The vote’s final impact could even be greater than that of World War One or World War Two. The Brexit decision marks a totally new phase of British politics which politicians so far are being very slow to comprehend. While Theresa May has responded determinedly to events, it is far from clear that she has yet appreciated the power and scope of the new politics that have been created. Winston Churchill unfairly wrote of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement record in order to make his own contribution appear greater, but to the detriment of postwar politics that struggled not to see world events through the prism of fighting dictators. Yet the change from Chamberlain to Churchill signalled a transformative move that we should now be equalling. The Chamberlain government saw the war with Hitler as another issue being dealt with using the usual methods of a peacetime government. Churchill made the war total and adopted the government’s machinery so that it reflected the aims and ambitions of the government and the nation. That war was won because victory was the only aim of any importance for the government, even if other peacetime issues pushed their way onto the political agenda. A similar change in the structure of government is needed if our new war by negotiations is to be equally successful.

On the international stage, politics will centre on the repositioning of Britain as a significant player in the world without being part of the EU. This change must not be underestimated. A phase of Britain leading an empire that merged into a commonwealth, followed by a period of what I see as entrapment within the EU, is now at an end. Britain has to refashion its position in the world. While it might be difficult to get politicians to adjust to this new reality, this is the position that we have moved to and from which we have to rebuild our world status.

I hope there will be friendship with the EU, but the period in which we were locked into an inward European arrangement is coming to its peaceful close. How we position ourselves as an independent, but outwardly-looking, moderately significant player on the world stage is a crucial part of the Brexit transition.

Such a transition will, of course, raise our so called “special relationship” with the United States. In the position we will find ourselves it is crucial that we do not treat the US as mother and run to her for protection. One of the weaknesses of our position in postwar politics was the straitjacket into which Churchill brilliantly, but so damagingly, cast Britain. For understandable reasons Churchill was an Americophile. Trying to convince America that it had a special relationship with us, he thought, was crucial to winning World War Two.

Whether there ever was a special relationship that benefitted us in the long term is for others to debate. The idea that this relationship still exists has had a crippling effect on our foreign and defence policy, and has often meant that our country’s long-term interests have been subjected to the short-term demands of our American ally. Brexit will allow this relationship to be recast.

An equally important part of the repositioning of Britain in the world will be the trading links that have to be built upon and greatly expanded. This is not a question of compensating for our lost EU market. The EU holds a huge trading surplus in its favour. This will result, as Sir James Dyson has publicly stated, in the EU’s concession of a free-trade agreement with us. Britain’s repositioning on trade is about how we restructure our economy so that we balance our current account without constantly relying on the inward movement of capital (to be welcomed for other reasons) and the sale of British industry assets (a most unwelcome development) to do so. It is easy to write these words. The task is Herculean. Again one has to question whether the government has yet got the measure of the task for its industrial strategy, and, if it has, why it has settled on a machinery that is so inadequate to deliver that objective.

These are fundamental criticisms of a government embarking on a strategy that no set of politicians has had to undertake since Britain’s fight for survival in 1940 without a governmental machinery that has been reshaped to deliver success.

The government has, however, rightly laid down that one of the cornerstones in its negotiations with Europe — as opposed to the repositioning of Britain in the world — is that we will control our borders. From this decision our negotiations with the EU will commence. 

The referendum vote marks a genuine revolt by the masses, and by those people who have the least hold on Britain’s wealth but the greatest affection for their country. This group has had to put up with an ever-growing Europhile elite who have constantly sold Britain short. It is noticeable that in all the time Brian Griffiths spent at the heart of the Thatcher government, as he revealed in the September issue of Standpoint, he never once met a top civil servant who expressed even the slightest whiff of doubt about the European programme in which they had helped trap the British people. This “sell-out” was never more clearly expressed than in the elite’s insistence on an open borders policy and, with it, mass immigration. 

But will the Brexit vote be the first of a whole series of transformative actions which not only repudiate the cross-party consensus that our own place is at the very heart of the EU, but begin to build a new chapter in the nation’s history? The government says the vote to leave the EU will be implemented and its strategy is shaped around the control of our borders. This is, I believe, the first move but it must only be a first move.

It should be from the basis of controlling our borders that the government will negotiate its continued access to the single market. That should be the aim, although I do not underestimate the difficulties of holding to the borders cornerstone policy and being successful on this front as well. It will require a huge amount of the government’s time, effort and drive. It is at this point that the machinery the Prime Minister has established again troubles me.

An effective control of our borders needs to operate differently from the present status quo. What will control of the borders mean in practice? The objective must be to control the numbers but there are grave concerns over the machinery that will help achieve that objective. I do not believe that the UK Visas and Immigration Service, as it is currently structured, is able to implement a government policy of bringing down the level of immigration. Such a strategy will take time and, meanwhile, we need whatever border controls we can muster. We must begin to build up an alternative form of border control. This should centre around a system which will allow the government to develop a totally new approach involving in the administration of border controls those sectors of British industry that have most interest in it working successfully.

