Vocal Voices

Suff has put some good stuff on here about how devloution has brought about some much needed improvements in Scotland.

Here is some evidence about how it is being used in England, or some examples which show the potential for it's misuse.

Canterbury council. The leader of the council is Conservative Ben Fitter-Harding, who lives in the Boughton area with his husband, Jonathan, and runs a hotel in the city centre.
Ben recently unveiled the council’s extravagant "transport" plans. He intends to divide the city into five zones. People will not be allowed to travel by car from one zone to another. They have to stay in their zone or walk.
If they really need their cars to -travel to another part of Canterbury, they must avail themselves of a new ring road on the outskirts of the city, thus possibly increasing tenfold or more the distance to be travelled. People will not be able to drive to their supermarket of choice – they will be fined if they do. Many will not be able to drive to work. When presented with objections about how people were to do their week’s shopping, Mr Fitter-Harding said: ‘By 2045, will people actually be driving to their supermarket in the same way that they do now? You could use a hopper bus to get there, choose your shopping and get it delivered back to you.’

This is authoritarian in the extreme. Fining you for going to the supermarket of your choice?? Making you go six times the distance to where you want to go? (Which will obviously increase emissions).
All this because of Canterbury council trying is to save the planet by virtually banning car use in the city.

Or take Oxford. Duncan Enright, a member of the Labour party, who is Oxfordshire County Council’s ‘cabinet member’ for travel and development. He is imposing pretty much the same scheme upon the residents of Oxford. Again, the city is being divided up into a number of zones but Duncan is more zealous than Ben, so in Oxford there will be massive roadblocks to prevent people escaping from one of their zones into a neighbouring zone, although if found straying from their own ghetto they will still cop a fine from the council. Duncan wants to create what he calls the ‘15-minute city’. He said: ‘It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs – the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools – which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood.’

Mr Enright told the Oxford Mail that his little scheme would go ahead regardless or not of whether the public liked it.

Local democracy?

Lastly Manchester, a great city that voted against having an elected Mayor, but got one anyway - Andy Burnham. Now the Great Helmsman Burnham is trying to introduce a congestion charge. A charge which Manchester voted a resounding 94% NO to, but he's going to do it anyway.
He’s also using his wife’s company to install the cameras. (On hold at the moment due to massive public outcry).

Hopefully this demonstrates that in England there is no local democracy and that more power granted to these Mayors is only going to result in more schemes which the public don't want, but get anyway.

And there was the whole problem. Westminster is a UK assembly. When devolution happened there should have been an English assembly too and Westminster should have been scaled back. This is how all federal governments work. By creating devolution the UK federalised. Of course that didn't fit the aspirations of Brown and Blair. So it was a Ducking Fisaster for England.

Just about the same as everything Blair did.

After a bit ofpoking around I have found out that the idea of "15 minute neighbourhoods" as pushed by the Labour party in Oxford, is actually coming from Michael Bloomberg.
Who is Michael Bloomberg? He is an American billionaire and also President of the Board of C40 Cities.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... lobal-push

So there you go. Once again a foreign bilionaire seems to have more influence in British politics than the British people have.

This is not much more than we have discussed here from time to time. How to revitalise inner cities. Europe does it well but we suck at it.

The problem is when you give it to bunch of sponge brains like Labour councillors. All they see is "shut down the traffic and make them use bikes or public transport". What they do not see is that you have to "invest" in the local infrastructure first and make it more more attractive to use the services within the city. Only applying the control "stick" when people simply carry on doing what they were doing before.

There is no IQ test for becoming a councillor. How can we expect them to responsibly implement any form of societal change within our cities.

Oh they think they are doing a great job. But that is as far as their thinking goes. This policy is not so much about American billionaires pushing their ideas at us, we get ideas from wherever they are born. The problem is that in the UK, on average, the success of these policies is on parallel with pulling a fish out of the river and telling the fish to " go do it".

I am a big fan of impeachment for any politician at any level in the structure. Fear of impeachment is far greater than fear of losing at the polls once every 5 years or so.

This also goes for amoeba who try to do devolution but don't have another brain cell to complete the work successfully.

Leeds has bought in to this 15 minute city thing and has a glossy brochure proclaiming it will get there by 2040.

The major problem for all cities is that very few people live within 15 minutes of where they work, for obvious reasons, nor will they ever be able to.

Even if planners had a blank slate to work from entropy would eventually take over as people moved jobs or homes. It would take an authoritarian regime to make it work. Maybe that is what politicians are looking for.

As for devolution I am with Suff's idea of an assembly for England and leave a slimmed down Westminster as the umbrella organisation for the UK as a whole.