An anniversary passed recently that went largely unreported by the mainstream media, but is significant nonetheless: Belgium has effectively gone a year without a national government. Their general election in June 2010 did not produce a clear winner, and relations between the various parties are so bad that they are barely talking to each other, let alone able to form coalitions. But guess what? They are managing perfectly well without a national government! If such a thing were to happen in this country there would be chaos, as all the functions that the control-freak British government runs centrally and guards so jealously - the NHS, benefit payments, tax collection and the like - would cease, leaving the population in limbo. And the reason Belgium is managing to tick over so nicely? Because their underlying structure of local government is strong. They have regionally devolved powers that our local governments can only dream about.

It is obviously fortunate that Belgium is not under military threat, and is also a member of the eurozone, as there might have been a run on their currency due to their inability to form a government - but those issues aside, Belgium is managing on a day to day basis in a manner that we could not imagine in Britain. Some would argue that being in the EU has allowed Belgium to get away with this situation, and that may be true up to a point - but what happens when the EU itself collapses? All empires do eventually, and it is hard to see how the EU will survive its present financial difficulties - both the Roman empire and the USSR collapsed for similar reasons.

There is an undeniable case that a country needs a national government - but how much should that national government actually do? What is the ideal form that it should take? The English Radicals have been giving this a lot of thought recently, and we offer our opinions below.

In Britain, there are of course national differences and rivalries which have direct parallels with Belgium, as there are bound to be with any artificially created state of union - in Belgium you have the Dutch-leaning Flemings and the French-leaning Walloons: in mainland Britain you have the English, Scots and Welsh nations, all under British rule. In Britain, we all share a common language, a currency and a land mass - but in light of the events in Belgium, do we really need to share a government? The Scots especially are unhappy with being ruled remotely from Westminster, to the point that an SNP majority parliament now sits in Holyrood. They are a nation in their own right, who want more powers devolved from the British in London and handing back. Are we, the English, worthy of anything less?

So what can we learn from the Belgian experience?

Firstly, we should consider doing what the Belgians ought to be doing now – grant a divorce to the quarrelling couple Flanders and Wallonia, which would open up the possibility for each part to form workable coalitions in their own areas. In Britain, the equivalent action would be to grant full independence to all the Home nations, and lay the “United” Kingdom to rest.

Secondly, as Belgium has proved over the last year - that when a country has strong local governments - able to raise their own taxes, plus provide and manage their own infrastructure - where then is the need for central government to perform these roles?

Thirdly, although there is a need for an outward-facing national government which oversees issues that local governments cannot deal with alone - defence, immigration/border control and central banking, for example - then that national government should only have such powers that the local governments underneath allow it to have, via a written constitution. In other words, a Confederal government. This differs from the Federal model such as the USA employs, in that a federal government is the supreme authority over its member states. We feel this is a crucially important difference, and would be a good safeguard against the abuses of power by corrupt individuals that are carried out all the time in the name of federal government.

There is no reason why a Confederation of English counties - all co-signatories to a binding, written English constitution - could not send delegates to a national English government, that is only permitted to operate within specific fields of responsibility. Such a government would be responsible for the readiness of our defences in the event of aggression by a foreign power, but would have no authority to declare war on a far off land, simply because the Prime Minister of the day was able to persuade the MP's of his own party – a few hundred toadies - to support him in a parliamentary vote, regardless of the wishes of millions of people; such a course of action would be unconstitutional under the articles of Confederation, and only possible if all the Confederation member counties held an emergency public referendum, which was passed by a majority of the public vote. Shouldn't you as an individual have a say who we go to war with, seeing as your lives may be directly affected by it?

Under a confederated national government, MP's and Prime Ministers would be stripped of their excessive powers that presently make them our masters, and revert to being what they should have been in the first place – our servants. For the first time in history, the English people would have a written constitution which clearly sets out their rights and responsibilities, and defines their freedoms – unlike our present unwritten “constitution”, not worth the paper it's not written on!

All the other English nationalist parties are content to settle just for an English parliament – which to our minds displays a depressing lack of ambition and poor forward thinking, because the question must be asked - how would an English parliament, under the same constitutional rules, be any better than what we have now? Central government would still be calling the shots, local government would still be weak, and the main parties would simply be masters over a smaller piece of the British pie - England. They would still abuse their power in exactly the same way as they do now, without significant constitutional safeguards brought in to prevent that happening.

The English Radicals feel that a Confederated national government with limited powers and responsibilities, constantly held in check by strong local governments and ruled by a written constitution, is a good workable system that is a vast improvement on what we have now. Isn't it time England had a national government worthy of it's people?
 


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