In what should be the death knell for the very idea of elected mayors, we read in the Daily Fail that former MP Sir Peter Soulsby, and now mayor of Leicester, is in line for an 80 percent pay rise.
This is despite his own council making £70million-worth of spending cuts, and cutting back 1,000 council jobs, in a move that could see his pay go up from £56,000 to £100,000. Soulsby's deputy could more than double his salary from £34,000 to £75,000. Six assistant mayors would pocket 65 percent increases from £26,000 to £40,000, and all 47 city councillors would see their basic allowances go up 20 percent from £10,000 to £12,000.
Therein lies the ultimate outcome of the misplaced vogue for "democratising" local government by adding yet another layer of highly-paid elected officials to the structure. One can well see why the political classes like the idea, but all one ends up with is another layer of highly-paid elected officials to the structure, with no demonstrable enhancements in standards of government.
The problem, of course, resides in the fatal confusion between elections and accountability, it being assumed that the need to get re-elected exerts a restraining influence on the greed of ambitious officials. But given that, as an MP, Soulsby employed his two daughters, Lauren and Eleanor, as junior secretaries and his wife, who earned £25,000 a year as office manager, there was never much chance of such restraint.
Wittering for Witney explores further the failings of representative democracy here, arguing that change is required to our system of democracy. And as long as there are troughers such as Peter Soulsby around, he is not wrong.
It really is about time somebody did some serious thinking about the nature of this democracy of ours and where we are going, breaking away from the simplistic notions that currently govern our structures. Not least, we need to recall that politics is about power, and the ability merely to select one's tormentors (very often from a rigged list) without any means of controlling them is no democracy at all.
COMMENT THREAD
I am grateful, therefore, toWitterings from Witney, for picking up a comment of mine on the Norwegian situation, brought up by Cameron in his Lord Mayor's Banquet speech, and supposedly rebutted by Farage.
This affords me an opportunity to display some irritation (hey! I'm entitled occasionally) at the limitations of our "own" side. For, while one expects nothing of Cameron – or any of the other Tories who seem impervious to knowledge on the EU – one would hope that our own would take the time to find out something of the organisation of which they speak.
In the case of Norway, this is quite important, as the situation is deemed to be a weak point in the eurosceptic armoury. Even outside the EU, it is held, Britain would have to adopt common trading law, as does Norway but, unlike currently, we would lose any influence in its framing, having thus to adopt in the manner of Norway, laws sent to us by fax from Brussels - the so-called "fax law" option.
Bizarrely, Farage concedes this point, although it is not true and can easily be demolished. We have rehearsed it many times and wrote a definitive piece in May 2008, pointing out the actual situation. Most of these laws are not agreed by the EU at all, but by intergovernmental bodies such as UNECE, of which Norway (and the UK) is a member. The legislation is then processed by the EU commission acting in more of a bureaucratic than legislative role.
In other pieces, such as this, I have pointed out that there are dozens of UNECE-type bodies, which would also continue in place even if we left the EU, and through which we would continue to agree international standards, to which EU members would also be bound. Outside the EU, therefore, we would have just as much influence over single market-type law, adopted by EU members.
The down-side, of course, is that leaving the EU would actually provide less relief from petty regulation than we might imagine, although we could disapply much of it from the domestic market.
This though, is core knowledge which should be shaping the debate. But, tediously, one of the leading players continues to do nothing other than display his ignorance, having never troubled to expand his knowledge-set beyond the basic minimum.
And this is why UKIP risks being left at the starting gate, should we come to a real debate about the mechanics of leaving the EU. The Party has no more to offer than the Tories, and that is perilously little.
One sees, for instance, the halt and the lame in that direction, talking blithely about which powers to repatriate and how they would go about reclaiming them, demonstrating absolutely no practical understanding of the complexities involved.
Strangely, of all the policies at present managed by the EU, the first we should claw back is the research programme. This is quite simply because, to repatriate powers, we must replace policies – otherwise there is no point in so doing. And those that are aware of the processes will be aware that a huge amount of policy development (a complex, expensive and time-consuming process) is funded under the research programme.
Thus, is order to reclaim powers, we must develop new policies and, to do that, we must reclaim the policy-making tools.
And so do we need coherence in the debate. Leaving the EU is eminently practicable, possible and necessary, but only if we are able to offer a credible and realistic pathway. To its shame, the eurosceptic community has yet to deliver on this and, when we hear the likes of Farage parade his ignorance, we wonder how longer we are going to have to wait.
COMMENT THREAD
It would be interesting to hear views, but having thought Johnston did not do so well, it seems Jenkins has made a better stab at the issue. Not least is the framing expressed in his strap, which declares: "Capped and cut back, local councils can't raise money by any other means, so it's no surprise they pick on car drivers".
Jenkins asserts that there is coalition government hypocrisy behind the current [local authority] war on motorists. With local taxes held down by government order, the councils are unable to resist increasing parking fees and penalties - what drivers in the capital have come to regard as licensed mugging. What makes it hypocrisy is the attitude of the Treasury, which does nothing to restrict local authorities in turning parking into a cash grab.
For all that, though, Jenkins is wrong to put so much emphasis on parking. As we keep pointing out, the council fees and charges issue is much bigger than just parking, some £25 billion annually as against £2 billion annually extracted thought parking fees and fines.
This broader issue really needs the attention. Despite Jenkins having it that local authority revenue is being "capped and cut back", historically both total income and government grants have never been higher, yet their appetite for additional funds has never been greater.
The ability of local councils – with the complicity of central government - to by-pass national restrictions on taxation levels by ramping up fees and charges, is now "squaring the circle", to the extent that it is a major, if poorly-recognised, national scandal.
COMMENT: "SUPERFICIALITY" THREAD
The Daily Mail, stoking up "anti-Hun rhetoric" is never a pretty sight, and one must always remember that it was Rothermere in the 1930s who was cheerleader for appeasement. Perhaps the newspaper is trying to compensate for earlier sins.
However, the current headlining does flag up an unfortunate, if predictable consequence of the financial tensions in the eurozone, and the conflicting national interests amongst the major players within the European Union. Far from becoming an emollient, the continued drive for political integration has become a serious irritant, adding to tensions rather than resolving them.
Even the more considered words of the Financial Times cannot disguise those tensions, this newspaper talking of "German frustration" over Britain's approach to the eurozone crisis, which has "erupted" on Tuesday after a close ally of Angela Merkel accused the UK of selfishness just days before a meeting between the two countries’ leaders in Berlin.
This a speech to members of the Merkel's CDU party, Volker Kauder, its parliamentary leader, who has criticised Britain for opposing the Tobin Tax, declaring that it was "not acceptable" that the UK was "only defending its own interests" rather than that of the wider European Union.
Anti-German sentiment is still only skin-deep in much of British society, and such comments can only inflame the situation, as indeed will the German insistence in pursuing this expensive and damaging tax. The fault lies by no means with the British, references by Kauder to German "being spoken in Europe" amounting to an extraordinarily insensitive statement for a senior German politician.
With Cameron due to meet Merkel in Berlin on Friday, and himself under pressure to deliver more than his usual europlastic rhetoric, it will not take very much for an outbreak of Hun-bashing to break out in the notoriously jingoistic British media, leaving The Boy politically stranded.
That is yet another consequence of the current stresses. Cameron is trailing so far behind domestic sentiment in his continued support for British membership of the EU that he now risks being caught up in a highly damaging war of words that ends up causing irreparable damage.
How ironic it would be if, in his attempt to keep it all stitched together, The Boy actually contributed to making it worse.
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