Universities are a case in point. These are a huge growth industry and wealth creator for the British economy. Whether universities treat overseas students well and honourably is another issue. But through the new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, the government needs to open negotiations with the Vice-Chancellors, telling them they are free to open their universities to any number of overseas students, providing a key condition is fulfilled. Many of the students coming here will want to have the experience of working in the British economy for two years. One of the leakages is that during this period a number of them will marry and may therefore have the right to remain. That is a price we pay for developing a more dynamic economy. But the universities, in being able to market their wares in the most attractive ways, acquire a duty. Their quota of students must be linked to their guaranteeing that the students return to their countries of origin after two years of work experience. Once the Vice-Chancellors live up to their responsibilities and ensure the new system works, student numbers should come out of the official migration data. The same delegated approach — for instance with the manufacturing and engineering body the EEF — should be adopted whereby the federation applies for a quota of work permits which should be granted in the first instance, but only on the condition that the federation has put in hand a training programme for British workers so that their request for the numbers of work permits will fall.

In negotiating our continued access to the single market, the government will not be going into the negotiating chamber naked. As I mentioned earlier, Europe benefits hugely from its trade surplus in having access to the British market. There is an £89.5 billion surplus on physical trade, as against a £20.9 billion British gain on services.

There has already been talk that the EU may make a deal over manufactured goods, but would resist one on services. That division of our manufacturing and services must be resisted at all costs.

Here is where the machinery, or lack of it, in government begins to come into play. To win this most crucial battle, it is necessary to harness every available source of friendly influence and power in the EU. Some of these powers have broken cover and called for the German government, for example, to negotiate their continued access to the British market.

The lobbying operation that is required to make contact with each European company that exports into our market cannot be underestimated. We need to persuade these individual firms to lobby their own governments, both through their trade associations and, if they are large enough, individually on the open trade access they would like to see continue with Britain. The task is huge, but the prize is equally great.

What of Article 50? It should not be invoked quickly, possibly not for years. Failure to trigger this mechanism must not be seen as a sell-out, but part of the most careful negotiating stance. It is important to remember that no preliminary work on a transition programme was undertaken prior to the referendum vote, as the old elite thought they had the Remain vote in the bag. That work now needs to be undertaken. A response to our failure to trigger Article 50 has brought forth a certain anger from parts of the European Commission. If we negotiate well, there will be much more of that anger in future.

Article 50 should be triggered only when it is in the interests of Britain to do so. The convenience of our European partners is not one of our main concerns. France and Germany have elections next year and little progress in formal negotiations can possibly take place until these elections are completed and new governments formed. This gives us valuable time, but even then Article 50 should only be invoked when we are ready to exploit it.

Our strategy must be explained. The Prime Minister should point this out and say we are busy talking with governments and organisations that will have a bearing on the final outcome of membership and access to the EU’s single market.

The European Commission is assuredly right in that we cannot conclude trading deals with other countries while we are still a member of the EU and have not given notice to leave. But a huge amount of negotiating work can be achieved without moving to a formal stage when new treaties will be signed. We should not forget that we are trying to navigate totally new territory without the aid of a map and compass that our EU exit will provide to other large countries if and when their people have a vote to decide their own destinies.

Again it comes back to the machinery of government and whether the capacity and drive exists to meet the task confronting us. By voting to leave, the British public chose to end our 43-year membership of a Common Market that was developed into a European Union with all the lack of safeguards to dissident members that Europe offers. The Brexit vote means that the electorate wants the governing elite to use its energy in representing to the outside world the type of Britain we are fast becoming. This will take a huge amount of imagination and resources, if it is to be achieved successfully. What relevance has a Corbyn-led Labour Party to these momentous developments?

Sadly, very little; for Labour is increasingly making itself irrelevant to this debate. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly made up of Europhile MPs whose main stance has little appeal to the electorate. Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, has been correct in highlighting the role of globalisation as a force for huge losses for our poorest citizens in the short term. But his internationalist position prevents him from having a borders policy or a Labour Party that is relevant to a large sector of the remaining Labour core vote. Labour’s irrelevance to the debate which is beginning to rage on the shape of the new Britain at home and abroad will be seized upon by others, and particularly by UKIP.

Labour has made this UKIP’s opportunity, under its new leader. UKIP are on the right page. The party stands for the politics of identity, locality and links to a culture which is one of shared experiences and memories for local inhabitants. The Labour Party has turned its back on this concern. The problem here is that more than 120 Labour seats voted for Brexit.

These seats are overwhelmingly represented by Europhile Labour MPs. What will these MPs have to say to the UKIP candidate at the next election when all they offer is an undoing of the Brexit decision and a bowl of the same gruel to which the poor have been subjected for the last decade or more?

I have always seen UKIP’s long-term threat to be to the Labour Party while it has been acting as a convenient vehicle for a Tory protest vote. UKIP has replaced the role of the old Liberal Party in gathering such protest votes which, generally speaking, return to the Tory fold at subsequent elections.  

Whether UKIP continues in its current form will partly depend on the antics of Arron Banks, the multimillionaire insurance dealer who backed his own Brexit strategy and is now threatening to form a new right-wing party based on the internet. We may well see Nigel Farage reappear as its leader to exercise his natural talents as a public figure as the pleasures of retirement fade.

