A wondrous piece of illogic
This is from across The Pond but we have our own domestics making much the same argument:
Assemblyman Phil Steck has been leading the charge to stop sending the revenue back to Wall Street from the minuscule transaction tax. Such an act could net the state up to $19 billion a year.
....
"The tax is in sum and substance one quarter of one percent, it's nothing . . . and according to data from Tax and Finance it was $1.6 billion in June alone," Mr. Steck said during a phone interview. "The present circumstances demand it . . .Teachers are being laid off . . .grant-based programs have been withheld. Upstate some of our education funding is all grant-based."
This is indeed the argument made about a financial transactions tax (or the Robin Hood Tax) here. It’s a teensie, tiny, tax but it’ll raise a fortune. One of the two statements has to be wrong of course, tiny taxes don’t raise lots, a tax which raises lots of revenue is not tiny.
One of us did a paper elsewhere explaining the larger story of why an FTT is a truly bad idea. We’re not trying to cover the same ground again here.
Rather, we just want to marvel at the mindset on display. $1.6 billion a month is real money even to New York state’s finances or to the assembled cash flows of Wall Street. That’s why the desire on the part of the politicians to collect it of course. But that very eagerness driven by the size shows that it’s not a small tax.
The cognitive dissonance of insisting that $19 billion a year being pulled out of one industry in one city is “nothing” is painful to the logic detectors.
Is the Grand Old Duke leading the charge to Zero Carbon?
Although the nursery song is much older, the Grand Old Duke of York usually refers to Frederick, the titular commander of the British army during the Napoleonic wars. Despite some good innovations, such as founding Sandhurst, his grasp of strategy and financial control was fragile. Eliminating carbon emissions is certainly a good idea but the leadership is a bit wobbly on how that can be achieved and the costs. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) is chaired by Lord Deben who, in his ministerial days, was famous for rarely, if ever, reading his briefs and for reassuring the public, during the mad cow disease era, by feeding beef-burgers to his children. But the CCC is only advisory.
As previously discussed, current forecasts by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) show an alarming shortfall in UK electricity generation capacity by 2050 if zero carbon is to be achieved. The CCC estimate the costs to be £50bn. p.a. by 2050 (1% of GDP). BEIS and HM Treasury reckon on £70bn. p.a. or £1 trillion overall, although the latter’s calculations are not due to be released until later this year. The BEIS is also due to publish its long-delayed energy White Paper this autumn. In the absence of any numbers from government, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), in their October submission to the Treasury Select Committee Inquiry, put their estimate around four times higher, i.e. £4 trillion.
The Grand Old Duke would have been proud of CCC’s response to the request from the GWPF (President: Nigel Lawson) for their annual figures leading up to 2050: “We do not hold the information you have requested. The purpose of the net zero report was to establish when the UK should reduce emissions to net zero, which we recommended be legislated for 2050. The focus of our scenario analysis was therefore on whether achieving net zero emissions was feasible in 2050, and what the additional costs would be in that year.” In other words, CCC recommended marching up the hill with no idea how to get there.
That is a remarkable admission given their 304 page, May 2019, Technical Report which provided analyses across nine headings: Power and Hydrogen, Buildings, Industry, Surface Transport, Aviation and Shipping, Net-Agriculture and LULUCF, Waste, F-gas emissions and Greenhouse gas removals. Unfortunately, CCC provided no executive summary so it is unclear how the figures add up. LULUCF, as any fule kno, stands for “land use, land use change and forestry” and F-gas is not that emitted by cows and humans but “fluorinated gases” emissions from refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pumps due to refrigerant leakage.
The Guardian was not impressed by the progress one year on from the government’s net zero commitment: “John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: ‘If the government wants businesses, local authorities and households to make the appropriate investments over the next decade, they will need confidence that Britain really is committed to decarbonising the economy. But the practical measures taken by the government over the past 12 months add up to a tiny fraction of what is needed to keep us on course to meet that commitment.’”
Alongside the Technical Report, CCC published a 277 page Advice Report with an exceptionally long (27 page) executive summary which consists mostly of political exhortations. Being responsible for 1% of greenhouse gases apparently puts the UK in the global driving seat. 1% is also stated, with little visible support, as the cost of moving up from the previous 80% elimination target which was itself going to cost an extra 1% of GDP. So far as the power sector capital investment is concerned, “our scenarios imply an extra investment requirement of around 1% in 2050” (p.29). It is hard to take a report seriously where, whatever the question, the answer is always 1%.
