Redecentralizing England
The just-released book “Saving Britain: How We Must Change to Prosper in Europe” by Will Hutton and Andrew Adonis is a must-read to understand how Brexit came to be, and what needs fixing.
Of the many good arguments, the key one is that England has over the past years become more and more centralised — the UK has actually become less so, with devolution to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. But England has a much larger population and for it nothing has changed. This feeling of loss of power was wrongly projected onto Europe by the disenfranchised voters in the poor areas of England of which there are many, due as it happens to the centralisation of power in London and an economic philosophy that makes it difficult for the city to see this.
To back this up, they write “the proportion of our public spending controlled from the center is roughly twice that in France, Japan and Italy, and more than three times that in Germany”. That England is more centralised than France should really give pause for thought! It is true that France has since President Mitterand in the 1980ies been hard at work re-decentralising, but even so: twice that of France is mind-boggling. The UK used to be known for its local democracy!
It is this problem of centralisation that explains best the reason why England voted Brexit. The English were right to feel the bottleneck in decision making, but wrong to lay the blame at the feet of the EU. Hutton and Adonis write towards the end of the book
The UK controls more than 98 per cent of its public expenditure.
The EU is an association of nation states for common purposes, and it is by historical standards a very good one. The whole of the ‘Brussels bureaucracy’, that supposed fountain of red tape, is smaller than London’s Metropolitan Police.
I would add a recent discovery of mine: not only is Europe not a super-state, but it cannot be: Prof Derosier, a French constitutional scholar who also keeps a blog for the well respected Newspaper Le Monde, showed this in his thesis whose translated title is “The constitutional limits to European Integration — a comparative study of Germany, France and Italy” of which I wrote in detail in my recent post “From Digital Sovereignty to the Web of Nations”. In the introduction to that book by Prof Otto Pfersmann we find the two quotes (my translation helped by Deepl)
The conclusion of this research is clear: the internal constitutional law of the three Member States examined — Germany, France and Italy — absolutely prohibits them from merging into a European legal system with sovereign competence.
and on the next page
These data clearly show that many eurosceptic anxieties, and equally euro-enthusiasms, are legally unfounded as long as the current framework is respected.
All that makes Brexit feel very much like a Quixotic enterprise, since it is trying to solve a problem that is imaginary (the sovereignty of Britain versus the fear of an impossible Federal Europe), instead of solving the real problems of centralisation of English politics over the last century that originate in an ideology that does not understand that the individual is shaped by the society he is in, but thinks of the individual as a pre-given atom. Thatcherism started off being pro European, but recoiled when the social implications of a common market became visible. But one cannot have one without the other. The individual comes together with the social in a process of Transindividuation.
This social atomism is a mistake made by the neo-liberal right, but in my view also by many on the left, who have habitually fallen into thinking that all workers of the world are the same (e.g. oppressed by capitalism), but forget that the culture they are brought-up in will have shaped them fundamentally, and so ignoring culture reduce everything to economics because it is more elegant mathematically. Which is the reason why the question of borders is a lot more tricky than it may seem at first. But again, the UK was not even in the Schengen area — it had border controls — and even if that was thought problematical, there are other ways than borders to stem the flow of people such as ID cards, which are discussed in the book.
The authors of “Saving Britain” have a proposal for a new constitution for England and a parliament to go with it, which they develop in the book, and Will Hutton gives a summary of it in a recent blog post. The argument that something form of redecentralization is needed is powerful, the details I would guess are very much up for discussion. One has to start somewhere.
The issue of Decentralisation is important for the UK but equally on the internet, where it could be argued that the centralisation of social networks, together with a laissez-faire attitude to advertising, i.e. mind-control, led in part to the spinning out of control of the elections that led to Brexit and Trump. That is the subject of my paper “On Fake News and Digital Sovereignty”.
I was aware of many of the pieces of the story that led to Brexit discussed in “Saving Britain”, but it helps a lot to bring them together in one book. The Kindle edition [1] is then very convenient as it makes it easy to copy and paste sections of arguments when in conversations with family and friends. As I am not a specialist in UK history or political economy I would not venture to evaluate the arguments put forward in the book, other than saying that most of them seem very plausible and that I have been wining a few arguments: I have been testing them out in WhatsApp discussions with my father who is Prof of International Political Economy at the European business school INSEAD — and who has been critical of the quality of the debate on Brexit — and my brother Alex who ran as Tory candidate for a northern town and understood early on the appeal of Brexit there (even while being born in France and having a German wife). And so far I feel empowered! Discussions on Brexit from now should be a lot deeper and more intelligent.
Perhaps the one point I am not that convinced about is that the UK would have done well to enter the Euro. That point could have been left out of the book without affecting the argument. With services like Transferwise that are now starting to act as banks, allowing people to have accounts in 40 or so countries on the click of a button with a “Hello World” credit card to go with it, and with minimal exchange rate costs one wonders if we have not reached a technical stage where more currencies could exist without being as problematic for business…
[1] On the other hand the Kindle edition downloaded on the initial publication day seems to be missing links to the notes. I found it weird that there were no notes, but it helped me read the book with less interruption. Having read the book I found them there at the end.