If this scenario takes shape, it will clear the way for UKIP to become a centre-left party appealing to Labour voters concerned with identity, culture, place and borders. Presumably in such circumstances UKIP would begin to develop an economic and social strategy favouring those who have lost most from the open borders policy that globalisation has entailed.  Any young, or perhaps not so young, politician wanting to lead a centre-left party would seriously wait to see how UKIP develops, for in a multi-party new Britain UKIP is quite capable of emerging as a centre-left party shorn of much of its right-wing vote siphoned off into Arron Banks’s new venture.

The post Brexit Gives Us A Historic Opportunity appeared first on Standpoint.

On this great emerging agenda neither the government nor Jeremy Corbyn has much to say. Ironically it is the government which is more likely to be saved by the crisis. It will be forced into action to defend our borders so that well before the next election events will have ensured that it is saying and, more importantly, doing much of what the electorate demands. If it doesn’t, I believe the political forces demanding effective border controls will be strong enough to break up Europe’s governing parties.

The pressure to act that naturally falls on the government will not be exerted on the Labour party, whose leader will naturally stick to the internationalist stance he has always espoused. The phrases will sound good to the activists who are understandably celebrating Jeremy’s success. But they will sound increasingly hollow to voters, who will be reminded every time they switch on the news that Europe’s borders are under attack as never before in our history.

Which brings me back to the Corbyn putsch and the comparison with the advent of Mrs Thatcher as Tory leader in 1975. There are crucial differences between these two takeovers, namely how Jeremy’s coup will impact on the events that have only just begun to engulf and will ultimately overturn British politics as we have known it.

On the purely local aspect of the leadership election outcome, British politics will be shaken up on a similar scale that followed Mrs Thatcher’s hijacking of the Tory party. Once in control Mrs T threw overboard the crew and headed the Tory ship into a new direction. 

Jeremy’s victory in the Labour party is of similarly breath-taking proportions. But here a crucial difference emerges. Mrs T sailed her ship into a political ocean that was favourable to her. Not so with Jeremy. His direction takes us into a huge ocean of hostile voters.

Mrs T had luck on her side. Her newly installed crew’s views were ones that had widespread support in the country, although not among the metropolitan elite. Jeremy’s crew members are similarly enthusiastic in the task before them. But their views are not ones that are shared widely enough to win an election, even in our broken electoral system that is overwhelmingly weighted towards the two main parties.

It is here that the tragedy engulfing Labour becomes more apparent. The crew Jeremy has, in effect, thrown overboard or who, more importantly, jumped ship, also hold views which couldn’t win in 2020.

The views of the three defeated candidates on controlling our borders are also anathema to voters — but for different reasons to the case put forward by Jeremy. The lines of the defeated opposition to Jeremy were of pure Blairism. Each of the three candidates are political children of Blair, no matter how much they proclaim otherwise. Theirs is a stance on Blair’s open Europe that inevitably leads to the same policies that will flow from Jeremy’s internationalism. The defeated wing of the Labour party is opposed to erecting national borders that will be the consequential demand arising from the collapse of European barriers.

It is at this point that Labour comes smack up against all the poll findings of why people voted as they did in the last election.

Jon Cruddas, the architect of Labour’s election manifesto, has now been tasked with drawing the lessons from the party’s historic defeat. He quickly published the detailed findings of a poll he commissioned into Labour’s election failure.

One only has to read the findings on the movement of voters away from Labour at the election to realise that Jeremy will be leading Labour into a political cul-de-sac. Jon Cruddas’s analysis presents voters as polarising into three broad, sometimes overlapping groups. The first, comprising about a third of the electorate and the largest among party members, are socially liberal, altruistic, at home with the modernity of city life, and better-off than most voters.

The priority of the second group, 37 per cent of voters, is to improve their income and social status. The third group is socially conservative with values centring around the home, the family and national security. They tend to be found among older voters and make up 29 per cent of voters.

In the general election, Labour witnessed a collapse in its support among its previous bedrock vote in this third, traditionalist group. Some 24 per cent of the UKIP vote came from Labour’s social conservatives. 

These voters are more likely than others to mention immigration, toughness on welfare, Europe, national security and fiscal responsibility as important. Any Labour recovery must be based on developing policies that win them back in a way that also appeals to other groups. More importantly, the views held by this third group will become more widely shared, particularly among the second group of aspirational voters, as the parliament unfolds. Defending EU borders will become the dominant political issue here until they are overwhelmed. Then the debate will switch fulltime to how to hold the line on our own borders.

Defending our borders will become the dominant issue in British politics. It will be the defining issue in the forthcoming EU referendum — no matter how the Prime Minister ducks and weaves over our renegotiation terms. It will also ricochet into home politics where welfare and the NHS will be viewed through the borders issue as they have never been before.

Take welfare first. Voters will demand that rules governing entitlement to social security benefits must reinforce how we define the borders to this country. The long-time grievance of voters — that welfare is unfair — centres on the fact that somebody is granted entitlement to benefit simply because they turn up to make a claim. Voters have long wished for a welfare system where entitlement to benefit is clearly linked to past contributions. In this way eligibility will reinforce our border controls.

