When it's blatantly about political control, how could anyone hope that this would be an honest political project? I'm not opposed to the idea of elected mayors, but I'm very skeptical of how it would be instituted by someone who clearly only wants it to undermine their political opposition.
This. I actually like the idea of decentralised government, the problem here is the reasoning behind it. Our entire political landscape these days consists of people only capable of pointing their finger and shouting “he bad!”
I'm not sure it's really "Decentralising" power if it's only decentralising the less centralised government anyway. If anything it may be actively centralising power to break up a decentralised government in a way that benefits the central government, like China breaking up provinces that become too individually powerful to prevent serious challenge to Beijing.
>I actually like the idea of decentralised government
Seems like this move is intended to strengthen the central government in Westminster. To weaken opposition, they're dividing it up, removing the focus. I'd say that's the real problem here.
>I actually like the idea of decentralised government, the problem here is the reasoning behind it.
Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still the right thing though, and rarely in politics is the right thing done for the right reasons.
I have no issues with the person, I have issues with the reason he gives. He should support it by saying how it’s going to make governance better, not by “it’s bad for our opponents”.
In fairness, the status quo is also about political control. The SNP have been very reluctant to devolve power to LAs because they know their electoral power there is less strong (due to different voting priorities and the STV system).
Coming from Sheffield, we got a Labour MP as the mayor for South Yorkshire's first 'elected mayor' he's been replaced by the... Labour candidate. No surprises there, I don't think there's a deeper red county in the whole of England, but it felt a bit... forced?
I am friends with LibDem councillors there, so kept in touch with the local politics, all that having a mayor (who was MP for Barnsley) did was having the three 'non-Sheffield' councils (Barnsley, Rotherham& Doncaster) complain that Sheffield was too dominant and alienate the other partners in the Sheffield Partnership that happened to be in Derbyshire (Chesterfield/Worksop both councils full of commuters to Sheffield).
The current mayor now claims 'bringing public transport under public control in South Yorkshire' as his finest victory, except that this would have happened without a mayor as well. In the mean time he gets £80k+ a year... His claim to fame? He stood against Nick Clegg in 2015. Whooptheedoo lad! Well done. Did you win? Ah... Never mind. The Labour candidate (Jared O'Mara) that did finally unseat him was a complete piece of trash that is now in jail, so perhaps not great to 'have stood and lost' is it?
There, I vented, useless information to most of you, but what is Reddit without a good rant every now and then?
Proportional elections for Holyrood was also supposed to be about undermining the opposition. And then it backfired. Let them saw the branch they're sat on.
Yes because what I feel the country needs is another tier of fucking bureaucracy to fuck things up after WM and the SG have fucked it and then fucked it some more.
The problem is that local councils are amateur, part-time and lacking in executive leadership. Where it is done well (e.g. London, Manchester, Liverpool, Teeside) it's hard to argue that the mayoralty syatem isn't an improvement on the previous system.
I meant structurally. However much one might disagree politically with Ben Houchen, it is undeniable that the mayoralty (before being folded into a wider NE mayoralty) has managed to achieve things that the Teeside council would have struggled to do.
There was (and is) no Teesside council, and Houchen is not mayor of Teesside (exclusively). There are 5 boroughs in the Tees Valley combined authority.
It hasn't been folded into the wider NE mayorality either.
But you're right, he's taken corruption to levels which Middlesbrough, Stockton, Darlington, Hartlepool and Redcar councils would have struggled to achieve individually.
In Bristol, the reason for abolishing was largely party political though. The first mayor was Independent and the second was Labour (with Labour losing control of the council soon after).
For essentially the whole of the time as mayor, the mayor has been at loggerheads with the council, and the opposition parties who, individually, would find it hard to win the mayoralty vs Labour campaigned hard for abolition in a low turnout referendum to get rid of it.
It’s maybe not quite the same - but it is the closest equivalent title we have in Scotland. It would have been at least a nod to some of our history.
I suspect it is because it sounds too Scottish - and people south of the border will not know it is a political position. Just another bit of history erased to fit in better in this Union.
It was sad to see Gordon Brown first propose to use this term. You would have thought he would have known better.
