Tom Tugendhat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Has the extent of devolution for Scotland and Northern Ireland gone too far? Because to an outsider, it seems like they have a great deal of autonomy, but actually not quite enough responsibility for the well-being of the whole polity. I wouldn’t say it’s gone too far, no. I’d say it’s imbalanced. I think that’s right. There’s an old principle, which you’ll know, of aligning accountability, responsibility, and authority. One of the challenges we’ve got in our devolution system in the UK at the moment is you’d have to be nuts, as a devolved representative seeking office, not to promise to pave the steep streets of your community with gold, and then to blame Westminster for not paying for it because you have very little responsibility for raising any of the money that you’re going to spend. We don’t have, in the same way that you’d have in the United States, the same level of city, county, state, and federal taxation. It’s much more centralized in the UK. Now, one of the advantages, of course, is it means that the oversight is stronger. One of the disadvantages, of course: It means the responsibility for each individual area is weaker, and that leads to the inequities of infrastructure and housing and the misalignment of incentives that we now see. Certainly, if you look at England — I’m not sure if this is true in Scotland, actually — but certainly in England, in the 1930s, the local authorities raised more and were able to keep more business rates. But the changes that came in in 1947, ’48, in the Town and Country Planning Act meant that a lot of this was centralized, and it became a rebate from central government. Of course, the incentive, at that point, went away. Now, you’re a Roman Catholic, and part of your family background is originally Jewish from Austria. Do you think that, in any way, gives you a slightly different understanding of British history? If so, what would that be?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.