The UK, in partnership with Italy, chairs the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow next November. As part of the run up to that, in case you had not noticed “This year, we’ve launched a Year of Climate Action”. The energy White Paper and the Treasury commentary may be part of that Action. Add to that the Treasury Select Committee has been holding an Inquiry into “Decarbonisation and Green Finance” since March and their report can be expected within the next couple of months or so. The technicalities of green finance reporting will annoy quite a few company secretaries but otherwise concern few voters. On the other hand, the effects of net zero carbon on consumer prices, as distinct from production costs, are another matter. Ofgem may be encouraged to keep prices high so that the Government can use the margin elsewhere and consumers are motivated to use less electricity. Conversely, Ofgem might be encouraged to push energy prices down to popularise the net zero target. In 2014 the BEIS predecessor ministry published “Estimated impacts of energy and climate change policies on energy prices and bills”. In 2018, BEIS promised to update it but have yet to do so. This needs discussion.
Chapter 7 of the Advice Report makes a valiant effort to assess the costs of zero carbon. The clarity of presentation is not helped by mixing costs and benefits together as “resource costs”. Carbon capture and storage is pretty much an unknown at this point and the assumptions are crucial for the reliance the report makes on hydrogen as a key part of the solution. The cost analysis is unconvincing.
Land use is also an interesting part of this conundrum: humans breathe oxygen and exhale co2 whereas plants, notably peatland, do the reverse. The CCC recommends more use of the land to remove carbon whereas the government’s planning White Paper seems to want to concrete it all over with new housing.
The Advice Report concluded that a net zero carbon 2050 “is only possible if clear, stable and well-designed policies to reduce emissions further are introduced across the economy without delay. Current policy is insufficient for even the existing targets.” In other words, it is only possible if the government makes it happen. As the Grand Old Duke explained to Wellington, “you are only going to win Waterloo, my boy, if Napoleon loses”.
The more incompetent government is the more libertarian we should be
There’s a certain logical confusion on display here in The Observer. Not that that’s unusual of course. The first claim is that to be concerned with the economy above lives is a mark of libertarianism:
Understanding how this catastrophe occurred is of critical importance – for it cannot be allowed to happen again. Some may be tempted to conclude that our leaders took their eyes off the ball momentarily. It is not an argument that stands up to scrutiny, however. In fact, the causes of this month’s dramatic surge in Covid cases have their roots in policy decisions made by a government that has shown itself obsessed with libertarian issues since the start of the pandemic. This obsession led it to consistently play down Covid’s threat to our health while constantly highlighting its potential to cause economic harm.
Libertarianism - in common with the close cognates, neoliberalism and classical liberalism and you can use whichever of the three you desire to describe our position on most matters - does not prioritise “the economy” over any thing at all let alone peoples’ lives in a pandemic. It is, rather, a method, a manner of thinking about, how best to create, the better life as are all socioeconomic and political sets of ideas - communism, socialism, corporatism, fascism and whatever other precepts one might like to describe. They’re all of varying levels of effectiveness, desirability and horror but all do indeed ponder the same interactions of economy, life, health and so on.
Libertarianism places greater weight than most of those others upon liberty and freedom, certainly, but that’s not the same as “the economy”.
It’s the next part of the argument that is seriously awry:
It has hard to see any positives in this sad tale of government incompetence
Consider the claim. We’ve not had enough firm thwack of government because everyone’s been libertarian about stuff. We’ve also got the insistence that government is incompetent. Those two can’t both be true. If those who rule are incompetent then we’d do better with less of their intervention into life, not more. That firm direction of the nation’s effectiveness is predicated upon the competence of those hands upon the tiller. The insistence upon the absence of the competence is an argument, perhaps the argument, in favour of just running before the storm.
It’s not possible to believe both, both the incompetence and the more deployment of the incompetence. Well, not unless you’re writing for The Observer….
Dropping the degree requirement for lawyers
This is obviously a good idea:
School leavers will no longer need to go to university if they want to become lawyers after regulators approved the biggest reform of legal education for a generation.
Under the changes, which take effect from next September, people can join law firms as apprentices under the government’s “trailblazer” scheme. Then, after gaining mandatory work experience, they will be able to sit a new two-part solicitors’ qualifying exam to become fully qualified.
