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By Councillor John Ward
So sang Sir Harry Secombe in “If I Ruled The World”.
Well, although I have no wish to rule the world, or even to become an MP (I leave that to those better equipped for the task, such as our own Rehman Chishti!), I am not immune to having pipe dreams about what I would do if I were ever placed in such a position. Probably most of us have had similar thoughts from time to time.
Anyway, I wouldn’t plan to run before I could walk, so I have limited my ideas for change and improvement to this nation of ours alone.
The first and most basic change I would make would be to introduce a formal Constitution — something I know many want, but political parties claim is “unnecessary”. I happen to disagree with that stance.
My proposed Constitution would be in two parts: the first would be a set of principles that would cast in stone, so to speak, never to be compromised. The only way any of them would ever be permitted to be changed would be via a national referendum.
One of those principles would be respect for all democratically-elected institutions, and no-one to overrule any of them from above or beyond.
Thus local communities would be allowed to determine their own futures without the threat of bullies like John Prescott or Gordon Brown imposing their own agendas — no-one in most of the affected communities voted for them, and certainly not on any kind of basis that permits interfering in local matters!
There would be NO housing quotas, imposed pack-em-in densities or other externally-dictated policies, under any circumstances! We here, who know what is best for our a area, will make all the decisions ourselves, without overruling from outsiders of any kind. There are plenty of legitimate recourses in case of perceived maladministration or similar, so we never need central government, regional assemblies (which would be permanently banned, by the way) or overseas agencies to try to tell us our business. This would be made unchangeable law!
Europe would be pushed back into what it does well: essentially just a trading bloc, rather than the attempted superstate that is still being pushed upon us in one guise or another. Oh, and where’s our promised referendum on the latest version of this, by the way?
The second part of my Constitution would be the changeable sections, including methods of taxation. One change is this arena that I’d like to try is for virtually all taxes to come to local communities in the first imstance, and for those communities — via their own local elected representatives — to effectively sub-contract a noational governmental organisation to deal with those very few things that really should be done that way.
Much of what national government currently does shouldn’t be dictated by them at all, but be left to the affected communities to deal with in their own way. After all, no outsider can have more than an inkling of what is really needed and how best to implement it.
A big clue to this is in how Medway manages its regeneration, as part of the Thames Gateway. We do this ourselves, rather than via any of the indirect methods utilised by other parts of the Gateway Region, all of which have had similar levels of investment but are way behind Medway in
so many ways.
Thus we clearly demonstrate the superiority of local management of projects and initiatives (and there are many more I could list, from Liveability to our Olympic Village plans, from our excellent libraries to our Contact Points and Centre, and so on) and other areas show their approaches to be next to useless by comparison.
Of course we shall still need “watchdogs” such as auditors and inspectors, but more sensibly applied, such as ten years ago when the costs to our council were just 30,000 Pounds or so per year. Now it’s over a third of a million pounds a year, all coming out of the same pot that provides local services. The next time any local service is being considered for review, it’ll be worth remembering this one of many externally-imposed reasons why the review has become necessary.
My Constitution would seek to provide a genuine incentive to reduce all bureaucracy by personally penalising anyone introducing new forms without a rock-solid case for doing so, and would reward those who find ways to get rid of such waste.
Okay: there are the bones of my ideas. Who here is with me?
Councillor Ward is one of the 3 Councillors for Rochester South & Horsted Ward on Medway Council – you can view his website here.
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This rather interesting article is a prelude to the publication of My Vision for a Greater Britain, which I will begin to publish on here in the next few days (though it will take weeks to complete).
I have to say that much of what has been written here is pure common sense – and it is refreshing to see that some people from a certain Association, and indeed some politicians, still have it…
I had no idea you were going to do this! Talk about happy coincidence…
Anyway, it’s a good thing to get some basic principles out there into the public domain. At a scrutiny committee meeting yesterday, all political parties there agreed that setting principles is a good foundation upon which to build; and building on a shaky or non-existent foundation is sure to lead to a collapse sooner or later, and probably sooner!
This is why I am personally in favour of a written Constitution, despite what many (including my own party) claim, i.e. that it is “unnecessary”. I say that it is, now, and needs to be done properly, not to any political party’s own convenience.
It would be great if your ideas and suggestions (and perhaps even some of mine!) could be considered as part of a process to create such a Constitution.