Local taxes and local borrowing

Here's Nick Clegg, according to The Telegraph:

We are different; we are liberal. Because we will put local government back in charge of the money it raises and spends.

That's why in our first budget we unlocked more than a billion pounds of ring-fenced grants. That's why we will end central capping of Council Tax. That's why we will allow councils to keep some of the extra business rates and council tax they raise when they enable new developments to go ahead.

And I can announce today that we will be giving local authorities the freedom to borrow against those extra business rates to help pay for additional new developments.

Localism, good. Increased taxes, bad. Government borrowing, bad.

As far as I can tell, Clegg isn't proposing to cut off central funding for spendthrift councils, he's just giving them a licence to extort more money from local taxpayers.

Westminster shouldn't be devolving any more power to councils unless they also give taxpayers a fresh chance to choose their local representatives. I'd go further, and suggest that

• central government should only be responsible for matters that can't be handled locally, such as national defence
• all local spending should be funded through local taxation; the citizens of Scotland shouldn't be able to vote for free prescriptions and free education, paid for by the English
  
• no government, local or national, should have the option of running up debt; taxpayers should be forced to live with the consequences of their electoral choices, rather than passing the burden to future generations
• a referendum should be required whenever taxes are to be increased; governments should have to work within a budget chosen by taxpayers
  

There was a good article in The Independent last week by Dominic Lawson, who found that Rich and poor agree on cutting taxes:

In February 2001 Bristol City Council held a public ballot to settle just such an argument: it asked its electors to choose between lower council taxes or "better" services – stressing that a vote not to increase council tax would result in big cuts, especially in its educational budget. It offered its electors the chance to vote for a 6 per cent increase in council tax to help maintain the education budget, a 4 per cent increase, a 2 per cent increase, or, finally, to freeze the council tax. Many more voted for the freezing of tax than the combined numbers of those who ticked any of the other boxes.
...
It's worth bearing in mind that this was not a solid Tory heartland area that might have been expected to put low taxes before public services: at the time of the referendum Bristol City was a Labour-controlled council.
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Some might argue that these results simply meant that the affluent middle-classes had turned out to vote en masse, while the poorer sections within the councils' electorates had been less well organised. Yet this turns out to be not the case. David Maddison, project officer at the Local Government Association, told the BBC that "research in towns and cities holding the votes suggested the more wealthy wards had opted for the higher tax rises, with deprived wards choosing the smallest rises."

What could be the reason for this apparently paradoxical discovery? One might be that even those on the lowest council bands believed they were being taxed far too much. Another possibility – and perhaps it is more than a possibility – is that it is precisely those most dependent on public services that know the full extent of their inefficiencies and unresponsiveness and are therefore most sceptical of the claim that such organisations would deliver better results if they had even more money – and more employees – to conjure with.

I support the idea of localism, but I think it's essential that it empowers local taxpayers, rather than local politicians. Accordingly, I wouldn't object to a centrally-imposed requirement for all councils to hold yearly referendums on their budget, with options of "no change", "ten percent reduction", and "ten percent increase".

It still leaves room for the tyranny of the majority, but I hope and expect that most people would vote to keep more of their money to spend according to their own priorities. It would be an interesting experiment, anyway.

The BBC vs democratic policing

Daniel Hannan has a great article today about the BBC's bias against elected sheriffs, as evidenced in a Radio 4 PM programme, which suggests democratic accountability would somehow transform our green and pleasant land into a Deep South dustbowl, complete with Confederate flags, rampaging rednecks, and Boss Hogg.

The segment starts about 18 minutes and 18 seconds in:

Are you interested in voting for the people who run your local police force? It's one of the government's 'big ideas' for England and Wales. The first elections could be in 2012. It would be an innovation here, but in the United States it's common practice. Reporting for PM from Alabama, and there's more on the blog, Micheal Buchanan ...

Here's a taste of Buchanan's reporting (to replicate his condescension, read it with a cultured Scottish accent):

I went for a spin through rural Alabama with Jimmy Ray Swindle ... Were he to win in November, Sheriff Swindle [a former radio DJ] would not be the only the only law enforcement novice in Alabama. Also standing for sheriff's office across the state this year are a swimming pool installer, a pharmacist, and a church minister. The bar to running for sheriff is pretty low in Alabama ...

Drive around Alabama, and the freeway signs act as an aide memoire to America's civil rights past, Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery flash past, cities where the elected police chiefs played their part in enforcing the will of the majority.

Hannan was right to describe this as "a snotty, sneering, superior piece":

You get the idea. Allow people to choose who directs their local police force and you are likely to get racists, half-wits or crooks – often with hilarious redneck names. Just in case we missed the message, the correspondent spelt it out with his closing words: “While popular elections may increase direct accountability, it [sic] doesn’t necessarily lead to better policing”.

Better for whom? Who is better placed to decide on a local police force’s priorities than a local voter? Some areas might opt for men like Arpaio, though the sheriffs in, say, Vermont, are a very different breed. That’s the beauty of the system: law enforcement reflects the local temper.

Not that the BBC is alone. The unelected beneficiaries of the existing system have also been mounting a fierce campaign against democratic policing. Their favourite argument is that, if you have elections, the BNP might win. Well, yes, they might. But, as a rule, they don’t: the far-Left BNP controls just 0.3 per cent of council seats and 0 per cent of Westminster seats. Still, if the logic of ACPO the Police Authorities and the BBC is sound, why not do away with elections altogether? I mean, how can people be trusted not to pick the wrong candidates?

How indeed? Far better to trust in the Philosopher Kings.

Daniel Hannan on the West Lothian Question

Daniel Hannan's blog post today led me to an old article of his, which is well worth reading:

I have found it: the philosopher's stone of politics, the elixir of life. There really is an answer to the West Lothian Question. Twenty nine years have passed since Tam Dalyell, the stony Old Etonian who then sat for West Lothian, set the conundrum before Parliament. Scottish devolution, he observed, would lead to a constitutional anomaly, as Westminster MPs with Scottish seats would be able to vote on matters affecting English constituencies, but would have no say over such matters in their own constituencies.

Today, the problem is no longer academic. On two occasions -- over foundation hospitals and again over tuition fees -- the votes of Scottish MPs secured the passage of contentious legislation that did not apply north of the border. And the signs are that the English are becoming miffed. An opinion poll in The Daily Telegraph showed that nearly half of English voters object to the idea of a Scottish Prime Minister -- a finding that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

What, then, is the answer? The only two solutions so far hazarded - a separate English parliament or a wholly independent Scotland - have understandably failed to win widespread support. But there is a third option: localism.

There is no power exercised by the Holyrood legislature under the 1998 Scotland Act that could not, in England, be devolved to a lower level -- either to counties and cities or, better still, to individual citizens.

I recommend the whole article.

As I wrote over at Tim Worstall's blog,

I think the main objection to localism is that councils tend to be even more incompetent than the jokers in Westminster.

I imagine there are two answers to this:

1) As much power as possible would be pushed *below* the level of the county/city councils, ideally to individuals

2) The transfer of power from Westminster to the cities/councils would cause us to choose our representatives in local government more carefully.