As the article goes on to point out this is rather a return to the past. It used to be possible to do articles without having a degree. Instead something akin to an apprenticeship was done followed by the exam. Licensure still existed - you had to have the chitty to be a lawyer - but the degree wasn’t necessary to gain the licence. This was also true of accounting and indeed many other of the professions.
The importance of this being that we societally tried insisting on the degree and now won;t. This idea having much wider application.
For example, there’s no obvious reason why a schoolteacher should have a degree. Certainly at the lower age levels where crowd control is rather more of what is being done. This is before we even consider that post-degree teacher training so often required. It seems to us obvious that the degree requirement for nursing was and is a bad idea - we speak as people who have watched family members go through the system both old and new. There are benefits to the members of both occupations in that the degree requirement engenders status - or did before 50% of all got degrees - and thus claims for higher incomes. But to the rest of us not so much.
Another way to put this is that if the traditional professions are no longer to require a degree upon entry then perhaps we should stop loading the degree requirement onto what were not and are not professions?
A clash of beliefs over food standards and imports
Varied media types who play at being farmers have decided to write to Ministers and MPs about standards for food imports. At the heart of their insistence is a clash of beliefs.
No, not our beliefs against their or anything, but an irreconcilable illogic in their own beliefs:
Importing low-quality agri-food products could force British farmers out of business as well as further degrade the environment. Neither we nor the public want this, as several surveys and petitions have shown.
The problem here is that the importation of such “low-quality” foodstuffs doesn’t threaten the business of British farmers one iota nor whit.
The purchase and presumably subsequent consumption of such items by British consumers very likely would.
The claim is that said consumers don’t desire this cheap food may or may not be true. If it is true then if available they won’t purchase it and won’t consume it - the business of British farmers is safe by that very contention that consumers don’t want this foreign muck.
On the other hand, if farmers’ business is indeed threatened by such imports then it must be true that British consumers will purchase and consume this delightful product of foreigners’ labours.
That is, either no one wants it and therefore a ban is not required or a ban is required because people want it. It cannot be true that a ban is necessary because no one does want it.
The real question then becoming, well, if people want it then who are these celebrity farmers with the effrontery to insist they may not have it?
The Anti-Slavery League did rather well actually
The Guardian reviews a new book discussing the abolition of slavery rather than the earlier killing of the slave trade. The implication of the review at least is that it took an unconscionable long time. In moral terms indeed, and yet as a political movement we disagree - it worked with stunning speed.
The Interest is the story of how widespread and deeply rooted such attitudes were, how powerfully calls for abolition were resisted and why the British parliament nonetheless voted at last in 1833 to end slavery in its West Indian and African territories. In 20 brisk, gripping chapters, Taylor charts the course from the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 to the final passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
Only a decade? How quickly does anyone think societal change normally happens?
We speak, of course, as professionals in this field. We exist to propose methods and manners by which society can be improved. Only 10 years strikes us as being lightning speed. To take one of our own proposals, something as seemingly trivial as a substantial rise in the personal allowance for income tax. It took 5 years from first mention - the idea that it is entirely ridiculous to have a minimum wage upon which people then are dunned for tax - to it appearing in political party manifestos and a further decade to come to fruition. It really is only now that the original target is being reached after that 15 years.
Or, to be more party political and something that we as a group were not involved in although one of us was directly, it took Ukip 25 years to move from a - small - rabble of malcontents to forcing a referendum and it’ll be nearly 30 in total by the time the deal is fully done.
We don’t say that you have to agree with both or even either of those political ideas and or changes even as we’d obviously hope that there’s no one left in favour of chattel slavery. But only a decade to achieve that sort of political change, the end of slavery? That’s an astonishing speed. Believe us, we know about these things.
The Lockean Case for London YIMBY
John Locke is best known for his political ideas. Namely, his defence of religious pluralism, of government by consent, and more controversially, that each person has a right to property. Invariably, Locke is invoked to justify and defend private property in particular, however kinds of reasons he gives for supporting an individuals’ right to private property are equally strong in supporting rights to common property in some circumstances. Restoring rights to the urban residential commons offers a feasible route out of the housing crisis in a way that is respectful to property rights – properly conceived. Giving local residents rights over their shared space, including those shared aspects of their private property such as façades, would enable development to happen in a morally legitimate way that benefits those most closely affected by it, and therefore generate popular support for a policy that will generate enormous wealth, and benefit the worst off by giving them access to affordable, beautiful housing in existing communities.