Likewise with health. Our core working-class vote deeply resents our “open borders”-type welfare state. We run a National Health Service. The operative word here is “national”.  Yet Labour is all too often found to be sounding as if it supports a health service and welfare state open to all comers. The demand will be for a health and welfare state based on past contributions, with entitlements increasingly accessed only by prospective claimants in possession of ID cards carrying our contribution records and our right to be here.

Likewise with housing. We must tackle the inviolability of the green belt if the nation’s shortage of housing is to be addressed. But what is the point of building more houses if our borders are open and no one knows how many people will be seeking accommodation by 2020?

Moreover, if we believe the main basis of welfare is contributory, shouldn’t long-standing citizens be at the front of the queue for social housing and other areas of welfare?

The polls show that a new coalition of voters is willing to sign up to this kind of programme on health, welfare, housing and immigration. They have already moved into post-Blair Britain. But Jeremy rejects such an approach that holds out the possibility of building a wider coalition of voters prepared to give voice to the poor. Both Jeremy and his defeated opposition are, like Lot’s wife, frozen, staring into the past. 

Yet it is with border politics that Labour can begin to forge a coalition of voters whose sharp elbows will advance not only their own interests but those of the weakest. Here are the beginnings of a route back to power. But will these potential voters have to wait for a leader to emerge only after the razzmatazz of Jeremy’s victory is forgotten?

The post No, Jeremy: Politics Is All About Borders Now appeared first on Standpoint.

King George V is reported to have been taught how British government worked by first reading Walter Bagehot’s great book on the British constitution. Today Harriet Sergeant’s book on teenage London gangs would be a better guide. Among the Hoods (Faber & Faber, £14.99) tells us more about how political leadership emerges and is sustained in this country than any other commentary I have come across, even if this was not Sergeant’s objective.

Bagehot’s Victorian commentary gave a two-dimensional view of politics. It was about power and the institutions through which political power operated. These two dimensions should never be ignored, for political power will be exercised over time through different institutions captured and adapted by owners of new economic power.

The monarch’s supremacy was first challenged as the holders of economic power, based on the ownership of land, wished to share with the sovereign the role of governing. But with the rise of industrialism, that landowning economic power base was in turn challenged by a new industry-owning class who also wanted political recognition. So political power moved again, as it had from the monarch to the landed gentry, to industrial power centred in the House of Commons. And it was this state of power play that Bagehot described as our constitution.

It was, in fact, a picture of a very short period in our political history that is now described as the “Liberal view of the constitution”. The House of Commons made and unmade governments. This was the age of the independence of MPs. Whether this pivotal role of Commons is to be resurrected by a multiplicity of parties after the general election, we have only to wait until May 7 to find out.
 
Power was soon on the move again, first to the select few in the House of Commons who managed, as Disraeli did, to climb to the top of the greasy pole of political ambition and then into the Cabinet. Today, this group comes almost exclusively from the Commons, with only a handful from the Lords. It is at this point that the limitations of Bagehot become apparent, and it’s time for Harriet Sergeant to step forward and take a bow.

When is the little gang that reaches the top of the greasy pole formed?

It is a question which is rarely asked. But it is of profound importance. By locating where the political gang’s leadership is formed, we learn how a political power base is formed and how it might be sustained. The formation of a power base also tells us much about the degree to which our political society is open or closed.

We are currently being run by the gang of Cameron. It was not formed in the House of Commons, as an unsuspecting observer might guess, but at Oxford. Some of the gang members had already met up at Eton; however, the deputy gang leader—George Osborne—was not schooled there, but at St Paul’s. And Michael Gove, who is the best example of meritocracy in action, was educated in what we need to recognise since the Scottish referendum as a school north of the English border.

The formation of the gang of Cameron is far from uncommon. It is not the first time that a top team has come from university to the House of Commons, lock, stock and barrel, and ready to wrestle for political power. More remarkably, possibly, was the Cambridge-based cabinet that emerged under Mrs Thatcher’s stewardship. The majority of her cabinet—Geoffrey Howe, Kenneth Clarke, Leon Brittan, John Gummer to name a few—are captured in a Cambridge University Conservative Association photograph in the early 1960s. All that is missing from this photograph is the leader herself (who went to Oxford). 

Here we see that a political gang can operate with a “hostile” headship although, in the end, it was this Cambridge gang that brought down Mrs Thatcher. Even so, what was remarkable was that Mrs T was the outsider in every sense to her cabinet, both by gender and by not being part of this Cambridge-based political gang.

The gang, of course, like the ones described in Among the Hoods, can adopt new members. But such membership is based on the additional services or skills the gang needs to survive, and the new members rarely, if ever, rise into the leadership’s inner ranks. Most suffer the indignity of being spat out once the emergency or crisis that has given rise to their membership has passed.

The gang formation of political leadership revises, if not undermines, one of the key roles of the House of Commons, which has been viewed in the traditional text as being very much concerned with the formation of a government.

The functions that still reside with the monarch—the right to be consulted, to advise and to warn—are functions that she now shares with the House of Commons. The Commons has the right to be consulted on what the gang is up to, and to advise and warn them. The monarch’s advice is given in private, and remains so.

