Via Dizzy, a new book from Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell that dares to think the unthinkable:
* Scrapping all MPs' expenses except those relating to running an office and travel from the constituency
* Selecting candidates through open primaries
* Local and national referendums
* "People's Bills", to be placed before Parliament if they attract a certain number of signatures
* Placing the police under locally elected Sheriffs, who would also set local sentencing guidelines
* Appointing heads of quangos, senior judges and ambassadors through open parliamentary hearings rather than prime ministerial patronage
* Devolving to English counties and cities all the powers which were devolved to Edinburgh under the 1998 Scotland Act
* Placing Social security, too, under local authorities
* Making councils self-financing by scrapping VAT and replacing it with a Local Sales Tax
* Allowing people to pay their contributions into personal healthcare accounts, with a mandatory insurance component
* Letting parents opt out of their Local Education Authority, carrying to any school the financial entitlement that would have been spent on their child
* Replacing EU membership with a Swiss-style bilateral free trade accord
* Requiring all foreign treaties to be re-ratified annually by Parliament
* Scrapping the Human Rights Act and guaranteeing parliamentary legislation against judicial activism
* A "Great Repeal Bill" to annul unnecessary and burdensome laws
Sounds like they have some pretty good ideas.
5 comments:
Could've sworn I'd seen something similar elsewhere...the LPUK forums for example?
"future government could actually shift powers back, from Brussels to Westminster, from Whitehall to town halls, from the state to the citizens."
Good stuff - and with power must come tax raising powers. But sales taxes or turnover taxes or VAT are the very worst taxes of all. SImply sticking the word 'local' in front of it doesn't change that in the slightest.
Rather frustratingly, both UKIP and LPUK are guilty of this.
Land Value Tax is the ideal local tax - it turns the council into a business - they can only charge more tax if what they do makes the place a more pleasant place to live.
So out go 5 a day advisors and in come more coppers.
Out go sink comprehensives and in come grammar schools (or even better, vouchers for schools).
And once they have restricted spending to purely items that add value, they can't charge more tax, because that just depresses land values (assuming no corresponding benefit to residents) and so the tax take would go down again. So they can't increase taxes beyond a certain point (above and beyond items that add value) and that sets a natural upper limit on local taxes.
End of today's lecture.
@mark: I did actually wonder about that one aspect of the plan. Do you have a post somewhere that spells out how LVT would work in the real world?
Ob, I did an article on Con Home in March that explains 90% of it. That'll do for starters. I've also got a 38 page document from over a year ago that will need updating because the house price crash is now merrily underway.
That being the main selling point of LVT - it keeps house prices low and stable.
Or you can implement an LVT using Market Geonomics. see my blog.
Post a Comment