An important premise of Locke’s defence of property is equality. No person is born in a natural position of superiority to anyone else. Robert Filmer, an ardent defender of the natural authority of kings, with whom Locke bitterly disagreed, argued that kings have a natural right to rule because they own the territories upon which their subjects dwell. Subjects are therefore guests of the king, and must do as he wills whilst on his property. Locke’s rejection of the natural authority of monarchs meant a rejection of the idea that anyone came into the world with any special particular claim over territory. The Earth is not owned by the heirs to royal estates, but rather is owned commonly by all of humanity. Locke, a Christian, believed that God gave the Earth to humankind. If we are equals, then why would God favour some having special claims over certain parts? Equality meant the Earth is our common patrimony, for Locke. However, equality also meant that we are sovereign over ourselves – “self-owners” as many neo-Lockeans put it – and this means that those parts of the Earth that we bring into our personal projects, leave a stamp of our personality on, or what have you, become our own property:
“Though the Earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. […] The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath thereby mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by his labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others.” (Two Treatise of Government, II §V.27)
Labour mixing is a metaphor for how our lives are not lived merely inside our own bodies, but also outside them in the physical environment. When we act and leave our imprint on the world, subjecting it to our purposes, we make it part of ourselves. To Locke, this is how personal property is born – through unilateral action by sovereign individuals. We need not seek the consent of the community before we do this, because this would undermine equality. If we must constantly seek approval from someone else before we exercise our rights, then it looks more like our rights are privileges granted to us at the pleasure of superiors. If we cannot act without leave from others, we cannot truly be said to be free, and when we act, we make things our own.
The idea of literally mixing your labour with external resources turns out not to make much practical sense. As David Hume would later tell us, labour cannot be the subject of physical admixture, but is rather presupposed by it. Nonetheless, tilling soil or the like would have been the primary way people would have brought hitherto unused resources into their personal, ongoing projects at the time Locke was writing. It is hard to argue against this general idea; hard to argue that among equals, individuals should not be regarded as the rightful owners of that which they make an extension of their person, particularly when the proviso that enough and as good is left over for others. It is hard to deny the basic appeal of this claim. After all, who has a better claim to the soil than the one who tilled it; soil that no one knew existed until it was so tilled?
Locke’s argument about the moral importance of property is invariably only taken to apply to private property. Everyone who thinks seriously about property has a little Garret Hardin inside their head reminding them that common property will only result in a tragedy of commons. But the overgrazed common pasture that Hardin so famously analysed in his article in Science is now recognised not to be a particularly realistic model for how common property systems often work in practice. As Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom recognised, only if we assume that users of common-pool resources cannot communicate with each other, cannot socially sanction one another, and are unable to nominate third parties to enforce agreements among one another, must the commons necessarily be tragic. Where we do not assume away the social fabric that would likely be generated by those who have every incentive and capability of cooperating with one another in a sustainable way, the commons can be a comedy, not a tragedy. We should not a priori think that an argument for some kind of property necessarily means it must be individual private property. We should consider how common property can sometimes answer the needs of freedom and equality, just as we do private property.
External resources are often brought into the ongoing projects of groups. Individuals do not always act alone in their interactions with the external world. Where our projects are shared, so too must be the property. Our ownership of the physical resources and spaces that constitute those projects. Of course, we need to be able to exclude third parties, hence it is common property, not a free-for-all.
There is no reason to think that such social projects should not be granted the protection of property, especially where there is the institutional fabric in place to ensure it doesn’t result in social and ecological ruin. Whilst Locke missed this important part of the story in considering the question of lands on the American frontier, he did note that the common lands in his home country of England could not be privatised, because this would violate the rights of those who have established use-based rights to them.
As it stands, we don’t really have any common property rights of this sort, at least not in urban areas where the majority of us live. We have private property rights, and then property owned by the council or the government, or some other agency that administers it with a vague eye to the public interest. However, resources and spaces that are the common property of the particular social groups that leave their imprint on them, that use them, that subsume them into their meaningful life plans should be administered by those people directly – unless they choose to outsource the job. Of course, no one ever asked us if we were happy for the government to take over management of our local streets, parks, and views. If the government cannot take your private property without your consent and administer it in your name, then neither can it take our common property. Yet it has.
