←

Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor

Tag: UK General Election

  • Reform the House of Commons

    mayberetiredpastor

    Reform the House of Commons

    At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.

    Daniel 6:4

    So, the manifestos of the major parties have been published and some of you may be wondering if I secretly authored the Green Party manifesto. The answer is no – but maybe they’ve been reading my blogs! I have voted Labour consistently all of my adult life (with one or two exceptions) but you might have noticed that I’m unimpressed with the present offering of Labour. Therein lies a problem with our democracy.

    At school, I was taught that government proposes and parliament (i.e the House of Commons) disposes – that is, the government proposes the laws it wants to enact and the House of Commons decides whether or not to allow the government to enact those laws. But in our modern parliament that is a myth. In reality, the government both proposes and disposes, that is, whatever the government decides it wants to do it can if it has a parliamentary majority, and because of our first-past-the-post system of election governments almost always have a majority.

    Government gets its way because MPs are completely beholden to their political parties. Individual MPs rarely actually read or examine the proposed legislation (that only happens in the Lords!). The parties instruct their MPs how to vote and MPs are punished if they step out of line. The only path to progression as an MP is through the patronage of your party. If you constantly go against the party line you do not progress as an MP and may even be refused permission to stand as a candidate at the next election (witness the Labour Party debacle over Diane Abbott). The patronage of the political parties is wielded over the whole career of the individual MP from consideration as a candidate right through to whether you can hold position in government or one of the powerful committees in Parliament.

    Before 1832 there was a system of “rotten boroughs” in the UK. The MPs for those boroughs were nominated by powerful people who owned the boroughs and consequently the MPs were beholden to those powerful people. This particular system no longer exists but has been effectively replaced by the patronage of our two party system. The MPs we elect are not answerable to us but to their party. This is every bit as corrupt as the old system of rotten boroughs.

    Constitutional reform is not on the agenda of any party (Why would it be? It’s not in their interests!) but that we need it to properly reflect our views and achieve better governance and management of the country is, in my view, unanswerable. But what sort of reform do we need?

    Parties as prospective governments need to be separated from MPs as representatives. Much as in the US, we should vote directly for whichever party we believe should be entrusted with government, but MPs need to be elected separately to parliament. Candidates for MPs should be funded and overseen by the state and not by the parties and their election should be by a form of proportional voting. Political parties offer themselves for election as the government by first-past-the-post voting. Once in government they can propose their legislative programme to MPs who are no longer beholden to their parties (if they are members of a party) and neither parties nor government can require MPs to vote in any particular way.

     This is just the barest sketch of a reform. For very many people, including myself, our present system does not work very well. No party programme entirely satisfies all our aspirations for ourselves or our communities, and we have no genuine representation by our MPs who, as individuals, might give the nuances  to legislative discussion that we desire. We need constitutional reform, but what needs to be reformed is not the House of Lords but the House of Commons.

  • When Is A Tax-Cut Not A Tax-Cut

    mayberetiredpastor

    When Is A Tax-Cut Not A Tax-Cut?

    But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ …

    Ephesians 4:15

    When is a tax-cut not a tax-cut? When it’s a Tory one! We are in the throes of general election hype and spin. The Conservative Party has announced that if voted back into government the state pension will never be taxed even if it increases above the current tax-free threshold of around £12,500. They are presenting this as a tax-cut, which it isn’t because the state pension does not currently exceed the tax-free threshold and won’t for a good few years to come, so nobody’s actually paying any tax on their state pensions! Setting that aside, in itself it’s not a bad idea and certainly worth considering. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount  I received in state pension (currently around £800 a month) but it wouldn’t be easy to survive on it if it were all the income you had as a pensioner. So, to have the assurance that it will never be taxed would reassure those who do rely wholly or mostly on it.  But it isn’t a tax-cut.

    Which brings me to Rachel Reeves and Labour. On Sunday, she ruled out any increases in income tax or National Insurance if she were to be Chancellor in the next government. Instead, she reassures “us” (which “us” would that be I wonder?) that Labour is the natural party for business and will “grow the economy” in order to raise funds for the spending plans of a future Labour government. Nonetheless, she concedes that she would have “difficult decisions” to make on spending! Meanwhile, Keir Starmer has pledged to hit the 18 week waiting time target for NHS consultations within five years of assuming power. So, I wonder how is Labour going to do that – closing all the prisons and releasing all prisoners into the community perhaps, maybe this is the “difficult” spending decision Rachel Reeves will make? It would certainly save a lot of money which could be diverted to the NHS!

    Our political culture is one in which the major protagonists refuse to be honest. We cannot have an honest debate on tax and spending, instead of setting out the alternatives and the costs and consequences of the various alternatives we are fed sound bites intended to lull or deceive into acceptance. Why can Rachel Reeves not say I have to raise £x billions to ensure that we can hit the 18 week NHS consultation targets which may mean raising taxes by  x%, but if the economy grows by a  certain amount it may be less? Why do the Tories have to dress-up a proposal worth considering as a “tax-cut” when it is nothing of the sort? The Bible teaches us to “speak the truth in love” but as a society we seem incapable of doing this. Unfortunately, this simply opens the doors to Satan, the father of lies as Jesus famously described him, with the terrible consequences that we see and hear about all too frequently.