For some time now Labour has been twenty or more
points ahead in the polls. Unless something odd happens, we will soon have a
Labour Government. I feel rather as if I am eating the curate’s egg. The
prospect of a Labour Government is good in parts, but there are a few mouldy rotten
bits that make me tempted to spit the whole thing out.
My primary concern is as always keeping the UK intact. If Labour can win an absolute majority, which now looks likely, it will do much to undermine the SNP’s cause for the next few years. If the price for keeping the UK intact is a Labour Government I will happily pay it.
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| Right Reverend Host: "I'm afraid you've got a bad Egg, Mr Jones!"; The Curate: "Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!" |
The next General Election will be about Labour versus
Conservative and the chance for the first Labour Government since Gordon Brown.
It will be very difficult indeed for the SNP to push its independence agenda and
it is likely that many former Labour voters who now support the SNP will be
tempted back to get rid of the Tories. If the SNP share of the vote falls, then
it will have no mandate to push for an independence referendum and if Labour
wins an absolute majority, then the SNP will have no leverage to gain one. Looks
like game over.
This is the good part of the egg.
I am less worried than normal about Labour managing
the economy. It could hardly do worse than the Conservatives are doing at
present. It may be that a Labour Chancellor might be competent. I am willing to
give him a chance, because when the Conservatives have got us into the present
mess it is time to give the other guy a go.
Neither the Conservatives nor Labour are especially ideologically
different. The Conservatives are offering us centrism rather than free
marketeers, lower spending, lower taxes and a shrinking state. Those ideas blew
up with poor Liz Truss.
The battle then becomes who manages the British state
better. The Conservatives have been doing badly so they deserve to be kicked
out. This is how democracy ought to work. It is not football. It ought not to be
tribal.
I don’t think Labour will be able to change Brexit. It
would require a referendum for us to rejoin and I don’t see how rejoining could
avoid us having to accept the Euro, Schengen and paying more for the privilege of
Brussels telling us what to do. Rejoin would lose. Labour will not dare ask the
British public for this reason.
Labour might try to manoeuvre us back into the Single Market
but given how little advantage we have made of Brexit I would not be overly
bothered by that. If you are going to go down the low tax, undercutting the EU
road, then leaving the Single Market makes sense, but we haven’t done that, for
which reason membership of the Single Market looks more attractive.
What matters about Brexit is that the UK doesn’t end
up in an EU superstate and that Parliament is sovereign. Soft or hard is a
matter of taste with regard to eggs and Brexit. It is the fundamentals that
matter, not the details.
Of course, if we rejoined the Single Market, we could
not limit immigration from Europe, but I’m not sure we want to anyway. The problem
of immigration is not Poles and Slovaks. They work and cause minimal trouble.
Neither the Conservatives nor Labour want to seriously
limit migration. They pretend to, while offering hundreds of thousands of visas
to people to visit, work or study in the UK knowing that the vast majority will
stay. Stop offering such visas and you virtually stop illegal immigration even
if a few small boats arrive on our beaches.
The issue then becomes do you prefer to get your migrants
from the EU or from outside the EU?
There might be more woke crap under Labour, but look at how much of it has developed since David Cameron became Prime Minister. It isn't as if the Conservatives have been particularly good at conserving common sense, nor have they protected us from the environmentalists and the green crap of net zero. So how much worse would this stuff really be under Labour? Not much if at all.
I am not remotely bothered by the idea of abolishing
the House of Lords. Lots of countries have elected upper chambers and it works
well enough. Some countries have only one elected chamber and that works well
enough too. I would I think prefer a single elected House of Commons with a new
system of checks and balances. There are lots of sensible countries that have
unicameralism including New Zealand, Norway and Denmark. Ask them how they do
it. We would at least save a lot on the cost of ermine.
But whatever Gordon Brown touches tends to be an
attempt to appease Scottish nationalists and every single one of his attempts
from devolution to “The vow” has done damage and helped rather than hindered
the SNP.
If we are to have an elected upper chamber, again
there are lots of sensible countries that have one, then base the membership of
this chamber not on nations and regions, but on constituencies or groups of
constituencies.
The Supreme Court decision on refusing the SNP the
right to allow Holyrood to legislate for an independence referendum made clear
that Scotland while being called a country is legally merely a region of the
UK. It has no more right to secede than Burgundy or Bavaria. The fact that
Scotland is called a country, or a nation is legally immaterial. The UK is a
unitary state. It is neither a federation nor a confederation.
The task therefore is to treat each region of the UK
equally. Five million people living in Scotland should have no more democratic
rights than five million people living in a region in England.
The mistake with devolution was to treat the parts of
the UK that happened to be called countries differently from those that were
not. This was both unfair and led to the absurd situation where Scottish MPs
could vote on English healthcare, but English MPs had no say at all over Scottish
healthcare.
If you want to improve British democracy by all means
either abolish the House of Lords or make it elected either at a different time
or perhaps by means of some form of proportional representation. But more important
than either of these things is to devolve power equally.
Each of the devolved parliaments should be made to
devolve power to a local level covering perhaps one million people and that
level of devolution should be made available to each group of around one
million people living in England.
It is impossible politically to abolish the devolved
parliaments, but they could be bypassed so that real power is decentralised and
given to local communities.
The rottenness in Labour’s egg is the same as it was
when Gordon Brown first thought he could kill Scottish nationalism stone dead. Instead,
it was Labour in Scotland that was poisoned by the stench of rotten eggs.
You can never appease nationalism. You just strengthen
it, but you can bring about a situation when the whole of the UK is governed in
the same way and each citizen has the same democratic power as every other.
So please Labour, if you win power, no more powers for
Holyrood, no more talk of nations and countries within countries and if you
intend to radically change the nature of the constitution do so with cross
party consensus rather than a whipped majority. Otherwise, we will just get
another rotten egg like we got the last time we had a Labour Government.
