Giving taxpayers power over how their taxes are spent
What a week! First we have Gordon Brown’s constitutional reforms strengthening Parliament’s powers to hold the Executive to account – though we have yet to see the small print about how they would operate and there are several important gaps which need to be plugged in the consultation period and many new powers added. Now we have the DCLG proposals to give local people power to determine, or at least influence, how some of their tax revenues are spent – to enforce their own priorities, not the Council’s. There’s also talk of giving people the right to petition Councils, which Councillors would then be obliged to consider. Excellent, and it should be piloted quickly.
But why limit it to Councils? Why shouldn’t both these proposals be considered for application to Parliament as well? The Treasury always wisely keeps a precautionary contingency fund in reserve of about 10%, amounting to some £50bn a year. If as little as 5% of this were set aside for allocation by the citizenry in accordance with their own priorities, it would allow some £2.5bn a year to be devoted to national projects which the people themselves wanted, not just a tiny conclave of Departmental negotiators carving up the national cake in secret discussions with the Treasury. It would revive interest in national politics more than any number of Ministerial press notices spinning the good news about their latest expenditure plans.
And if Councils can be petitioned, why not Parliament too? In fact there’s already of course a precedent via the No.10 website. When 1.8million people recently supported a call opposing road pricing on this website, the cognoscenti thought this was an own goal by giving the opposition a platform to have a go at the government on a very sensitive and difficult issue (on which the Government are obviously right). Of course there are always plenty within the Westminster –Whitehall bubble who want to keep out the people at all costs and get on with governing as only they know best, but they never believed in democracy in the first place.
MPs should set up our own Parliamentary website, and where petitions or proposals attracted overwhelming interest and support, Parliament should consider, perhaps via its Liaison Committee composed of all its Select Committee chairs, whether some might be tabled for debate and vote on the floor of the House. That might at last inject some real excitement into the parliamentary process which is now largely moribund.
However, despite all these plaudits, I have one major criticism. If the Government is opening up the channels of democracy at last which have been so long blocked, why is the Party leadership going in the opposite direction when it comes to Party Conference? The latter has already been largely neutered by the leadership’s refusal to acknowledge or accept any resolution where it is defeated. Now it is being proposed that there won’t even be a vote at all at the end of debates, in other words Conference is treated as a glorified talkshop around the only event in the week that matters – the Leader’s speech. And maybe this is the precursor to getting rid of Conference altogether, as we are moved steadily down the road towards American-style rallies without the inconvenience of a Party impertinent enough to want to have a say.
When it’s the electorate, some attempt is being made at last to give them a teeny-weeny taste of power, but when it comes to the Party, even that tiny pretence of influence that the Party liked to think it might have is now, it seems, to be flattened.