No.15 - A Time to Reflect?
Dear James,
Before the battle resumes next week in parliament, I thought it might help if we looked at where we stand as a country and a parliament.
We are rightly proud of our institutions. They have grown up over many centuries, developed through civil wars, constitutional crises and international conflicts. It has never been a straight path and serendipity has played a large part in the process. From the days of William the conqueror where, at Old Sarum, he claimed the freehold over all English lands, through the 1611 Act asserting Parliament’s sovereignty over the monarch, through the Civil War, through the ’Glorious Revolution’ and the 1688 Bill of Rights and on to the Great Reform Act of 1832, our ‘Unwritten Constitution’ has evolved. One of the great strengths of the British experience has been continuity and fluidity. The fluidity is based upon the idea that everyone respects that constitution and its precedents and also respects the laws that flow from it. No one is above the law. Not the monarch, not the government, not a referendum. Parliament makes laws. No one else. We have had very few major breaks with the past such as the French Revolution or the German 20th century catastrophes. However, continuity has its weaknesses too. For example, it allows inherent inequalities existing in the social and economic structures of the nation to persist.
And the problem at base is inequality and the mechanisms that mitigate such differences in wealth have become critical. The 2016 Referendum was a cry of resentment following eight years of Tory austerity. The great ‘Left Behinds’ were angry and a group of nationalists saw that and exploited it. The great majority of people accept that there must be a degree of inequality in any society. Inequality arises from two sources. Wealth i.e stored income from earlier periods or current income. At the moment we tax the latter but let the former of scot free. Government expenditure is a way to alter that distinction by skewing current income (taxation) towards government stored wealth i.e social expenditure. In recent years however, these inequalities have got much worse because of the excesses of capitalism. Every time that an ‘ordinary person’ opens a newspaper he or she will see the bonuses paid to top city executives that in some cases mean that top executives earn 300x more than the average salary of their employees. That compares with about 140x only twenty years ago. No wonder people are angry.
But the anger was focussed on people that have very little to do with such internal contradictions in our nation. In a word, it was the refuge of all nationalist governments over the ages. It was the ‘foreigners’. They became the scapegoats and the EU allowed us to put them all into a convenient basket for our vituperation.
The present mess is the result. Our ancient institutions are under more stress than at any time in the last two hundred years. This is no way to run a modern nation state. The current yaboo politics is an embarrassment to us all. We are all a mixture of Whigs, Tories, Roundheads and Royalists, left or right, - even Normans and Saxons but when we let such distinctions come between us we lose control of the careful and subtle discussion inherent in the complexities of modern government.
What can be done? We have to look at the Voting system, the Taxation system. We have to consider the restructuring of national expenditure to reflect the needs of a middle sized nation rather than a post-imperial nation punching above its weight. We can continue to punch above our weight through our history or soft power itself. We do not need two massive new aircraft carriers to make our mark in the world. We need to reassess or our role in the wortd and adapt our expenditures accordingly.
One of the great mitigating systems with regard to inequality is education. The wealthy have their excellent private schools, the ordinary have underfunded state schools. We need to address such problems at base. Social mobility in our country is frozen. The one great unifying institution that we do have is the NHS. It is excellent but again, under funded.
So we need to grab the bull by its horns. For a period of say 20 years we will have to increase our state expenditure to be say 42% of GDP rather than the current 35%. The new money must be applied to the social and economic structure of our country. We need to think of the public good rather than the short term concerns of shareholders. In other words we need to rid ourselves of the American free market model of capitalism.
The current stalemate in parliament gives us an opportunity. Our crisis calls for dramatic measures to break our country out of its stale and continuous deadlock.
The party that emerges after this crisis should hold a Constitutional Assembly where all the above issues are analysed and finally put to the people.
Any comments James?
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent