@john.redwood.official
@johnredwood
Anyone submitting a comment to this site is giving their permission for it to be published here along with the name and identifiers they have submitted.
The moderator reserves the sole right to decide whether to publish or not.
So why does the government want us to stock up for disaster?
In the case of each kind of event the government thinks might need us to keep some tins of food and some water in the store cupboard it is the government that should be taking action to prevent the event from happening.
If it’s hostile countries or terrorist groups disrupting our undersea cables, issuing cyber attacks and damaging UK facilities that is an argument for the government to get on with strengthening our defences and putting in a sufficient Defence budget. Where are the ships to patrol our nearby seas and the counter forces to stop illegal criminals getting into the country?
If it’s hot weather leading to us running out of water why the delay in putting in the new reservoirs? If the threat of flood in winter where the new containment and storage measures?
If it is running out of power, where are the back up facilities, the energy stores, the stand by generators that can work when the wind has gone on strike and the sun gone to bed?
If it is poor harvest and a food shortage, where are the grants and support for farmers to farm, and to put in farm irrigation with more fruit and vegetables under cover?
Most of us agree we need greater national resilience. Current policy forces dependence on more and more imports, with all the extra risks to supply that that brings. We are increasingly dependent on the goodwill of foreigners for energy and food, and on their ability to provide for themselves and for us. That may not always be possible.
My IEA article on the collapse of the UK car industry
Two collapses of the UK car industry
Car output in the UK over the last century has been subject to two major crashes. One was in Mr Burnham’s much loved 1970s. The other is happening this decade. Output peaked at 1.92 m vehicles during 1972, our last year before entering the European Community. Many UK brands and past success stories were concentrated in the conglomerate British Leyland. During our first decade in the EEC and its Customs Union output slumped to 868,000 by 1982. BL was taken into government control in 1975 and kept afloat by public money. It struggled to survive with its output plunging from 916,000 cars produced in 1972 to just 405,000 in 1982, a fall of 56%.
The 1980s and early 1990s saw a rebuild of the industry, with the government helping attract in substantial Japanese investment as Nissan, Honda and Toyota added substantial new capacity alongside Ford and Vauxhall. Part of BL was sold off to BMW who were only interested in continuing the Mini as a major product. Industry output recovered from the 1982 low to reach 1.78 m in 1999. The new Labour government took over in 1997. By 2009 as they prepared to leave office output slumped to just under 1 million as the economy battled the banking crash and recession of 2008.In 2005 when the residual Rover Group left over from BL got into financial trouble the government only offered temporary relief so the brands were subsequently sold off to a Chinese company. They decided to make cars under the MG brand in China.
By 2016 under the Coalition and the Conservatives output had recovered to 1.72 m. As net zero policies were rolled out the industry started to lose ground, and lost substantial output over the covid lockdowns, taking it back down to 920,000 in 2020. Instead of sustaining a recovery post covid in recent years a major slide has been underway under both the Conservative and Labour governments. The industry prepares to close all its factories making petrol and diesel cars in time for the ban on making any more of them which comes in in 2030. Output was just 717,000 in 2025 and falling.
Why did the industry fail?
The big falls in the 1970s occurred for three main reasons. The first was the removal of tariffs on cars and the easing of trade barriers against European competition. The UK market saw imports account for just 5% of the total in 1965. This leapt to 56% in 1979, with most of the gains occurring after entry of the UK into the European Community. Continental producers in Germany, France and Italy were good at exploiting the market opportunities whilst the UK failed to stay competitive with product or prices as the tariffs were removed. Leading international groups took advantage of market opening to shift production from UK factories to continental ones to get economies of scale. They integrated their UK production and amalgamated their models with their continental businesses. They no longer thought they needed different designs for the UK from the EEC.
The second was the chaotic labour relations in a strife torn UK . Managers were unable to win over employees and get them to accept positive leadership . Unions wanted to drive wages higher in an inflation ridden economy and were willing to strike often to do so.
