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A quick recap of my previous blog which was for a “British Federal System” where property taxes are set and collected locally and all National Taxes are collected pretty much as today but split between say, 40% being retained centrally and 60% returned to the “local government unit” where they were collected.

This “government unit” would be based upon The Welsh Assembly, Stormont in NI, The Scottish Parliament in Scotland and the County/Metropolitan Councils in England. I am not proposing definitive solutions as in “I am Right”, I am putting forward debating positions or a hypothesis so let’s move on to other implications…

Services Provided to UK Citizens

The basic principle is that whilst Central Government may set ‘standards’, apart from key issues that are best handled centrally such as Defence, Foreign Policy/International Relations and Treaties (some thoughts here), the Prison Service, Home Office, Immigration possibly the Courts System and any research based upon “Best Practises” in any area of ‘good governance’, everything else should be ‘local’.

Health Services, Education, Policing by being funded locally should lead to the services being provided better reflecting the needs of the local community and the “end user”. Local politicians being responsible for budget allocation and monitoring would be far more accessible to local electors than national politicians as the latter are marooned on the “Westminster Village Island” which often seems to be located near “Never, Never Land” for all the lack of reality that reigns there.

Additional Grants from Central Government

Now having said that there would no longer be a “Rate Support Grant” from Central Government there would have to be a system of Budget Item Support Funds to even out demographic variations.

An example being areas of higher than average concentration of old people, as older people are bigger users of health services, there may be the need for a “Supplementary Grant” to top up the Health Budget locally. Equally inner city areas may have fewer old people but a higher concentration of children of school age and therefore need their Education Budget topped up but all of this must be done to a transparent formula.

Project Based Central Grants must be another possibility whereby a major infrastructure project just would not happen by being funded locally but also, it must bring broader benefits to other surrounding areas or even the Nation. A good example of this might be the proposal to build an energy generating tidal barrage from Somerset across the Severn Estuary to Wales. Economically it would be beyond the budget of the local authorities but as it would generate around 5% of total UK energy needs, worth funding.

Sure in the above example, one would actually expect commercial enterprises to take a hand too but even if they did and fully funded the actual barrage, there would inevitably be substantial infrastructural works related to that, which would fall on the shoulders of the local authorities to fund.

The Political Head Count

At almost 650, there are far too many MPs in the House of Commons and even if nothing much else was changed, by altering boundaries, they should be culled down to 400 at the most and if this country remains in the EU and as 80% of Laws now come from there, even much less than that, likely 150 only.

MPs can’t complain, it was they who voted their jobs away not the British people, we have had no say in the matter since the Seventies. It was the British public who killed the home grown motor industry by voting with their feet and buying foreign cars, British politicians have done exactly the same with their own jobs by giving them to faceless EU Bureaucrats in Brussels.

As I was taught when a kid: “If you want the money, you do the job, if you don’t like the job, you don’t take the money, you find yourself another job that you don’t mind doing.” Our MPs have decided to take the money but not do the job as is demonstrated by the man in charge of our economy for 11 years has shown – Gordon Brown just didn’t see the obvious downturn coming but he will retire on an indexed linked pension even if everyone in the private sector has seen theirs destroyed by him personally.

The Actual Numbers

The current reality is that we are ridiculously over governed within the UK and whilst one may argue that the 3 Celtic Nation’s Parliament/Assemblies are really only the equivalent of an English Metropolitan Council, in the event of any of them opting for independence from the UK, I will treat them as a ‘national’ tier of government for the time being so the numbers:

Scottish Parliament: 129

Welsh Assembly 60

Northern Irish Assembly 108

European Parliament 78

House of Commons 645

House of Lords 732

Moving Forward

In order to present a realistic hypothesis and because there are specific “other issues” with each of the Celtic Nations, for the moment I will exclude them. Of the 645 Westminster MPs, Welsh 41, NI 18 and Scotland 59 which totals 118 MPs from the Celtic Nations, 527 from England.

I will also ignore MEPs, if we have the sense to leave the EU, there won’t be any and also, I will ignore the House of Lords which costs us little and like the MEPs, has no legislative powers anyway.

So, I am going to develop my argument based wholly on England and English MPs because there are two good reasons for doing so:

It covers the greatest number of constituencies but it also has a more “greenfield” situation in terms of the relationship between local and national politics which in turn means a lot more room for experimentation without treading on someone’s toes as would be inevitable in somewhere like Northern Ireland. Everyone would spend forever arguing about the colour of the paint, with the result that the wall would never get painted any colour, any time soon !