The Commons’ advice used to be similarly relayed privately through the whips. Not so any more. Much more often, if this Parliament is anything to go by, the advising will be very public and sometimes, when public diplomacy has failed, it will be delivered in the voting lobbies.

A further function of the House of Commons has only recently been acquired—to conduct a continuous election campaign. Each side tries to promote their best image and, likewise, the worst image of their opponents. Here the gang rule depends on the election outcome and they therefore attempt to control that debate in their favour. Fortunately they do not always win.

One sees this now over the issue of immigration, which is likely to dominate the election and last into the next Parliament. Independent MPs on both sides of the House have been warning their respective leadership of the impending disaster of the rise of UKIP that would primarily represent an anti-immigration stance, if they continue to refuse to engage seriously with the issue. On the immigration issue the Cameron gang is showing greater ability than the Miliband gang to listen and act on such advice.

Should Cameron stumble, his gang will do their very best at choosing their next leader. After all, the importance that George Osborne has given in promoting trusty lieutenants in the formation of the Cabinet, and then in every reshuffle, should not be lost. Whatever Theresa May’s abilities, she is likely to gain the leadership only if the power of the gang is broken by electoral failure. The breaking of a gang’s power doesn’t, however, automatically follow an election defeat. Look at Neil Kinnock succeeding Michael Foot, and Ed Miliband taking over from his boss, Gordon Brown. 

A Labour failure at the polls will be followed by a swift change in leadership. What remains of the Blair gang will move quickly to prevent a succession from within the existing gang hierarchy.

Those politicians working to influence who succeeds this time will do well to observe the role of the political gang in modern political leadership and how rare and difficult it is to overthrow its power. The greatest danger to the gang comes after the big street fight that is formally known as a general election. Those wishing to break the power of either of today’s ruling gangs need to be ready to strike on the morrow of May’s general election. The gang leaderships will need no warning on this score.

The post Warring Gangsters Who Run The Country appeared first on Standpoint.

There are, generally speaking, two ways by which social reform comes about in this country. The first is from the force of an inspirational leader. The second is, to use Harold Macmillan’s phrase, by “events, dear boy, events”. The most radical health reforms are going to be made necessary in the next Parliament by events, dear reader, events. Health and welfare were once reformed by an inspirational leader. Sir William Beveridge published his blueprint for a new social order at the great turning-point in the Second World War, coinciding with Montgomery’s desert victory at El Alamein. Public interest switched from how the country might survive to the world after the war, as Beveridge presented his reconstructions for post-war health and welfare.

Beveridge built on the basis Lloyd George and Neville Chamberlain had laid down over the previous 30 years and he did so for fiscal reasons that are as valid today as they were then. Lloyd George judged that the tax base was too small and inflexible to be expanded to finance his health and unemployment reforms. Paying by way of National Insurance built on the country’s growing sense of fairness: you pay in before you draw out.

Beveridge naturally followed. His great health and welfare reforms were to be paid for from a much enlarged National Insurance scheme. So to advocate a National Insurance basis for reforming the NHS is far from revolutionary. It is, rather, to adopt the finance model that has always served this country well: the contributory principle.

A National Insurance approach to financing health has a number of clear advantages, and none more so than the prospect of the public being unlikely to elect a government committed to a non-hypothecated increase in taxes. Contributors never viewed National Insurance contributions as a tax, despite the fact that politicians have continued to call them thus. More important has been that contributors saw these services as theirs, paid for by their own contributions.Here is the beginning of a link between benefit levels, the level of healthcare, and costs. It is here that events, dear reader, will push reform in the next Parliament back along the National Insurance path.

Sixty per cent of cuts still need to be enacted. Yet even these cuts will not be sufficient. Balancing the books will require a further £12 billion cut in the welfare bill. The idea that tax increases of any size are going to be made for health, let alone welfare, is moonshine. But the NHS is already in deficit and that deficit will grow each year over the next Parliament to make a cumulative shortfall of £90 billion. That is not a misprint. In 2020 alone the annual NHS deficit will have reached a staggering £30 billion. The political response shouldn’t simply be one of succumbing to blackmail for yet more and more money, without it being clearly linked to productivity gains. After reviewing the huge injection of new monies into health from 2001, the National Audit Office observed that while “there has been significant real growth in the resources going to the NHS, most of it [was allocated to] funding higher staff pay and increases in headcount. The evidence shows that productivity in the same period has gone down, particularly in hospitals.”

This is why I propose to raise through National Insurance half of the monies required to plug that £90 billion deficit and that these new monies should be used not only to reshape the service, away from hospitals to GPs, but also to drive through productivity increases while keeping the health service free at the point of use. But I don’t think this new injection of cash will by itself result in the changes necessary to gain a new deal for patients. It hasn’t in the past.

Acting on the principle that every crisis can be used for radical reform, I have proposed that the next government establish a National Insurance mutual. The mutual would have all the functions that NHS England and Monitor—the sector regulator—currently have. But the mutual would be owned by us, the contributors. Its governance could follow the John Lewis model whereby the members elect a strategy board which then appoints an executive board to carry out the policies it decides upon.