The third was the decision of the government in 1975 to buy up 95% of the shares of BL, to direct the business, appoint the Chief Executive and finance the investment. By doing this they acquired control of the largest part of the UK car industry. They with their chosen managers failed to design and produce a streamlined and profitable car range as they played around with the large number of brands and plants they inherited.
Where BL had a good selling product like the Mini they did not charge enough for it to make a sensible profit. They badge engineered the vehicle so they were selling an Austin, a Morris, a Wolseley and a Riley version adding to production and sales costs and competing against themselves with brand promotions. Where they had ageing product as with the main Austin and Morris saloon cars they failed to develop products that could outsell the new popular Ford ,Vauxhall, VW and other European competitors.
The end result is no-one makes and sells cars under most of the brands they once held, including the death of Austin, Morris, Triumph, Wolseley, Riley, Vanden Plas and Rover. Jaguar survived but has not produced a single car for sale over the last year. Mini survived under BMW ownership and launched new models but is now mainly made abroad. Land Rover has survived . MG has changed from making UK built sports cars to making family vehicles running on batteries made in China.
Why has the industry plunged to even lower depths this decade?
The 2020s started badly with covid lockdowns hitting all European producers. Now well into what should be a sustained recovery the UK has continued to decline. The main reason is government decisions to force the pace of transition from making diesel and petrol cars to making just battery vehicles. The UK industry failed to explain to the government that their timetable was too demanding. The main players accepted the unrealistic targets set only to discover there were not nearly enough willing buyers of battery cars. Government tipped in some modest subsidies for the new electric vehicles and made it dearer and more difficult to buy petrol or diesel. Electric cars are spared high taxes on fuel, unlike the fossil fuel based alternatives. They have favourable tax treatment when bought by companies. Still they remain a minority choice of the public. At the same time diesels in particular have experienced a very sharp decline adding to the difficulties of car makers. They have to rush to write off their investments and move to close plants.
On the other side of the account the manufacturers have failed to put in much new electric capacity. Jaguar has gone a year without a car to sell and is only just getting round to offering a single choice of vehicle with battery propulsion at a much higher price than many of the older petrol and diesel cars that sold well. It is putting in a large battery plant but will be launching dear new vehicles which will not be affordable in the mass market. Range Rover is planning new all electric products. BMW is making most of its all electric Minis outside the UK. A major investment plan to make larger car batteries in the UK was dropped. Nissan is the one large manufacturer that has committed to switching production to new EV cars with UK made batteries. Government and other companies over the last seven years have watched as China has cornered the market in materials and components needed to make batteries, and has launched big ranges of battery cars at very competitive prices.
How much of the UK car industry will revive?
The government is determined to end all production of petrol and diesel cars in three years time. It wants the production lines and many of the factories closed. It looks as if that is going to happen. Vauxhall, Ford, Honda and other makers of petrol and diesel cars in prior years are not planning to make any battery cars in the UK. Toyota is also importing EVs but has said it might later start to produce a battery car in the UK. There is no firm project or timetable. The industry will be a lot smaller than in its heyday. Many jobs making petrol and diesel cars will go, much capital will be written off and the UK will be importing far more from China.
The industry is keen to see the UK adopt Made in Europe rules and standards and to impose a high tariff on Chinese imports. This is unlikely to make much difference to the many plans for leading manufacturers to cease making cars in the UK or to avoid returning to UK manufacture. The higher the Chinese tariff wall imposed the more they might be able to switch some of our imports from China to EU factories. This would come at the cost of a slower transition to battery cars and would give the UK consumer a worse deal.
