ULEZ: Let the crofters decide
The brouhaha over ULEZ (the Ultra Low Emission Zone in London which will mean drivers of highly polluting cars will need to pay a charge when they enter the capital) has provoked some to say that decentralisation has failed.
One Telegraph columnist in particular has argued that: ULEZ has created a serious democratic deficit. "More than one million motorists living outside London may face the daily £12.50 charge if they enter the city. Many will work or shop regularly in London, but live outside its borders. Accordingly, they have no way of holding the mayor to account .... What do the champions of devolution have to say to that?"
The answer is simple. This is nonsense.
Let us apply an ice bucket of logic to this enflamed argument. The reductio ad absurdum of this implicit assertion is that if you didn't vote for something you ought not have to accede to the duties imposed by that vote. It means that I can say: 'I live in Milton Keynes so nothing that the mayors of West Midlands/Manchester/West Yorkshire have enacted should apply to me when I visit because I can't vote it down.'
Really?
So when I cross my parish council boundary, or wander into the next borough, or county or head into Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland or head off overseas, I ought to be exempt from every law and bylaw? I should only live by the laws that I voted for?
The logic of this is we should have a one-world government whereby we can all vote on everything. Of course our voices will be irrelevant and swamped by the billions of voters deciding issues on a global basis. But it will somehow be 'more democratic'.
This is silly.
Here in my English urban borough I know better what is relevant to me than I know what a crofter in the Outer Hebrides might need. Yet, according to the logic of 'only do what I can vote for' I should get to tell that crofter what's what. And that crofter ought to be able to tell me whether I can have ULEZ or not.
Logically it is less democratic to impose a nation's will on a city or a borough and more democratic for a city or a borough to forge its own destiny. Irrespective of what one thinks of ULEZ, voting locally on local issues is the antidote to the democratic deficit.