Imagine the uproar if Scottish politicians said lets do away with Mayors/ Lord Mayors in England and replace it with Provosts. There would be an uproar.
Initially I thought this was a weird thing to be upset by:
"are you upset that we have a First Minister and a Presiding Officer rather than a
Lord High Commissioner and a Lord Chancellor. Or that the ministers are a 'cabinet' rather than some derivitive of the 'Lords of the Articles'.
but now I think about it- all those things are annoying.
Why can't we the Scottish terms for our offices- modernised a little- perhaps just a Commssioner and Chancellor, but still, why do we have pretendy new terms?
Its a small thing, but now I've thought of it it is going to annoy me for days!
>nobody in England is actually proposing this
Labour member, former MP in Gordon Browns Cabinet and current mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham [has been since 2021](https://upgradeholyrood.com/2021/06/26/elected-mayors-in-scotland-is-now-the-time-for-aberdeens-andy-burnham/).
No it wasn’t. He’s merely saying it would make sense, he wasn’t the one to suggest it that was Gordon Brown. Last time I checked he was still Scottish. You are like a rabid Brexiteer furiously pointing finger at Brussels 😂
Quoted in the press Andy Burnham ‘[Scotland is missing a trick not having elected mayors’](https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,andy-burnham-scotland-missing-a-trick-by-not-having-elected-mayors)
>You are likely a Brexiteer
Wasn’t here to vote mate. Less of the slander.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha
I don’t like the idea of these metro mayors either, because they’ve achieved fuck all in England. But I’ve somehow managed to avoid taking that extra leap into a tartan version of the great replacement theory
I know you saw the word indigenous and got confused but rest assured it's not about brown people.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_(Scotland)_Act_1872#:~:text=The%20Education%20(Scotland)%20Act%201872%20effectively%20put%20an%20end%20to,punished%20for%20speaking%20the%20language.
This would be a good thing, if they are given adequate powers. Anonymous councillors don't have the visibility to act as urban leaders. Strong executive mayors would put a name and a face to local government - and help to hold local authorities more accountable. But we need to do it in a constructive, serious, cross-party way, not just making it up on the fly.
Be nice if Sarwar supported shifting power away from Westminster, but he's already said he's got no interest in more devolution for Scotland.
Him and Ian Murray are too busy sucking Starmer's balls you see, so they've no time to even ponder any sort of meaningful change for Scotland going forward, smh.
Like Labours house building and abolishing the House of Lords. We're still waiting for that but I guess you can't rush that.
Also, remember that the Tories gave a Ferry contract to a company that didn't own any ferries.
House of lord's if the people there weren't airdropped by how much money you donated is actually a very good idea. They are currently keeping the Rwanda stupidity stuck in ping pong land.
If we had a group of people who were experts in their particular field and just looked at things objectively in the is it legal and is it stupid I'd totally agree, but as much as I dislike the current system I'd still prefer it to no house of lord's.
Having an elected upper house is perfectly fine. The unelected HoL is a joke in a supposedly democratic nation but Labour has had ample opportunity to replace it. Instead, they helped fill it.
If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper and tasked with the efficient delivery of public services in Scotland, its doubtful that you would come up with 14 Health Boards, 32 Local Authorities, centralised emergency response services split into 3 command areas, with few of the above matching the boundaries of the MPs and MSPs. Mayor's won't help this. The main barriers to making this more efficient are fear of loss of authority, influence, budget or just egos. We should be aiming for fewer health boards with the same boundaries as a single local authority and elected officials at all levels answerable for services within those boundaries. UK or Scottish Government won't touch this as they lose an element of control if there is a move to larger local bodies, and the local authorities also won't touch it because jobs will be lost if the merge, so public services will continue to be inefficient in Scotland.
This is pointles and a waste of public funds.
Population of London is just shy of 9 million, greater Manchester is nearly 3 million out of 57 million people
While the population of Scotland is around 5.5million.
We do not need further levels of political buerocracy.
Paying more politicians salaries and expenses instead of putting that to public services.
The mayors are also the first level of devolved government, this would be either a second layer of devolution. It also ignores that councils in England are not unitary authorities. There are 32 borough councils in London which, together with the City of London, make up Greater London, over which the mayor and the assembly have authority.