Buses and trains preoccupy Mr Burnham
Downing Street South must have a cluttered desk. There is the delayed need to pay for a better defence settlement. There is the Milburn Report on how to get people back to work, delayed until after a budget it was meant to influence. There is the escalating benefits bill as more young people get a sick note for life . There is the brain drain as more talented and hard working people and businesses flee UK taxes.There is the collapse of high energy using businesses, throttled by the UK’s super dear energy.There is the progressive closure of all our petrol and diesel car factories thanks to the early ban in 2030. There is the threat to the Falklands and the disastrous and expensive attempted give away of the Chagos. There is the delay in getting our own oil and gas out forcing us to rely on dear and less reliable imports.There are many more problem files in the in box.
So what does Mr Burnham do as he sits at his desk in Downing Street North? He plans £2 bus fares, reviving an old Conservative policy. He dreams up new fines for people playing loud music on buses and trains. He imagines a nationalised rail and steel industry will work fine, and dreams of an industrial strategy which remains unconnected to government reality.
Where has he got to with his first pledge, to offer every rough sleeper in every postcode somewhere to live? How can he pass more powers to Mayors whilst giving away hard won rights to self government in his proposed Re set with the EU? Why can’t regional Mayors say No to illegal migrant accommodation?Why can’t they use any extra grant to cut taxes? Why can’t they turn down plans for developments they do not like?
Talking about buses, noisy trains and devolution from Manchester to look away from the growing inbox in Downing Street south is not a good way to do the job.
You do not save the Union with more devolution
My Conservative Home article
I support the Union of the UK. I despair of the way the SNP in Edinburgh and the Labour government of Mr Burnham wish to go over all the old arguments about Scottish “independence” . We were told that was all settled by a referendum for a generation. The UK has been governed as a united kingdom, so important military facilities have been located in Scotland. Scotland provides a substantial amount of the Union’s wind power to the mutual benefit of those living on both sides of the Scottish border. There is free trade and free passage of people over the notional border. Unpicking it all would be costly and divisive.
I also believe in the democratic resolution of issues and have no wish to retain an unwilling people and region in our Union. That is why I supported holding a referendum and agreeing that just the Scots should vote on the issue of whether they still wanted to stay with us. They said they did. You cannot keep asking the same question about something that has such big constitutional and political ramifications. Investors and governments making decisions about where things should be located need some certainty. Uncertainty about Scotland remaining in the Union puts off some investors and introduces strategic reluctance about Scotland into UK government thinking.
As an Englishman who prefers them to stay I would not have worried if they had voted to leave but would have argued for a clean, full and fast untying of the links. England would have shed a lot of borrowing and saved substantial tax revenues which currently flow north so financially would have benefitted. There is more to being a nation than money, but it would have been some compensation for the emotional and political loss.
What is so frustrating to most voters today is to see the governing party of the Union and the governing party of Scotland spending so much time on this issue we thought settled. They both put out misleading statements and both fail to analyse the problem in a way that can produce a good solution.
Labour in Westminster have wrongly thought for more than fifty years that offering the Scots devolution to their own Parliament would end their quest for independence. Each time it does not they offer more devolution of powers, further fragmenting government. As I forecast in my Death of Britain? book in 1999 it just fuels the SNP. It encourages an SNP government to keep making more demands of London, threatening London with Scottish exit if there are not more gifts of power and money sent to the Scottish Parliament. Mr Burnham last week tried a counter by pointing out the Scottish government centralises decisions in Scotland and says they should devolve more themselves to large Councils or powerful Mayors. The SNP predictably answers by ratcheting up the independence language. I accept that people in Scotland have voted for a devolved Parliament, so we need a find a better way of letting it function without it just being a means to campaign for break up of the Union.
The SNP do not seriously want independence. They have for years been sketchy about what an “independent” Scotland would be like. They lost the last referendum as their campaign failed to answer obvious questions convincingly. What currency will they have? Who will pay all the extra taxes when grants from England end? How will they be able to sustain their large borrowings without the UK credit rating? What will replace the lost defence jobs? What terms would they get to enter the EU? Would they be able to negotiate all the trade deals they would lose when exiting our shared Agreements? Would there still be a common travel and work area with England and Wales?
