eurealist.co.uk

“The Constitutional treaty is over and finished”, said prime minister Jan-Peter Balkenende, during a parliamentary debate.

As only the Dutch leader can accept or reject his own countries referendum, unless he calls for the ratification process to continue the Constitution is dead.

The French are pushing for it to continue, this must mean that President Chirac is prepared to ignore the French vote, and try to ratify the constitution at a later date. But that will not affect the eventual outcome if the Dutch stick to their guns.

For the process to continue what is needed is a clear commitment from both France and Holland that they do intend to try to ratify, failing that, as much as it goes against the grain to say so, Blair is right to stop the referendum.

It is not a matter of Chirac and Schröder putting pressure in Blair to continue it is him putting pressure on Chirac and Balkenende to clearly state their aims.

A way Forward for Democracy or a Red Herring

The Telegraph today has several articles based on the dissatisfaction of the voters with politicians, in order to promote its three day, serialisation of a new book by a group of Tory “brightest young minds” who are advancing an answer to the way forward by the party that will open the door to number 10. These “brightest young minds” suggest the conservatives in power lies in what has become known as The New Localism.

Arguing that the fall in voter participation is not down to apathy as many pundits suggest, but rather the “Voters are not so much apathetic as frustrated. They no longer see any connection between where they place their crosses and anything that tangibly affects their lives. Voting for Boodle rather than Coodle will not stop the incinerator being sited nearby, or get their child into the school they want, or improve their local hospital.”
The status of MPs has dwindled as their power has shrunk. Parliament has parcelled out its jurisdiction in all directions: upwards to Brussels, downwards to the regional bureaucracies, sideways to the judiciary. The decisions that actually matter to people are these days made by functionaries who are outside the democratic process: the Child Support Agency, the Financial Services Authority, the Health and Safety Executive and a thousand other quangos stretching right up to the European Commission.
The complaint that “voting doesn’t change anything” is not a facile cliché, but an accurate appraisal of how Britain is administered. Human rights judges lay down school uniform rules; police chiefs decide whether possessing cannabis is a criminal offence; regional development agencies decree where new houses are to be built: Eurocrats forbid us to sell in pounds and ounces.
Until a political party addresses this democratic deficit, it will not convince people that it is in a position to remedy their grievances.”
According to “The New Localism” observations
“Conservatives need to adopt a Self-Denying Ordinance. They must dispel the notion that they are interested simply in office and convince the country that, rather than grasping at the levers of control, they would push powers outwards and downwards. They should be guided in all things by three principles.

• Decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect;
• Law-makers should be directly accountable;
• The citizen should be as free as possible from state coercion.

Where possible, “New Localism” advocates devolving power directly to the citizen. Many of the public services, for example, would be immensely improved if the state paid for them without trying to run them. Where devolution to the individual is impractical, we propose decentralisation to towns and counties, and a proper link between taxation, representation and expenditure at local level.
In areas which, by their nature, require a national approach - such as foreign affairs and immigration - we would transfer powers from bureaucracies to elected MPs.

We shall be setting out a range of policy proposals to this end: locally elected sheriffs, self-financing councils, parental freedom of choice, parliamentary hearings instead of patronage, diversity in health care and much else. But the specific policies matter less than the philosophy that informs them.
We take our stand on the defence of the individual against the state, of Parliament against the
Executive, of the elected representative against the civil servant, of the local councillor against the quango. We favour variety and pluralism against harmonisation and centralism.”

It is early days and I would not like to prejudge these ideas, goodness knows we do need to do something about the present morass, not just of the Tory’s but of democracy and political accountability itself.
I would however suggest that these are not new ideas; they have been around for some considerable time in one form or another, what is the Labour Party’s push for devolution, if it is not to try to achieve exactly the outcome that “New Localism” represents, we should also not forget that it was the conservatives and I belive, Howard when in office who initially set up the regional assemblies.

FCO paper 1971 SOVEREIGNTY AND THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES FCO 30/1048 - 1971

In 1971 the foreign office report forecast that

“the transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government”

and also contained the blueprint that would be used to combat this alienation.

“To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential.”

The question for the Tory “brightest young minds” and their “New Localism” is does this address the problems at their base, or is it “a slow coup against political democracy” just one more attempt to introduce a system of federalisation along the lines that would eventually enhance the idea of an EU of the regions. Is it an attempt to redirect the idea of people sovereignty to a lower unit than the nation state, so that we will not be too bothered about the loss of sovereignty of the state to the EU institutions?

Unless they can address and clearly answer this question, then any fiddling about with the respective internal powers of the state, will not deal with the basic problem of the people who make our laws not being accountable.

Although they do appear to have looked at this, one of their basic aims is that “Law-makers should be directly accountable” but if they only mean that these are local laws, and not national or supra national laws then this will just be a red herring.