’m happy to take on further suggestions) are the German Bundesrat and the US Senate (to a degree) – a federal tiered system, in other words. In Germany, for example, recent years have seen an ongoing tug-of-war between the Land and Bund levels of government, as Berlin tries to replace the legal rights it has to cede to Brussels with ones it can nick from the state governments; now, the Bundesrat, which is a chamber specifically designed to represent the states’ administrations at the national level, can and does veto these attempts. I don’t see any reason why a similar system couldn’t be introduced (perhaps, he says tentatively, as an alternative to the House of Lords that would focus on the interests of individual citizens rather than simply the constitutionality of proposed legislation) in England. At least, I don’t see in what way such a chamber would be incompatible with another that addresses the interests of the nation as a whole (for me, preferably, England rather than the UK).

However, and this is where I am going to differ sharply from both the English Democrats and “The Plan”,  I would argue that such a chamber representing the interests of the regional governments is also not incompatible with a much higher central authority. What I mean is that, once the essential individual-, regional-focused interests of the citizens have been guaranteed, there is essentially no condition set for the level at which the next authority up must operate. I guess you can see where I’m going with this, and I reiterate my core position as a Europhile and libertarian paternalist just to make things clear. I don’t see, especially if we as a European nation can operate in a “Swiss-style free trade deal” (as DK calls the EFTA), why the cooperation between the different countries in political matters must necessarily remain at a national level. Note: I’m not arguing in favour of the Euro here (though I’d suggest that a common currency is a viable long-term extension of the free trade area), as I appreciate that right now the different ends of Europe are undergoing wildly different economic cycles that make managing a common EU monetary policy an even less desirable job than being the prime minister’s personal psychiatrist. Essentially what I’m advocating is a sort of bicameral system stretched across the whole of the EU, where the role of the ‘lower chamber’ is played by the central parliament in Brussels (or somewhere else if you don’t like Brussels, I don’t know, Krakow sound more appealing?), and that of the traditional ‘upper chamber’ – scrutiny, checking constitutionality, representing regional interests &c &c – is played by the (singular) chamber of ‘national’ parliament in each member state.

The biggest criticism I can sense heading my way is likely to come from those who prefer to pick out cultural differences between European countries rather than emphasising the similarities (as compared, for example, to the African Union or ASEAN). It also happens to be the same people, more often than not, who scorn the study of foreign languages “because everyone can speak English anyway”. Obviously, that’s not true, but more subtly, that is possibly the greatest cultural barrier between the countries of the UK and the rest of Europe, where learning foreign languages (generally French, German, Russian and Spanish) is so run-of-the-mill that its being incidentally mandatory for baccalaureate-level qualification is not even commented upon. The cultural differences and discrepancies between nations have two chances of being picked out in the legislative model I have described – firstly through opposition in the central parliament, and then again through rejection or revision by the regionally-representative bodies.  It is these latter bodies that would constitute the ‘national parliaments’, if you like, and in this respect I am definitely still all for the complete separation of the UK into its constituent parts.

I suspect that quite a few of the serious political types might contend that I haven’t really suggested anything particularly revolutionary here, that all I’ve done is remove one level of government from the grasp of national authority and shunted it up the hierarchy. Well in that case, good – I wasn’t exactly trying to reinvent democracy, just to remove a bit of bureaucracy. And as it happens, I’m also fairly keen on keeping the top level of the (supra-)state reasonably small – that’s the libertarian in me – but big enough to provide an overarching political unity and vision (vague, I know) to the whole of the state (i.e. the EU) that would, I feel, be lost if legislative power stayed at only the national level – that’s the paternalist part of my argument. At the very least, it should help bring local concerns back to the forefront of supranational politics, and I doubt that even Eurosceptics would disagree that that would make a very welcome change.