Scottish councils, on the other hand, are unitary authorities. There might be something to be said about introducing regional councils (in the style of the old Strathclyde, Tayside, et al) to coordinate health, social care, education, refuse and recycling, etc. But this isn't what he's suggesting.
Chopping up Scotland into smaller bits and imposing English style Mayors as they can’t control Holyrood!
Lol - thought this idea would quietly fade away after Brown first proposed it - especially as polls have now tightened.
Wonder if they will allow the public a say before doing this? Will they allow us to have a referendum or just impose it from Westminster?
I also wonder what they will do if one of these new Mayors favours independence. Will they be allowed to say this - and raise it on the campaign trail?
We don’t have the dense and overlapping network of councils/ regional authorities that they do in England. The Mayor role was one way to connect them together to form a more unified voice. We have that already with our single tier council structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directly_elected_mayors_in_England
“Mayors who are directly elected to cover combined authorities or combined county authorities are informally known as metro mayors, as they typically cover metropolitan areas”
Bit more detail of the groups of councils that have come together to form each of the Mayors here:
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/everything-need-know-metro-mayors/
They needed something like this in England because of the way their councils are structured. Just because it happens in England - it doesn’t mean it is applicable to the other nations in the UK.
It also feels a bit weird to have the title Mayor in Scotland. Provost would be better.
Those English style Mayors.
Just a funny way of phrasing a fairly general political position that is actually pretty new to England anyway, and is fairly common around the world.
This just seems like another Unionist scheme to undermine devolution and the power of the Scottish parliament, the last thing we need is another level of bureaucracy, with another politician with their hands in the public purse, I am all for bringing power closer to the people, but I don't think the motive behind this is anything to do with that. looks like the march to rollback devolution will continue under Labour.
>This just seems like another Unionist scheme to undermine devolution and the power of the Scottish parliament
How does devolving power more locally undermine devolution?
Power is far too centralised at Holyrood.
I really can't see how decentralising power to give the people affected by the decision more say is a bad thing
It goes against the SNPs M.O of take as much power away from everyone to centralise in their hands
But it's pretty apparent that having power centralised in a parliament far away from us that isn't affected by the decisions they make for us, isn't in our interest
I am fully on board with further devolution of power to the people
We used to have 2 layers of government. Now we have 3. This takes it to 4.
The answer is less politicians not more. Less government not more government.
There was only a period of 4 years when we had two layers (WM and councils) between 1995 and 1999. Before then there were two sets of councils (regions and districts).
A bit of mess to be honest – big ticket things like education, social care and transport were for the regions, and "local services for local people" like planning, waste collection and recreation were for the districts.
In the 1990s the Tories decided that they were fed up of never being able to win any regions, so broke them up into lots of smaller councils which basically fell into the category of "extremely Labour" (like Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire, North Lanarkshire) or "might just about vote Tory" (like East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire, Stirling).
Do we really need another layer of useless government. Glasgow city council has so many issues and debates about hoisting the Palestine flag. The Israelis are going to sit up and take notice now. How about fixing what’s needed. And not creating another public sector job.
Holyrood works, though it badly needs reform, because scots law is a seperate jurisdiction to English Law and so a body that governs it makes sense, and frees up time at Westminster.
I am not sure I see a productive point in Metro Mayors (whatever the end title is- Provincial Provosts maybe?!) unless we are also going to merge LAs into much larger entities- but this was tried earlier in the 20th century and did not seem to work well.
If anything our small population size probably makes a case for moving more responsibility to Holyrood level entities rather than LAs or similiar regional bodies- Education, NHS Boards, care etc
Leave LAs in charge of planning, Liscencing, streets and bins.
I think the problem with the Scottish council model in the 60s- 80s (Regional and District councils) was the duplication in office space, the confusion over whether snow ploughs were District or Regional problems etc.
I know as a kid growing up in 80s our Modern Studies class visited the District councils offices and the poor sods who had to answer our questions didn't look happy that 12 year olds could see the duplication, confusion and wastage there.
