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702  28 April 2003   

Devolve to Survive

"Management" is now high on the political agenda, much higher than it ever used to be..  My canvassing this week in the Welsh General Election has persuaded me that the centre-of-gravity of politics has indeed moved that way. It is difficult to engage any elector with the old causes celebres- social inequality, discrimination, injustice, tyranny and oppression. What matters is reliability in refuse collection, diligence in pothole-filling and hedge-trimming, assiduity in the removal of canine excreta, success in cutting hospital waiting-lists, managerial prowess in traffic management – these are the stuff of current "politics".  Major issues of principle are never far away from the argument - but they do not grab the headlines.

Just consider the lengths to which Whitehall is going, to get "closer to the people". The Department for Education & Skills (DfES) wants to ensure that its writ runs in every individual school, for it is only at school level that citizens perceive the education system – local education authorities are increasingly seen as getting in the way, and they are in any event too numerous and too small to be the carriers of major political responsibilities. Similarly with health: the Department of health is bent on creating "Foundation Hospitals" to whom greater executive responsibilities can be effectively devolved, to take Westminster out of the firing-line. And in a remarkable new initiative, the Home Office is creating a new telephone focus-group consisting of the representatives of some 2,000 local organisations throughout England.

"Voluntary and community organisations, large and small, working in all regions of England and providing all types of services, can make their voices heard by joining the Home Office’s State of the Sector Panel. Membership involves filling in one questionnaire, and up to four 20-minute telephone interviews per year. Panel members will be chosen from those who send in a registration form available online"

The above advertisement appeared in The Guardian on 23 April 2003, bearing a deadline of 25 April 2003 – some trawl!  The Home Office must be desperate for popular legitimacy, to have embarked upon such a flawed exercise.

These are desperate managerial measures.  Ministers probably know that they are demanding too much of the centralised bureaucracies at their disposal.  They face, however, the difficulty that they have no reliable governmental partners, within the UK Constitution. In England, there are no other politicians to take the responsibility. Wales and Scotland now have, for all their shortcomings and inexperience, new soundly-based representative democratic institutions, with which Westminster power can be shared. Westminster Ministers regularly rise in the Commons, in response to questions, and explain that the issue has been devolved to Cardiff or Edinburgh – and that is good.  But that option is not open to them, for Birmingham, Southampton, Taunton, Newcastle, Norwich – these questions must all be answered, in detail and ad nauseam.

Westminster needs devolution. Labour needs devolution. Not the Scottish kind, which continues to threaten the break-up of the Union. Nor the half-baked kind used for London, and now proposed for the English regions. I mean the full Welsh devolution package, including block grants and the right to enact secondary legislation for the region. The Welsh system is settling in well, and now has the approval of a strong majority of the Welsh electorate, whatever their Party politics.

Devolution is not a luxury, or the mere property of enthusiasts.  It is a political necessity. It is no secret that, in my case, I favour a dual-mandate form of devolution, which would bring our great cities back into the front-line of UK government.  I consider that the next round of constitutional reform should confront the weakness of city government throughout our society, and propose a new integration of municipal and provincial (i.e. "regional") government.  But that is a matter of detail, rather than a difference of principle.

  • The centre of gravity of Westminster politics should be shifting away from the town-hall towards Europe and to all the UK’s global connections - that is where top-level political initiative is increasingly needed. Westminster Ministers should leave someone else to manage the traffic, clean the streets, fix the schools and hospitals, and decide local planning applications.

  • Labour should let UK communities govern themselves, and encourage them to do so.

Do you have any experience of this great century-long political saga?  Drop me a line

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703   28 April 2003  

Property Rules OK

Few people understand the profound significance of property law for all business transactions. In our settled UK society, we take it for granted that property rights are routinely respected and upheld. Our citizens have come to terms with the primacy of property and its ownership.

Yet the existence of an effective system of property rights, and their systematic enforcement, is an essential precondition of all trading, and of all "capitalism".  The owner of private capital must always be able to control his operations lawfully, and lay lawful claim to the fruits of his success.  All trading (whether "capitalist" or not) presupposes the generation of a trading surplus (i.e. profit) with the trader buying at X and selling at X+P. And it is fundamental to all trading that the seller can establish his legal right to X+P -  even if there should be no profit in the transaction at all.  He must at least get the residue of his trading capital back, so that he can keep on trading.

In the case of the Iraqi oil supplies, that basic trading requirement cannot be assured.  For the basic "entitlement to sell" Iraqi oil is in doubt - all because of the illegality of the "Coalition" invasion. The United Nations asserted the right, at international law, to place an embargo upon such oil sales, as a "sanction" for Saddam’s failure to relinquish its weapons of mass destruction. Effectively, Iraqi oil is not the Iraqis' to sell: the United Nations controls the property-rights and holds the purse-strings. The removal of that constraint vital, if market trading is to recommence. There is further legal difficulty of the "war" – are these oilfields the proper "spoils of war" accruing to the states of America and Britain who waged the war. Can full legal entitlement-to-sell pass to the victors if the war itself was "illegal"? These are all difficult ownership questions, left behind by this messy and illegal military operation. Such disputes are very "bad for business"…

The world economy bristles with property issues. The EU is locked in a dispute about the longevity of drugs patents for "generic" non-branded medical drugs - should it be 8 or 10 years? The difference could be critical to the profitability of the industry.  Drugs property rights are also splitting the World Trade Organisation. The Russian economy has long been bedevilled by the difficult of establishing private property ownership, particularly in the case of land. President Putin finally pushed the necessary legislation through the Duma last summer, but may disputes subsist. And legal disputes may even bedevil simple claims to personal property (chattels, or movables) let alone land and other forms of real property.  These issues are so important that, when it comes to tackling the overweening power of the corporations, I advocate for them a new type of property right, see Tame the Corporations.

  • Don't allow your mind to dwell on that useless abstraction "Capitalism".

Think property rights. 

What do you think of this critique?  Drop me a line

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