Crucially, the strategy board would receive all the additional funding from the National Insurance increase. When Gordon Brown put a penny on National Insurance to “save” the health service, he secreted away almost half the sum to other pet projects. The mutual will set future contribution levels in negotiation with the contributors and the government. This leads on to the mutual’s other function. It needs to inform, educate and seek approval from us, the contributory owners, on the range that a future free health service should take and to gain our support to drive through productivity increases with our money.
It is here that the national mutual would break further ground in the health debate in this country. At the moment the clinicians largely decide on the pattern of NHS treatments. Further down the line, the politicians have to pick up the bill, however reluctantly. The new health mutual would dispel the idea that voters have of a bottomless pit of money from which resources can forever be drawn.

National Insurance has also struck a deep chord with the nation’s gut feelings about fairness: you have to have paid in before you can establish an entitlement. To reinforce this crucial feeling, I proposed that contributors and their families would have an entitlement card. These entitlement cards would also prevent NHS tourism. We would need to present our cards when visiting our GPs or going to hospital. Pie in the sky? I think not. It’s how events will play, dear reader, and it’s these events that will deliver an NHS Mark II.

The post Time For An NHS Mark II appeared first on Standpoint.

Tam Dalyell was the MP who saw how devolution had the potential to destroy the British Constitution as we know it. He posed a simple but deadly question: how could it be fair to English voters that their MPs are excluded from having a say in what happens to the constituents of Scottish MPs, whereas Scottish MPs can vote on all English matters? Worse still, those Scottish and sometimes Scottish Nationalist MPs, could now be in a position to put into power at Westminster a government that did not have a majority among English MPs.

Tam is still waiting for an answer to that question he posed back in 1977, which is now known as the West Lothian Question. During a recent interview he suggested that one response to the referendum result should be the abolition of the Scottish Parliament, to batten down the hatches, and wait for the inevitable political hurricane that will result to blow itself out. Tam’s preferred option, as he well knows, isn’t going to happen. The genie of country-based nationalism is well and truly out of the bottle and not only in Scotland. The only durable response, therefore, is to see the devolution principle through to its logical conclusion, which means a proper and durable settlement for England.

That is not what the Prime Minister is offering. The Smith Commission — established as the votes were counted in the referendum — reported in November on a “Devo Max” settlement. It continues the political muddle that has existed since the original Scottish Devolution Act and a muddle that advantages Scotland but leaves England with the most inferior political status of any of the countries that make up the UK. The report’s 21 major fiscal and constitutional reforms can be grouped around two major themes.

Scotland will set the rates of income tax and will keep half of the existing VAT revenue raised in Scotland. Scotland will likewise have the power to borrow in its own right in the international money markets. A great silence falls on how the revenue from these tax-raising powers will be offset against the Barnett formula that decides the amount of central taxpayer support to each of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom.

As well as these major fiscal advantages Scotland becomes sovereign over how it runs its own elections. From now on, we will almost certainly have no common suffrage. Scotland will be allowed to determine, for example, its own qualification for the age at which citizens first vote. This reform is presented in the Smith Commission as though it were little more than a bauble to decorate a constitutional Christmas tree. But a moment’s thought suggests how destructive it will be to an equality of votes throughout the United Kingdom. For the first time since universal suffrage there will be no universally geographically applied qualification for the vote.

The Smith Commission report is the latest instalment of an appeasement policy that has been operated in Scotland’s favour for the past 40 years or more. The cost of the appeasement has been borne exclusively by England.

Fortunately, as Humpty Dumpty plummeted earthbound, it was already clear what would happen to his constitutional parts. That much was clear, of course, once the Scotland Act hit the statute book. There is no other means of answering the West Lothian Question satisfactorily than by re-establishing equity among the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom, each with its own representative parliament or assembly. The unthinking retort to such a proposal is that it would create two different types of MPs. The truth is, of course, that that is the very injustice under which English MPs currently labour. A majority of all MPs, with the support of MPs from non-English constituencies, can outvote in our current system the wishes of a majority of English MPs trying to decide purely English matters. An English assembly or parliament is the only way I see of answering Tam’s West Lothian Question in a manner that re-establishes equity amongst the four countries of the United Kingdom.

Each assembly — for England, Wales and Northern Ireland — should have the powers that have been, or are about to be granted to the Scottish Parliament. The remaining functions would be reserved for a senate (which would replace the present House of Lords). Foreign affairs, defence and the remaining Exchequer powers would be exercised by a senate common to all four nations. This senate, I suggest, should be made up of two types of members. Two hundred and fifty or so would be elected by the voters from new senate constituencies based on between six and seven current parliamentary or, as they would be called, assembly constituencies. Each one of these senate constituencies would return a senator. Whether they should be elected on a first-past-the-post principle, or on some other form of proportional representation, should be the basis for further debate. What must be ruled out from the outset would be the current system for EU elections, where the party hierarchy decides the order in which the candidates are elected, with voters restricted to a choice of voting for a political party but never a person. We must be able to elect our senators and they must be accountable to a known electorate and be known to that electorate.