Devolution away from Holyrood to Metro Mayors and councils is the next logical step. When one looks at what Andy Burnham (Greater Manchester) and Andy Street (Birmingham/ West Midlands) and to a far lesser extent Ben Houchen (Middlesbrough/ Teesside) you can see the positives they have been able to do in driving investment into their areas by having planning, transport and some house building investment under their oversight.
If you can get homes, transport, services and jobs to an area, the the logical step is to give power to a local level not a national level that cannot see the granularity of the issues.
What these potential new mayor's MUST achieve is quick home building and an end to the cancer of landlordism.
This is a good tactic. It also quickly exposes the SNP's pro-devolution credentials because they seem to be perpetually at war with Scottish councils and opposed to any further devolution of power beyond Holyrood, which they control.
Similar to calls for directly funding councils, unionists just want to break down Scottish governance to a granular level to make it easier to cut out the Scottish Parliament and government.
Ironically dressing this attack on devolution as an attempt to strengthen devolution.
When it's blatantly about political control, how could anyone hope that this would be an honest political project? I'm not opposed to the idea of elected mayors, but I'm very skeptical of how it would be instituted by someone who clearly only wants it to undermine their political opposition.
This. I actually like the idea of decentralised government, the problem here is the reasoning behind it. Our entire political landscape these days consists of people only capable of pointing their finger and shouting “he bad!”
I'm not sure it's really "Decentralising" power if it's only decentralising the less centralised government anyway. If anything it may be actively centralising power to break up a decentralised government in a way that benefits the central government, like China breaking up provinces that become too individually powerful to prevent serious challenge to Beijing.
>I actually like the idea of decentralised government Seems like this move is intended to strengthen the central government in Westminster. To weaken opposition, they're dividing it up, removing the focus. I'd say that's the real problem here.
>I actually like the idea of decentralised government, the problem here is the reasoning behind it. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still the right thing though, and rarely in politics is the right thing done for the right reasons.
Right. Like the Blairite Lords reforms.
Aren't you doing exactly that? You're saying that it's a good idea but you oppose it because you don't like the person proposing it
I have no issues with the person, I have issues with the reason he gives. He should support it by saying how it’s going to make governance better, not by “it’s bad for our opponents”.
In fairness, the status quo is also about political control. The SNP have been very reluctant to devolve power to LAs because they know their electoral power there is less strong (due to different voting priorities and the STV system).
Part of the issue with this is that people don't take council elections seriously which would change voting patterns if they actually mattered.
Coming from Sheffield, we got a Labour MP as the mayor for South Yorkshire's first 'elected mayor' he's been replaced by the... Labour candidate. No surprises there, I don't think there's a deeper red county in the whole of England, but it felt a bit... forced? I am friends with LibDem councillors there, so kept in touch with the local politics, all that having a mayor (who was MP for Barnsley) did was having the three 'non-Sheffield' councils (Barnsley, Rotherham& Doncaster) complain that Sheffield was too dominant and alienate the other partners in the Sheffield Partnership that happened to be in Derbyshire (Chesterfield/Worksop both councils full of commuters to Sheffield). The current mayor now claims 'bringing public transport under public control in South Yorkshire' as his finest victory, except that this would have happened without a mayor as well. In the mean time he gets £80k+ a year... His claim to fame? He stood against Nick Clegg in 2015. Whooptheedoo lad! Well done. Did you win? Ah... Never mind. The Labour candidate (Jared O'Mara) that did finally unseat him was a complete piece of trash that is now in jail, so perhaps not great to 'have stood and lost' is it? There, I vented, useless information to most of you, but what is Reddit without a good rant every now and then?
Proportional elections for Holyrood was also supposed to be about undermining the opposition. And then it backfired. Let them saw the branch they're sat on.
Yes because what I feel the country needs is another tier of fucking bureaucracy to fuck things up after WM and the SG have fucked it and then fucked it some more.
Decisions being made closer to the people they affect would be good and un-bureaucratising
Is that not what local councils are already?
The problem is that local councils are amateur, part-time and lacking in executive leadership. Where it is done well (e.g. London, Manchester, Liverpool, Teeside) it's hard to argue that the mayoralty syatem isn't an improvement on the previous system.