The SNP have said they would want to enter the EU. That would mean they would immediately surrender the right to choose their own laws in a wide range of areas and have to accept over 100,000 laws the EU has already settled and imposes on members. It would mean they would need to follow what socialists call the austerity economics of the EU, with demands they keep borrowing to less than 3% of GDP and debt to under 60%. It would mean accepting EU taxes and having to make a contribution to a large and growing EU budget out of new taxes on the people of Scotland.
The SNP used to say they wanted to keep the pound sterling as their currency. It greatly limits a country’s ability to run its own economic policy if it uses the currency of another. It would mean Scotland had to accept interest rates for its savers and borrowers set by the Bank of England, with Scotland no longer being a consideration or having any representation around the Bank table. That sounds like being a monetary colony of England, not like independence.
Now they say that they would live with the pound for an unspecified time then maybe get round to their own currency. If they opted for the Euro as part of a big package to join the EU, that too means the end of any idea of settling your own interest rates and money policy. They seem to think they could join the EU with an opt out from the Euro but there is no guarantee they would secure that concession the UK negotiated for itself when the Euro was created.
The SNP are clear they want to move the UK nuclear deterrent out of Scotland and become a nuclear free country. They would ask to join NATO and would seek to establish their own military forces and intelligence systems. There would be a long transition to fill as they did so, and Scotland would be far less well defended without some agreement to rely on UK forces and presumably to pay for the service the rest of the UK could continue to provide. The loss of shared intelligence with the US and Five Eyes would be particularly damaging.
More importantly, what would need to be done at the border with England? Trade and people flow freely all the time we are one country. It is naive to think that could continue if Scotland asserts independence, and of course impossible if Scotland joins the EU. In the EU Scotland would need to impose border controls over people and goods to conform with the Schengen rules and with the Customs Union. The problems the EU has created over the Northern Ireland border might get repeated.
Both sides in this worrying dispute are undermining the interests of voters in Scotland and in the rest of the UK. The SNP are trying to sell a new kind of dependence for a Scotland that would be dominated by the EU and dependent on doing deals with the EU, NATO and other international bodies. The UK government keeps applying the medicine of devolution to an illness which is made worse by that treatment. No wonder the rows go on and on with no resolution possible. The SNP and Labour look like two bald men arguing over a comb.
Reflections on the French riots
We hear that protests about poor conditions in French schools and unfairnesses at universities have broadened into general protests about everything from the cost of living to the state of the Middle East. The far left party Insoumise denies responsibility for the state of the streets and the left generally criticise the police for inflaming things with too much tear gas and too many rubber bullets.
What is clear is that the protesters express their anger in a self defeating way. Small businesses are looted and ransacked. Great public buildings are damaged or burned down . Bond markets take fright making it dearer for the government to borrow. Many law abiding hard working people fear for their local shops and property and face the riots and tear gas when they venture out.
These protests make the economic issues worse. They terrify some of the people they say they want to help. They do not offer solutions.
President Macron had a Marie Antoinette moment dancing in a privileged box as Paris highlighted poverty and public sector austerity. His attempts to crack down with curfews on the many who do not riot shows his weakness.The centre of French politics has not held. We await the electoral contest between right and left.
The 1970 s were dreadful. Why does Mr Burnham wish to revisit?
What was it that took Mr Burnham’s fancy about the 1970s?
Was it the high inflation that made our current cost of living crisis look mild?
Was it government borrowing longer term costing 15.5%?
Was it the rate of pit and factory closures?
Was it the halving of UK car output 1972-82?
Was it the colossal losses of the nationalised industries led by coal, rail and steel?
Was it the brain drain as talent and investment left the country?
Was it the 83% higher tax rate on earnings and 98% on savings income?
Was it going to the IMF for a loan when the government ran out of money?
Was it areas in the hot summer of 1976 cut off from running water in their homes by nationalised water?
