[lbo-talk] uh-oh! too much regulation!!

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Feb 3 15:51:00 PST 2010


Doug 'Does Britain have anything like our Senate, where a handful of thinly populated conservative states can block legislation? (Does the House of Lords even have any legislative function?) I thought that a common complaint against your parliamentary system was that it's something of an elective dictatorship where the party in power can do pretty much whatever it wants as long as it has a decent majority. The Chancellor can dictate fiscal policy. Our fiscal policy is an indescribable mess.'

No, plainly adminstrative regimes differ. But the trend is towards convergence. Amongst European political scientists the trend towards 'non-majoritarian' regulatory institutions is not only widely acknowledged, but almost universally supported. It is true that the Lords lost much of its authority over the commons, but in proportion the British legislature is subordinated to the unelected European Commission, European Court of Justice and European Central Bank . In 1997 the current Prime Minister (as Chancellor) signed over monetary policy to the ECB by making the Bank of England 'independent' - of UK government control, that is(as indeed every EMS or Eurozone country has had to do, as a condition of participation). The model, incidentally, on which the ECB is founded is the Federal Reserve. Further, effective control of much of economic policy has been handed over to a number of unelected bodies, such as the Audit Commission.

That Britain was an elective dictatorship was a complaint first made by Lord Hailsham, a neanderthal tory who complained at the same time of the 'ratchet-effect' of socialism in Britain. It was (by some curious osmosis) later adopted by the New Left Review people as an alibi for the programmatic collapse of English socialism. The people that talk about 'elective dictatorship', not surprisingly, are mostly those who have had a hand in the fight to limit popular control over government, first in the person of Lord Hailsham and the Judges, who played a big part in the 1970s, jailing strikers and striking down policies; second in the New Labour strategy of derogating power from Westminster to Brussels.



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