I would also suggest that we retain the valued independence and wide-ranging expertise of the current House of Lords by allocating a hundred or so senate places among each of the constituent parts of the Big Society, so the established representatives of the professions, the arts, education, science, religion, trade unions and industrialists et al. would elect senators through their associations.

The current House of Commons would be the meeting place for the English parliament or assembly. Their Lordships would cease to sit in Parliament and the buildings of the House of Lords would be the meeting place for the senate. The senate should be encouraged to hold some of its sessions in each of the four constituent countries, particularly when considering legislation particular to that country. It should also be encouraged to hold pre-legislative hearings as part of its business, whether conducted in Westminster or in other countries of the United Kingdom. The overall aim would be to simplify the present structure of government and to do so at nil cost. The abolition of the House of Lords would save £93 million annually.

Timing is crucial. Whether we think it wise or necessary, the promises that have been made to Scotland must be honoured. People cast their votes on these pledges. But the professional constitutionalists — those calling for restraint and mega-conventions and royal commissions and God knows what, and who have had, after all, since 1977 to think out their position — should not be allowed to slow down justice for England.

Both the major political parties are now intent on erecting their own roadblocks against achieving justice for the English. The Prime Minister’s call for English votes for English issues is little more than a catchphrase. A moment’s reflection shows how near impossible it would be to work effectively within our current constitutional arrangements. Who would decide, for example, when an issue was an exclusively English matter, and when it related to the other three countries of the UK? Would those MPs who are critical of the current Speaker’s stewardship be happy with the holder of that office deciding which MPs would vote on which measures?

Nor should Labour’s understandable, but totally unacceptable, wish to maintain their Scottish bonus be allowed to negate setting the outlines of the English question this side of the election. The voters recognise weasel words when they hear them. Labour’s offer of a major constitutional convention is a not very skilful attempt to kill the debate until after the votes are counted. This issue, once lost in the long grass, is where, I suspect, Labour will wish to keep it. But Labour has to accept the truth that the bonus that is gained from having Scottish MPs added to the English parliament now has a sell-by-date put on it by the Scottish voters themselves.

I would suggest that an enabling Bill on England, Wales and Northern Ireland be tabled, debated and voted upon before the next election. The next Parliament should debate and settle the details of the enabling Act, but the form of the constitutional change must be clear and submitted to voters at this coming general election. The next Parliament could, of course, take such a measure off the statute book, but Labour will only do so by effectively branding itself as the anti-English party, with all the consequences this would bring in English Labour seats at the following election.

Some, perhaps many of us, opposed Scottish devolution in that we knew that devolution was a journey rather than a destination and that it would inevitably fracture the United Kingdom. But, sadly, breaking up has been shown not to be all that hard to do.

Scottish devolution was rammed through by those, like Gordon Brown, who now claim that its logical outcome, the settlement of the English question, would strike a dagger at the heart of our constitution. That dagger was wielded long ago by those who steadily refused to see that it was they who made the English question what it is. There were no demands for an English parliament until the Scottish reformers forced their reforms on England.

Those of us who opposed the original devolution proposals now have a duty to make a settlement of the English question in a manner that does not spitefully disadvantage those other three countries — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And a clear statement to that end can be made in the powers and country representation in the new senate. The English should propose limiting their numerical advantage in any four-nation constitutional settlement and to do so in deciding the national shares for the new senate places. Likewise, the English should move to give a new senate proper checks and balances on any extreme activities of the four assemblies or parliaments. I can think of no better time to rework our infinitely flexible constitution than the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta this year.

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The cover, like the book itself, is there to surprise. At first sight the photograph of a collapsing church was, I assumed, depicting the handiwork of Mr A. Hitler. But, the book informs us, the photograph was taken in 1937 and, in a matter-of-fact manner, tells us that the church was being demolished because of an insufficient congregation. Here, in graphic detail, is the final chapter in the story of a Protestantism that had forged the England of most readers’ childhoods.  

The work is a wonderful read, but it isn’t an easy one. Curiously, it is best to start with the conclusion as this summarises what the book is truly about, leaving the first chapter until last. There are two surprising heroes to illustrate the story: the “Dismal Dean”, William Ralph Inge, and, perhaps even more surprising, Seebohm Rowntree, the inventor of the poverty line. Green transforms the importance of both characters as key staging posts in his history.

I had previously seen Inge as an outstandingly clever, ever so witty reactionary, who could begin a sermon, “Jesus tells us to forgive — but we cannot,” and earned a tidy sum from popular journalism. Green reveals him as the most serious of prophets, warning of the catastrophe that awaited our country, once stripped of Christianity.

A similar revelation awaits the reader on Seebohm Rowntree. Best known, alongside Charles Booth, as the inventor of the English style of sociology, Rowntree is presented as the originator of that fast-growing industry which now sails under the banner of cultural studies.  

Rowntree’s concern was the impact on a country that, for the first time, discovered leisure: longish spells of collective idleness not enforced by unemployment. With the advent of this leisure culture, England became a nation mainly indifferent to institutional religion. Rowntree was the first to plot this disengagement of our country from organised religion, but the outcry that greeted his work is now largely forgotten.  