Was it Heath putting the country onto a three day working week thanks to a miners strike?
The run up to the budget
The latest figures for GDP growth show the year to August has delivered reasonable growth in services led by computing and digital services. This is the biggest part of our economy so overall growth remains better than the sluggish main EU economies whilst remaining below digital leaders USA. Production industries have been flat, whilst construction has fallen.
The collapse of new housebuilding is dragging down growth. There is no sign of a surge in new Council housing which Labour promised and used to get the OBR to up their forecast a little on the back of the promised package of measures. Rising government borrowing rates knocking on to mortgage rates are holding back private housing work.Labour will discover wanting more Council houses rather than Housing Association ones means far fewer new homes with public money .far more of the cost of a new Council home than of a new Housing Association one counts as public spending owing to the absence of private sector money in the Council home.
The new Chancellor has allowed some speculation on new and higher taxes whilst apparently realising that is a bad idea which hits confidence and stops new investment. He said he could not rule out harmful tax rises, then later did rule out Capital Gains Tax , leaving open other feared tax rises. Labour had anyway ruled out any increases in the three main taxes in their Manifesto showing you can rule out tax rises. What a stupid muddle.
There is no sign of a plan to control runaway benefit spending, no wish to find the much needed extra money for defence that John Healey resigned over. Most commentators think the forecasts will find the Treasury too close to the minimum level of reserve for comfort. The latest rumour is yet more tax on banks. They already pay 3% more as a supplement on the standard 25% Corporation Tax, and pay a levy on their balance sheet. These two bank taxes already make it less worthwhile to keep and use money in London. If John Healey makes it worse more banks might divert more capital abroad.That will be another anti growth policy.
My IEA article on AI and government
AI offers great opportunity to the public sector. Ministers tell us they are spending on it to boost productivity and drive change. We were told of a £3.25bn Transformation Fund for public services for 2025-8, with £2bn being spent this year and £ 1bn next. The recovery of lost productivity was always planned to take time, with AI mentioned as a way of helping do it. We were treated to another 5 year hockey stick, with extra spending only leading to substantial savings in the final year. I never understood why we needed new investment in AI to recover 2019 levels of productivity when that was a pre AI era. The government should urgently recover the lost productivity on old technology and consider what additional gains there can be by spending on new technology.
The government needs to live up to its words on AI and chart a way of using it that is fair to taxpayers and its staff. Throwing a few hundred million more into the IT budget and hoping the suppliers will spend it well for us is not a good strategy. What is their aim? Which parts of government will benefit most? Is there a central strategy or do different parts of the public sector make their own way through the AI spending grounds? Much of public administration is amenable to more computing assistance, but it needs to be done in a way which keeps the good staff, allows them to direct and improves the lot of the users.
Now we can see the breakdown of the planned Transformation spending for 2026-7 we see £547 m is going on SEND, £ 271 m on Social Care and £150 m on asylum. This implies half the Transformation money is going to three hotspots where budgets are under severe pressure and will not primarily be on AI. There is only £25 m this year for civil service improvement, £210 m for HMRC computer schemes and £194 m specifically earmarked for various cross cutting digital programmes.
I have written before that efficiency and quality are two sides of the same coin. Higher quality and productivity have to be driven daily by senior managers. In government Ministers need to stress their importance. In order to achieve them the top managers need to learn daily from experience. What has gone wrong? What can we do better? What do we not need to do? Which complications mean more likelihood of mistakes and cover ups , even where their ostensible purpose is greater safety or accountability? Intelligent use of AI can clearly change the frontier between what you can let a machine do and what has to be done by a person. AI cannot substitute for hands on direction and responsibility for the service held by people.
When I was leading industrial companies I gave myself two important tasks as part of the job to highlight the importance to my teams of quality and efficiency. I asked to be informed of all serious complaints and accidents so I could see what was going wrong and insist on remedies, with a view to designing out the risks. I was also the questioner for the future, asking my managers all the time what we could be producing next that would be better, how we could improve service quality and customer relations, identifying inadequacies and antiquities in our factories and products.