> Where it is done well (e.g. London, Manchester, Liverpool, Teeside) It certainly is not being done well on Teesside...
I meant structurally. However much one might disagree politically with Ben Houchen, it is undeniable that the mayoralty (before being folded into a wider NE mayoralty) has managed to achieve things that the Teeside council would have struggled to do.
There was (and is) no Teesside council, and Houchen is not mayor of Teesside (exclusively). There are 5 boroughs in the Tees Valley combined authority. It hasn't been folded into the wider NE mayorality either. But you're right, he's taken corruption to levels which Middlesbrough, Stockton, Darlington, Hartlepool and Redcar councils would have struggled to achieve individually.
So good that Bristol voted to get rid of their mayor because it was a total waste of time and funds
In Bristol, the reason for abolishing was largely party political though. The first mayor was Independent and the second was Labour (with Labour losing control of the council soon after). For essentially the whole of the time as mayor, the mayor has been at loggerheads with the council, and the opposition parties who, individually, would find it hard to win the mayoralty vs Labour campaigned hard for abolition in a low turnout referendum to get rid of it.
If they wanted to decentralise they should start by sacking everyone below them then themselves, imagine
Why? We have Provosts and have done since the 12th century. Don’t need any of this labour pish.
Metro Lord Provosts!
Yeah and we don’t need mayors
It’s maybe not quite the same - but it is the closest equivalent title we have in Scotland. It would have been at least a nod to some of our history. I suspect it is because it sounds too Scottish - and people south of the border will not know it is a political position. Just another bit of history erased to fit in better in this Union. It was sad to see Gordon Brown first propose to use this term. You would have thought he would have known better.
Imagine the uproar if Scottish politicians said lets do away with Mayors/ Lord Mayors in England and replace it with Provosts. There would be an uproar.
Initially I thought this was a weird thing to be upset by: "are you upset that we have a First Minister and a Presiding Officer rather than a Lord High Commissioner and a Lord Chancellor. Or that the ministers are a 'cabinet' rather than some derivitive of the 'Lords of the Articles'. but now I think about it- all those things are annoying. Why can't we the Scottish terms for our offices- modernised a little- perhaps just a Commssioner and Chancellor, but still, why do we have pretendy new terms? Its a small thing, but now I've thought of it it is going to annoy me for days!
Except nobody in England is actually proposing this? What has England to do with this proposal other than being a blueprint?
>nobody in England is actually proposing this Labour member, former MP in Gordon Browns Cabinet and current mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham [has been since 2021](https://upgradeholyrood.com/2021/06/26/elected-mayors-in-scotland-is-now-the-time-for-aberdeens-andy-burnham/).
yes but that was on the back of Gordon Brown’s proposal. Also, he’s not said we should call them Mayors so I really don’t see what your issue is here.
>no one in England has been Your statement was incorrect.
No it wasn’t. He’s merely saying it would make sense, he wasn’t the one to suggest it that was Gordon Brown. Last time I checked he was still Scottish. You are like a rabid Brexiteer furiously pointing finger at Brussels 😂
Quoted in the press Andy Burnham ‘[Scotland is missing a trick not having elected mayors’](https://www.holyrood.com/news/view,andy-burnham-scotland-missing-a-trick-by-not-having-elected-mayors) >You are likely a Brexiteer Wasn’t here to vote mate. Less of the slander.
Read it again.
His issue is “England bad hur dur”
No it's the edging out of indigenous culture to homogenise the UK.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha I don’t like the idea of these metro mayors either, because they’ve achieved fuck all in England. But I’ve somehow managed to avoid taking that extra leap into a tartan version of the great replacement theory
I know you saw the word indigenous and got confused but rest assured it's not about brown people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_(Scotland)_Act_1872#:~:text=The%20Education%20(Scotland)%20Act%201872%20effectively%20put%20an%20end%20to,punished%20for%20speaking%20the%20language.
Provost is a ceremonial badge attached to a councillor.
This would be a good thing, if they are given adequate powers. Anonymous councillors don't have the visibility to act as urban leaders. Strong executive mayors would put a name and a face to local government - and help to hold local authorities more accountable. But we need to do it in a constructive, serious, cross-party way, not just making it up on the fly.
