PIP

Secrecy, that is the practice of not revealing certain facts of matters of concern to others might be a tactic used in battles against enemies or in carrying out competitive strategies in the market place. However, where is comes to information concerning the affairs of people managed by representatives and the associated disposal of financial resources supplied by those same people, secrecy takes on a very different form of manipulation, that of corruption.

One of the most rampant indications of the decadence of political parties, all political parties, was their willing acceptance of the Labour Party proposal to introduce cabinet government, so-called, to local authorities.

The Labour government took the logic of the West Lothian Question¹ and turned it on its head to create a tactic for enhancing the power of the Labour Party. The Labour Party wanted to consolidate power in three priority regions selected for devolution in England. These were the North East, Yorkshire & Humberside and the North West all were regions where the Labour Party had a majority of MPs and a fairly good local council representation. The auxiliary tactic introduced by the Labour Party specifically to lever the their power in those regions was the Local Government Act of 2000 device of cabinet government. This was introduced to local authorities where a few selected party members can take key decisions and where a balance of party representation is not required. This means that the decisions between local governments related to central government cash, who gets what, who is favoured is less transparent. This tactic, at one swoop, whilst masquerading as a basis for introducing efficiency in government decision-making introduced a fundamentally corrupt process throughout the country. Through the device of cabinet "government" political parties can buy its way into the future by consolidating a local power base by favouring its own in a corrupt and far from democratic manner. Naturally, any such intent would be vehemently denied but the evidence supports this local power strategy. The problem was that this wild and somewhat arrogant ambition of the Labour Party fell apart when the English regions concerned rejected devolution. The table below shows² the first five priority targets selected by the Labour Party for devolution. As stated they are "coincidentally" the very regions where Labour has their main majorities.

Region	Number of Labour MPs	% of total	% electorate support	outcome
Scotland	41	69%	24%	succeeded
Wales	29	72.5%	26.7%	succeeded
North East	28	93%	30%	stalled
Yorkshire & Humberside	44	78.5%	25.7%	stalled
North West	61	80%	25.9%	stalled

These regions contained 57% of the Labour MPs. Although over 80% of the MPs returned from these three English Regions were from the Labour Party under the majority principle they had just 27% of the support of the electorate.

The first English regional devolution election took place in the North East of England in November 2004³. The Labour government made use of a 100% postal ballot in spite of warnings concerning the possible abuse of the postal vote. The percentage of the electorate supporting this regional assembly was just 10.5% with some 37% against. The total number of people voting against the plans was 696,519 (78%), while 197,310 (22%) voted in favour with a "turnout" of some 47.8% of the region's 1.9 million voters took part.

The common interest in illicit power over resources

The other political parties had an opportunity to expose the potential corruption asscociated with the introduction of "cabinet government; they did not. All British political parties willingly accepted the device as a way to keep others out of decision-making and more ashamedly to prevent the electorate from knowing how decisions were being taken on their behalf and with their money.

Portsmouth's record on cabinet government decisions

In Portsmouth the cabinet system oversaw the Spinnaker Tower contract in 2002 for the bulk of the construction work and the lack of transparency and ability of the local electorate to monitor the quality of this arrangement ended up with council tax payers having to pay a £12m bill. Similarly the much vaunted Public Private Initiative on roads (Colas) is another example of a very bad and expensive decision being taken by cabinet (see Portsmouth's bad deal on roads - a need to rationalise). No matter what party is in power "cabinet government" serves to obscure the facts, it leads to more "efficient" decisions in terms of political party interests but corrupt and inefficient decision-making from the standpoint of the electorate and always a high risk of a waste of public finance.

Having suffered more than many, the people of Portsmouth should lobby against cabinet government in local decision-making and, at the more general level, seek to have this aspect of the Local Government Act, repealed.

¹ The West Lothian Question. The West Lothian question was in fact two questions raised by Tam Dalyell, MP for the Scottish constituency of West Lothian (now retired) during the debate over Scottish devolution in the 1970s. These were: "How can it be right that MP's elected to Westminster from Scottish constituencies have no ability to affect the issues of their constituents which have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament" and "If power over Scottish affairs is devolved to a Scottish Parliament, how can it be right that MPs representing Scottish constituencies in the Parliament of the United Kingdom will have the power to vote on issues affecting England (including those that don't affect Scotland), but English MPs will not have the power to vote on Scottish issues?". At the time other parliamentarians did not respond in an adequate fashion to these important questions and ever since Parliament and governments have prevaricated on these issues. Consequently even today after a Scottish Parliament was established, no satisfactory answer has been provided and the issues raised by Tam Dalyell are a reality. Clearly rather than be concerned with the discriminatory nature of this state of affairs, the government of the day prefers this because it provides an ability to sustain a majority vote in Parliament over English affairs against the preference of the English electorate. As a reflection of the lack of responsibility associated with allowing this constitutional flaw to persist, the Lord Chancellor in being asked about this issue, tp, BBC "Question Time" (2007) responded by stating it "might be possible" for Scottish MPs to vote and influence English affairs and that this was an " anomaly"; as if Tam Dalyell had never raised his questions some 30 years ago.
² From: McNeill, H.W., "The Briton's Quest for Freedom .. Our unfinished journey", Chapter 16, "A United Kingdom?", pp. 159-160, HPC, Portsmouth, 2007.
³ Regional assemblies. Regional assembly reception of idea in England. "You can't fool all of the English, all of the time" McNeill, H.W., RNO-APE, June, 2005, wa. see also the BBC, 5th November 2004, reported rejection of regional devolution by the North East.