It may appear to be hopelessly unworkable to give control of local streets to those who live on them. However, London YIMBY has proposed a comprehensive set of policies which in my view would restore much of the urban commons to those to whom it rightly belongs – the local residents; those in whose ongoing activities the relevant spaces are enveloped within.
The unaffordability of housing in London is a function of the difficulty of acquiring permission from the relevant authorities to build more housing. These authorities make it very difficult to build more housing because the average person does not want more housing in their local community. In a sense, then, the common space in which new housing would be placed is being administered with an eye on the interests of those affected. However, this is only natural when one recognises that adding units of housing to any given neighbourhood is almost all loss for those who already live there. It means more crowded streets and local public transport links, it may mean the obstruction of natural light or of attractive views, it may mean some change to the aesthetic and cultural character of the area, and it threatens their property values. These are things that, to some extent, the local community have some right to. In many ways, they have created (or more likely, paid for) a local physical environment of a certain kind. The YIMBY solution recognises this, and proposes that planning rights be purchased directly from local residents themselves as property rights, rather than being sought bureaucratically or politically from the authorities with no benefit flowing to those affected.
Under the proposal, residents of a given street would be given voting rights on the nature of their street. This would include a design code for new buildings or extensions. By a two-thirds majority, a group of residents can develop their street as they see fit, or if they choose to sell these rights to professional developers to be used in line with the design code and terms determined by the residents. Of course, this does not extend to violating the private rights of other residents, such as overshadowing another’s house. It would also mean that street -communities which do not want any further development are free to not have any – and rest in the assurance that none will be thrust onto them. Sometimes, the most valuable part of a property right can be that it gives a person or group the right to simply say “no”. As Professor David Schmidtz often says, “knowing I have the right to walk away makes it safe for me to turn up at all.” Of course, those who remain steadfastly Not In My Back Yard will be within their rights, it is just that now they would be aware of the cost of this decision, because they will be sitting on valuable voting rights (or, what can be understood as their share of the common property rights). Other times, the most valuable thing a property right can give a person or group is its cash-value. Those who under the current system are against further development because of the costs it would impose upon them have the opportunity to actually be made better off by others buying out their rights.
Restoring the urban residential commons to those who truly hold the rights to them not only gives greater reality to our sovereignty as embodied persons living in a physical environment, but it will help us overcome the housing crisis in a way that does not run rough-shod over any affected party’s interests. Agreeing on a design code means that new developments can be beautiful, and augment surrounding property values. The YIMBY proposals would mean development took place in a way that benefits those closest to it, and not only that diffuse group of persons who would benefit by having more affordable housing.
Dr Billy Christmas is the Lecturer in Political Theory and director of the PPE programme at King’s College London, in the Department of Political Economy
The Adam Smith Institute. and London YIMBY, have released our submission, written by London YIMBY founder John Myers, to the Government’s Planning for the future White Paper
If you would like to submit to the consultation, you can click here to Give Streets a Say.
Acknowledgements
My work on the commons has been supported by a grant from the Templeton Foundation under the Ideal of Self-Governance project, and forms the groundwork of my forthcoming book Property and Justice: A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights. If you are interested in the ideas discussed here, please check out London YIMBY’s website, and my recent article published in Economics and Philosophy, “Ambidextrous Lockeanism”.
Those special laws will only ever be used in special circumstances, Oh Yes.
It is indeed true that there are at times special circumstances which lead to the need for special laws. There is also that slippery slope to be glissaded down. That second can indeed be a logical fallacy, for it to be true requires that the second and subsequent steps will necessarily follow.
Which, we would argue, is true of those special laws for special times.
Raniere was prosecuted under a law that was previously used to bring down the leaders of mafia organisations. Prosecutors said he maintained relationships with about 20 women who were ordered to lose weight and were not allowed to have sexual relations with anyone else. He was convicted last year on charges that included racketeering, sex trafficking and child pornography.
RICO as indeed involved:
The Indictment charges him with racketeering (or "RICO") conspiracy,
Sex trafficking and and child pornography should be enough to get him off the streets. Those special laws required - sorry, justified - purely to beat the vile machinations of mafiosi intimidation of witnesses and law enforcement……well, there’s our slippery slope. It was indeed said back then that the use of those special laws would expand over time, so it has proven, the use of those special laws has expanded over time.
