Conservatives believe in devolution to local politicians and, wherever possible, to the most people-sized of institutions.
"No One Should Be Over-Powerful. Not Trade Unions. Not Corporations. Not The Government. Not The European Union. Wherever We See Bullying By The Over-Mighty, We Will Oppose It."
- Michael Howard
The idea of opposition to big and powerful vested interests is one of the great characteristics of conservatism. Sometimes ‘big business conservatives’ have appeared to capture the Tory Party but the policies of Michael Howard have begun to point towards a more democratic, small-scale and less centralised British politics.
Decentralisation
Labour uses the same kind of language but often means very different things. When Labour talks of decentralisation it means taking power from Whitehall-based politicians and giving it to other politicians, often in regional bureaucracies. Since 1997 a new breed of well-paid politicians now populate very expensive buildings in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh. When conservatives (particularly adherents of the Direct Democracy agenda) talk of decentralisation, however, they mean the devolution of power to parents, patients and local people. For example:
- School choice will see power taken away from bureaucracies and given to parents;
- The election of police chiefs will put local communities in the driving seat against crime;
- Stakeholder-directed funding of good causes, whereby politicians surrender funding decisions to local communities and service users;
- Local communities will also be given new powers to object to superpubs, mobile phone ‘monster’ masts and sprawling housing developments.
This kind of localisation is preferable to Labour’s politicised interpretation but it leaves unanswered questions about the imbalance of power between local government and Britain’s 529 quangos.
Soft government
Sir Simon Jenkins, former Editor of the Times, suggests that the real political divide is no longer between right and left but between those who believe in centralised government – something, he suggests Tony Blair has inherited from Margaret Thatcher – and those who believe in localism.
Across Europe, Mr Jenkins (as he prefers still to be called) insists, localism – what he names ‘soft government’ - is the spirit of the age. What characterises “French healthcare, Swedish schools and New York policing” is local, not national, accountability. Mr Jenkins concludes:
“Soft government is not easy. It means some variable standards in local services. It means a shift from national to local taxation. It means more power to municipalities and parishes, which means more participation and more anger. It involves redirecting… accountability to the locality, relating doctors, teachers, police and other public services direct to their own communities. Accountability is through the ballot box, not the central target”.
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Also see definition of subsidiarity.
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