Like so many mid-Victorian observers before him, Rowntree asked was about what impact the dying-out of Christianity would have on the character of England, and their collective concern was to ensure that Christian morality would survive without Christian dogma. For a century, thanks to T. H. Green and his idealist disciples, their wish was granted. A century later, Rowntree recorded that the activity had become bankrupt.

Where does this disintegration of Christianity leave us as a nation? Here is the importance of this tome for today’s debate, as our nation tries to make sense of what life is and what it should and can be about. We are forced to do so against an elite which has fought ruthlessly to ensure that the sticky fog of relativism is smeared over the country’s debate and where anyone’s moral compass is considered as good as anyone else’s. Yet Rowntree went to the heart of the matter: “In some future century, men may become so highly civilised” as to be able to “regulate their lives according to an ethical system shorn of all supernatural religion with which to give it authority”. Rowntree concluded: “That time is not yet.” 

I, like Rowntree, accept that the clocks cannot be turned back. So how do we react to living in a world where there are no supernatural religions available with a universal appeal to underpin our society’s moral rules, and where we are not yet so civilised that the basic rules come naturally? Isn’t the one option we have open to us to agree the ground rules on citizenship and for such rules to be systematically taught? T. H. Green’s brilliance was in converting Christianity into public ideology. Labour, for all sorts of reasons, failed to recognise and address his achievement, although David Blunkett tried to row against the tide. In picking up Blunkett’s mantle, the current Prime Minister might gain an over-arching theme which would knit together his government’s domestic programme.

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The Attlee revolution entailed not simply nationalising the commanding heights of the economy but, much more sinisterly, the Government brought most of civil society – apart from the trade unions – under the whip of central government control. Thatcher’s revolution denationalised the industrial sector, blew up the City’s restrictive practices and handed power back to individual trade unionists. What the Thatcherites left untouched was central government’s iron fist, which still controls how most of the 42 per cent of national income is spent.

One effective way for Gordon Brown to revive his government would be to establish pilots so that these six proposals become stepping stones to his 2010 manifesto. Alternatively, David Cameron might nail his colours to the mast, rather than the fence.

First, individual control over public expenditure. I do not sense much support for an old-fashioned Thatcherite approach of cutting taxes and leaving individuals to sink or swim. There is clearly much auditing to do on the massive totals of public expenditure and such efforts will yield significant tax cuts. But what individuals also want is for greater control over their public expenditure. Children gain over their first 19 years child benefit and tax credits averaging a value of £100,000. Why cannot parents, if they so wish, draw-down a quarter of this tax-free sum if one of them wishes not to return to work and instead concentrate on nurturing their children?

Second, galvanising support for mega capital projects. While we have one of the longest running farces over Terminal 5, the Government keeps pushing for a fifth runway. No sensible government in this terrorist age should allow such an intensity of flights over its capital city. A new site at the mouth of the Thames should be designated and accompanied by the announcement that the last flight will leave Heathrow 25 years hence. Planning new rail and speed water links back into London should become key parts of this project. Pulling the British transport system into the 21st century is one of the serious long-term decisions voters expect governments to take.

Third, establishing our own sovereign wealth fund. There could not have been a clearer demonstration that the era of rapacious capitalism was at an end than when Merrill Lynch had to grovel to eastern sovereign wealth funds to bail out capitalism’s most prestigious flagship. Britain needs its own sovereign wealth fund and it should operate one on the back of pension reform. Pensions, underpinned by savings, should be universalised and, as no sensible person would ever trust governments with their savings, Britain should operate its own sovereign wealth fund at arm’s length from the Government. A new body, set on a par with the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, would be charged with the investment strategy. It would become the cornerstone in a rebuilding of civil society.

Fourth, revolutionising what is meant by state education. The one education reform no government has tried is putting parents firmly in control. Can anyone believe that 40 per cent of children would leave primary schools without the minimum skills for a ten year old and that over 50 per cent of pupils would fail to achieve the minimum leaving standard of 5 A* to C GCSEs including English and Maths, if parents were in control? Denmark allows any community of 300 parents, too dissatisfied with the state schools, to draw-down the equivalent budget and form their own Little School. Similar powers should be given to parents in this country.

Fifth, saving the globe. When the President of Guyana announced before Christmas that his rainforest was for sale, a radical government would have immediately made a down-payment to begin a world-wide National Trust-like operation whereby individuals could make immediate contributions out of their own pockets to reward such nations. The prototype for this initiative, Cool Earth, is one of the new bodies which should allow civil society, not governments, to safeguard the planet.

Sixth, initiating a democratic blood transfusion. Democracy is at the heart of British society, but it is in urgent need of medical attention. Only 22 per cent of the electorate elected the current Government. Power needs to be moved back from the parties to the voters by instigating open primary elections in safe seats. Similarly, given the failure of the police to respond to public concerns, chief superintendents, who decide day to day policing strategy, should become electable. While such a strategy will not make good the obvious shortfall we have in policing manpower, it would ensure that existing resources were deployed most effectively. The local electorate would set the targets by which the chief superintendents would be judged.

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