The answer being let’s not have the special laws.
Which role of the state in the economy?
Whether there should be more - or a continuation of the current level of more - state intervention into the economy rather depends upon which problem we’re talking about and which state role in the economy. From Tom Kibasi:
In economic terms, the pandemic is best understood as an epic, simultaneous supply-side and demand-side shock. Demand has collapsed as incomes have dropped and workers fear for the future, and at the same time the labour market has ground to a halt as normal working patterns have been disrupted. Structural shifts – such as the move away from high streets and hospitality to home entertainment and online shopping – are set to destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, probably for ever. This is why the V-shaped recovery predicted by the Bank of England in May is nothing more than a pipe dream. And it’s why a vastly expanded role for the state in the economy is here for the foreseeable future.
It’s rather obvious that much of that V shaped recovery has already taken place. Things like retail sales, GDP and so on show that it has. Not, agreed, to above February levels in everything but we’re not that far off in most things. It’s also true that there are certain things which never are going to bounce back - those things that cannot, or will not, be done because of social distancing and all that.
What we fear Kibasi means about the state’s role is managing that change required from those things we cannot, or do not, do any more to the new methods and things we can. That redeployment of scarce resources to sate human desires in new ways.
If the meaning of the state role is to continue to alleviate the pain and grief of the transition then carry on even if precise details can be and will be argued about. If it is to direct the transition then that’s exactly wrong. We don’t actually know what those new methods are. We also don’t know which human desires people want sated, in which manner, from the new menu of options that a socially distanced world allows.
We do, however, have a method of discovery - that free market guided by the capitalist lust for profit. That’s the most efficient system known to chew through what can be done and match it up to what people desire to be done. Consistent market experimentation that is. Given the current difficulties we’d actually like to have a frenzy of such experimentation and government’s role is to get out of the damn way.
Harsh times may well mean government has a greater role in alleviating the harshness. Economic change means getting out of the way of markets to enable the discovery process to work efficiently.
Devolution works only if it's actually devolution
John Harris argues for more devolution - we’re fine with the idea that decisions are taken at the appropriate level even if we do normally argue that that’s by the people, by individuals, rather than some level of government. Harris though hasn’t quite grasped the implications of what he’s demanding:
Consider, for example, the southern German town of Rosenheim, which has a population of around 65,000, and was one of the virus’s early German hotspots. To quote the country’s health minister, as the authorities there got to work, “there were really no instructions from Berlin. Decisions were made locally, on the spot.” This is the very opposite of the approach taken here, a difference reflected in the fact that the UK’s death rate is around six times higher than Germany’s. But will anyone learn?
That would be to argue for dropping the national part of the National Health Service then. Which when baldly stated is something Harris would reject in horror. The point is more general as well:
Mayors and councils need decent tax-raising and borrowing powers. A whole range of responsibilities – over health and social care, education, housing and transport – ought to be spread across regional, city and local government, not on the basis of the current model of ad hoc “deals”, but a uniform shifting of power and resources. With the benefits system and so-called welfare-to-work now colliding with rising unemployment, most of the things overseen by the Department for Work and Pensions should be pushed in the same direction. On any matters of national emergency or strategic importance, politicians at the centre should always bring in leaders from outside. And decision-makers from all sides need to embrace one key matter of consensus: that austerity will never again be visited on local councils.
Much of the “austerity” that has been so visited is actually a reversal of the subsidy that Gordon Brown designed, the subsidy from richer areas to poorer. That though can be set aside, if we like, as just being the normal politics of spending everyone’s money on my voters.
The point is larger than that and meets with Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money. Spending other peoples’ on yet other people is the least efficient form of it. Therefore any true devolution has to, as Harris says, lead to substantial local tax raising powers to go alongside those spending ones. The corollary of that is that the varied national cross subsidies have to go.
That is, strong local politics is just fine, local spending is zippetty doo and all that. But that spending has to be from resources raised from that local area, local taxation. Being able to tax Esher to pay for Wythenshawe needs to stop. Devolution means that the local spending not be subsidised from national taxation.
A world in which Manchester elects the government it wants and then Manchester pays for the government it gets has an attraction to it. One in which Manchester has the power to spend but not the duty to pay for it is less appealing. That last would be close to harlotry, that power without responsibility thing.