Managers were often shocked to be told that most of what they are making today they will not be making in five years time. People get caught up in the here and now, but some have to look to the future. What look like good secure jobs today, backed by a steady flow of orders, can vanish tomorrow if leaders do no think ahead about what consumers will want and expect next. Making records in an age of downloads or selling carts in an age of cars do not create many jobs or need large factories.
Cost down or cost control is part of daily life of any company that wants to survive in a competitive market. Left wing critics think management is driven by an unhealthy desire to maximise profits, always looking for ways to do things more effectively. They need to understand that the prime reason for costs down is to provide customers with keener prices. This is followed by the need to control costs to stay in the market, protecting the company’s jobs. Put up prices too much and allow costs to be out of control like government and the jobs will be lost to competitors.
Profits too do matter, because out of the profits you can afford to research the future, launch the new products and services and above all pay for the new factories and computers you will need to deliver a good answer. Most profits do not go to rich shareholders. If no profits go to rich shareholders there will be no rich shareholders creating the company and the jobs in the first place. Profits go to new investment, to paying interest on borrowed capital, and to paying dividends to the pension funds and insurance schemes of the many as well.
AI is seen by some as a major threat to jobs, as AI will be able to do more things better and more cheaply than employing a person to do them. For any individual company there is no choice if they want to survive. If the computer is cheaper and better the company will need to use it more to stay in the market. Used properly society gets richer, meaning we will have more to spend on new products and services still not yet dreamed up. The cost savings from AI get recycled, helping growth and prosperity. Real wages go up as jobs change and total output and income rises.
Just look at the energy of Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, that understands all this. Last quarter it reeled off an incredible list of all the things it was doing to widen its reach and serve its customers better. In the retail space alone it launched the faster supply of medicines to people with bigger discounts on price, expanded its ultra fast delivery service offering 30 minute same day delivery in some big cities, added millions of new products and many brands to its range of products for sale, launched Amazon Supply Chain services so other companies could use the advantages of its efficient supply and delivery systems, announced Proteus, an enhanced robot lifting loads in warehouses , and developed Alexa as a Shopping Assistant.
What did the UK government develop and launch to give users of its services faster and cheaper services? Why did it go on ignoring complaints and putting up with poor service? Why did it greatly increase the costs without improving the quality? Why does it always boast about how much it spends on a service but not about how much service it delivers? Who was the voice in government for the future, seeking to apply the new technologies to delivering better solutions to users that they wanted? Why do so many in government see such digitalisation as there is as a new way to enforce compliance and make things easier for the service supplier, not the user?
When I was a Minister I was shocked at the unwillingness of parts of the public sector to learn from mistakes and to improve what was clearly poor performance. I had to keep repeating the need to answer incoming letters promptly and well. Today emails go unanswered for months in some cases, produce lazy or unhelpful replies sometimes and sometimes go unanswered altogether. When a disaster occurs like the Horizon scandal, the contaminated blood scandal, the avoidable deaths in hospitals scandals, the dumping of refuse in the countryside and the rest there are attempts at cover up, arguments over responsibility, and long delays in providing remedies and compensation. If one of my companies had a worrying complaint I got them to settle urgently, to apologise, and to show the harm was not meant and the remedy was good.
PR and local government
To the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, I am in complete disagreement that we need to change the method of election to the House of Commons. He is right that the single-member constituency and the constituency link is fundamental. I remember when I went to Brussels all too often as a negotiating Minister, and met Ministers there chosen or elected by other means, that one of the big gaps between us was that I was constantly saying that a new law could not make any sense for my constituents I was meeting tomorrow in my surgery. Their response was, “Well, why do you bother?” They did not have to, because they did not have that single constituency link.
