Wednesday 6 July 2011

Most definitely a case for "Referism"

"The House of Commons will today approve the government spending £ 48.875 Billion of your money for the Home Office, Foreign Office and Department of Communities and Local Government.  This is part of a total Estimates approval for the year ending March 2012 of £221,086,166,000........Yet it will more or less go through on the nod, with a faux - and largely pointless - Estimates Day debate."
One of the requirements of "Referism" is that:
"in the relationship between the British people and their governments, the people should be in control. The state is the servant not the master. Control is primarily achieved by submitting annual state budgets to the people for approval, via referendums. The catchphrase is: "it's our money and we decide". Governments are thereby forced to refer to the people for their funding, hence the term "referism"."
It would seem that there are 221billion reasons why we need a tad of "Referism"!

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Agreed.

The weak spot of 'democracy' is that everybody puts in their special pleading why THEY deserve more money, a little subsidy or tax break or vanity spending.

We have to turn this round so that you get a line-by-line break down of your tax bill, i.e. your year-end P60 says

"Tax and NIC withheld £10,000. The government has spent this on:
Private sector subsidies £2,000
Foreign aid and EU membership: £500
Public sector pensions £1,000
Old age pensions £1,500..."

and so on.

WitteringsfromWitney said...

Thanks your endorsement - and obviously agree with your comment.

Anonymous said...

People cannot vote on such large sums of money. The size of the budget is such that no meaningful decision can be made by anyone, including the Treasury chief.

What has to be done is to bring it to the local level. That means all taxes to be local. Then after allocations for the local shire have been met, again decided by the people, some of the remainder to be allocated to the "federal" government for defence, FO and other business.

WitteringsfromWitney said...

DP111: Well I do think we can make such a judgement and I also think that MW's idea about info in one's P60 worthy of introduction.

Agree with you on voting on expenditure at a local level as well as national level.