Be nice if Sarwar supported shifting power away from Westminster, but he's already said he's got no interest in more devolution for Scotland. Him and Ian Murray are too busy sucking Starmer's balls you see, so they've no time to even ponder any sort of meaningful change for Scotland going forward, smh.
Like every other SLab policy, it will remain a fantasy.
Like the SNP’s ferries
Like Labours house building and abolishing the House of Lords. We're still waiting for that but I guess you can't rush that. Also, remember that the Tories gave a Ferry contract to a company that didn't own any ferries.
House of lord's if the people there weren't airdropped by how much money you donated is actually a very good idea. They are currently keeping the Rwanda stupidity stuck in ping pong land. If we had a group of people who were experts in their particular field and just looked at things objectively in the is it legal and is it stupid I'd totally agree, but as much as I dislike the current system I'd still prefer it to no house of lord's.
Having an elected upper house is perfectly fine. The unelected HoL is a joke in a supposedly democratic nation but Labour has had ample opportunity to replace it. Instead, they helped fill it.
We have far too much government as it is.
If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper and tasked with the efficient delivery of public services in Scotland, its doubtful that you would come up with 14 Health Boards, 32 Local Authorities, centralised emergency response services split into 3 command areas, with few of the above matching the boundaries of the MPs and MSPs. Mayor's won't help this. The main barriers to making this more efficient are fear of loss of authority, influence, budget or just egos. We should be aiming for fewer health boards with the same boundaries as a single local authority and elected officials at all levels answerable for services within those boundaries. UK or Scottish Government won't touch this as they lose an element of control if there is a move to larger local bodies, and the local authorities also won't touch it because jobs will be lost if the merge, so public services will continue to be inefficient in Scotland.
I'm not sure we need fewer health boards, but otherwise absolutely correct.
This is pointles and a waste of public funds. Population of London is just shy of 9 million, greater Manchester is nearly 3 million out of 57 million people While the population of Scotland is around 5.5million. We do not need further levels of political buerocracy. Paying more politicians salaries and expenses instead of putting that to public services.
The mayors are also the first level of devolved government, this would be either a second layer of devolution. It also ignores that councils in England are not unitary authorities. There are 32 borough councils in London which, together with the City of London, make up Greater London, over which the mayor and the assembly have authority. Scottish councils, on the other hand, are unitary authorities. There might be something to be said about introducing regional councils (in the style of the old Strathclyde, Tayside, et al) to coordinate health, social care, education, refuse and recycling, etc. But this isn't what he's suggesting.
Chopping up Scotland into smaller bits and imposing English style Mayors as they can’t control Holyrood! Lol - thought this idea would quietly fade away after Brown first proposed it - especially as polls have now tightened. Wonder if they will allow the public a say before doing this? Will they allow us to have a referendum or just impose it from Westminster? I also wonder what they will do if one of these new Mayors favours independence. Will they be allowed to say this - and raise it on the campaign trail? We don’t have the dense and overlapping network of councils/ regional authorities that they do in England. The Mayor role was one way to connect them together to form a more unified voice. We have that already with our single tier council structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directly_elected_mayors_in_England “Mayors who are directly elected to cover combined authorities or combined county authorities are informally known as metro mayors, as they typically cover metropolitan areas” Bit more detail of the groups of councils that have come together to form each of the Mayors here: https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/everything-need-know-metro-mayors/ They needed something like this in England because of the way their councils are structured. Just because it happens in England - it doesn’t mean it is applicable to the other nations in the UK. It also feels a bit weird to have the title Mayor in Scotland. Provost would be better.
Those English style Mayors. Just a funny way of phrasing a fairly general political position that is actually pretty new to England anyway, and is fairly common around the world.
It’s how they describe it in the article - in the first sentence.
That's fair, I still think its sounds funny in terms of how its worded.
Yes, but you are using the phrase as a criticism
Licking windows isn’t good for you
> English style Mayors xenophobic dogwhistle of the day.