It is also easiest and fairest to say that the person with the most votes wins. As soon as you become the Member of Parliament, you have to represent everybody to the best of your ability, and you need support from your constituents. So, it makes sense to give the job to the person who already commands the most votes of the group who came forward in election, and it is obviously much easier if you win more than half the votes, as I often had the good fortune to do when I was a Member of Parliament. You need to build support and represent people, so the single-member constituency is the least bad way of electing the House of Commons.
The Liberal Democrats would be wise to remember that when they were in the coalition Government, one of the things they insisted on—and Conservatives agreed to—was, on their choice of system, to have a referendum on whether we should change the voting system. From memory, the public voted 68% against, in favour of keeping the current system—more than two-thirds. I was and am still with the public on that. They were right. I have always found the “democracy” bit in the Lib Dem name a bit odd, because whenever we have a public vote, they always seem to disagree with it, then they want to overturn it, not listening to the views of the people. They do not like the verdict that was given on their preferred system of changing the voting system, and they do not like the outcome of the Brexit vote, when millions came out to say we needed to restore our sovereignty, so that we could have a debate like this to discuss how the powers of self-government should be administered and distributed.
The Liberal Democrats wish that to be taken away from us to a much higher level of government by agreement between parties around a council table, with only the Commission allowed to write the laws and make most of the suggestions. The Lib Dems need to think very carefully about how they see democracy, compared with the way the rest of us see democracy—because we think democracy is about the voice of the people. There is only one thing above the elected House of Commons: the voice of the people in a referendum. The House of Commons would be wise to accept the verdict of a referendum, because otherwise, the people in the House of Commons can be changed at a subsequent general election.
As a former local government Minister, and, as a young man, a county councillor who chaired a committee and was therefore responsible for the conduct of various departments in the county council, I have a great affection for local government. Over my years as a Member of Parliament, I worked very closely with leading councillors in my area, and quite often, the issues that most concerned my constituents were wholly or partially decided by the local council.
What that taught me was that it is very disappointing that turnouts in local government elections are so low and that we do not get a good public debate through local media, and even social media, about the powers, duties and money that the council dispenses . If people knew more about what could be done by local government, I think there would be more interest in voting.
However, I am afraid that a lot of Labour and Liberal Democrat councils, as well as councils under no control, put people off. Instead of being proud of their powers and telling people how they will spend their money, all we ever hear from these councils is that they do not have enough money and they do not have any power because everything is already decided by the national Government. People therefore naturally conclude that there is no point in wasting their time with these councillors and councils, because the councillors themselves say, “Well don’t blame me, we can’t do anything; it’s already sorted out by the national Government”.
That of course is not true, but one of the further reasons why people are confused or put off is that we have far too many layers of government and council. It is a huge mistake to introduce regional strategic government in a small, very unified country such as England, and to have that in conflict with what should be truly local government through the local councils. My area moved over from county and district to unitary; I broadly welcomed that, because it removed some of the confusion. It means that, for local matters, we can say, “O unitary authority, it is your problem”, instead of being told that some row is going on between the county and the district and that nobody was really to blame.
That still leaves us with quite a lot of government, although I am very pleased that we have knocked out the European level, because that was a mighty imposition of taxes and laws that we often did not want. I am also glad that we have gone to unitaries, but we still have parish government, and now this Government are trying to intrude regional government on us. It is muddle, confusion and extra cost.
Let us deal with the question about the money. We always hear that most councils do not have enough money, and yet every year the council tax goes up, usually by more than inflation. That is what the public see. Every year government grants go up—yes, under Conservative Governments, as well as Labour Governments, grants usually go up—and councils still say that they are poor. Then when you look at how they are misspending, you can see why: councils that went on a binge buying up commercial property because the debt was cheap, or, as in my local area, a Lib Dem council wasting money on road projects and destroying our road systems for something that people do not want. The answer rests with local government using its powers and spending its money more wisely. ( Time limit kicked in )