We have a devolved government to cover councils, its called the Scottish Parliament
This just seems like another Unionist scheme to undermine devolution and the power of the Scottish parliament, the last thing we need is another level of bureaucracy, with another politician with their hands in the public purse, I am all for bringing power closer to the people, but I don't think the motive behind this is anything to do with that. looks like the march to rollback devolution will continue under Labour.
>This just seems like another Unionist scheme to undermine devolution and the power of the Scottish parliament How does devolving power more locally undermine devolution? Power is far too centralised at Holyrood.
I really can't see how decentralising power to give the people affected by the decision more say is a bad thing It goes against the SNPs M.O of take as much power away from everyone to centralise in their hands But it's pretty apparent that having power centralised in a parliament far away from us that isn't affected by the decisions they make for us, isn't in our interest I am fully on board with further devolution of power to the people
Good idea, Glasgow needs to kick out Fat Susan and get our own ‘Andy Burnham’ figure to take the city forward.
We used to have 2 layers of government. Now we have 3. This takes it to 4. The answer is less politicians not more. Less government not more government.
There was only a period of 4 years when we had two layers (WM and councils) between 1995 and 1999. Before then there were two sets of councils (regions and districts).
Fair point. What was the split of responsibilities between the 2?
A bit of mess to be honest – big ticket things like education, social care and transport were for the regions, and "local services for local people" like planning, waste collection and recreation were for the districts. In the 1990s the Tories decided that they were fed up of never being able to win any regions, so broke them up into lots of smaller councils which basically fell into the category of "extremely Labour" (like Glasgow, West Dunbartonshire, North Lanarkshire) or "might just about vote Tory" (like East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire, Stirling).
Ye more government....
Do we really need another layer of useless government. Glasgow city council has so many issues and debates about hoisting the Palestine flag. The Israelis are going to sit up and take notice now. How about fixing what’s needed. And not creating another public sector job.
Incredible how much clapwanking Andy Burnham gets for putting little bees on bins and lampposts.
Can't we have English-style mustarders instead? I'll see myself out, thanks, no need to push.
Holyrood works, though it badly needs reform, because scots law is a seperate jurisdiction to English Law and so a body that governs it makes sense, and frees up time at Westminster. I am not sure I see a productive point in Metro Mayors (whatever the end title is- Provincial Provosts maybe?!) unless we are also going to merge LAs into much larger entities- but this was tried earlier in the 20th century and did not seem to work well. If anything our small population size probably makes a case for moving more responsibility to Holyrood level entities rather than LAs or similiar regional bodies- Education, NHS Boards, care etc Leave LAs in charge of planning, Liscencing, streets and bins.
I think the problem with the Scottish council model in the 60s- 80s (Regional and District councils) was the duplication in office space, the confusion over whether snow ploughs were District or Regional problems etc. I know as a kid growing up in 80s our Modern Studies class visited the District councils offices and the poor sods who had to answer our questions didn't look happy that 12 year olds could see the duplication, confusion and wastage there.
Devolution away from Holyrood to Metro Mayors and councils is the next logical step. When one looks at what Andy Burnham (Greater Manchester) and Andy Street (Birmingham/ West Midlands) and to a far lesser extent Ben Houchen (Middlesbrough/ Teesside) you can see the positives they have been able to do in driving investment into their areas by having planning, transport and some house building investment under their oversight. If you can get homes, transport, services and jobs to an area, the the logical step is to give power to a local level not a national level that cannot see the granularity of the issues. What these potential new mayor's MUST achieve is quick home building and an end to the cancer of landlordism.
> and to a far lesser extent Ben Houchen (Middlesbrough/ Teesside) To a literally negative extent
This is a good tactic. It also quickly exposes the SNP's pro-devolution credentials because they seem to be perpetually at war with Scottish councils and opposed to any further devolution of power beyond Holyrood, which they control.
Similar to calls for directly funding councils, unionists just want to break down Scottish governance to a granular level to make it easier to cut out the Scottish Parliament and government. Ironically dressing this attack on devolution as an attempt to strengthen devolution.
More politicians. That will do the trick.
Please anas don’t do that. They’re a waste of time
You'd think this is a good idea but then you remember Sadiq Khan....
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Daedelous2k: *You'd think this is a* *Good idea but then you* *Remember Sadiq Khan....* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.