Mercia at heart of freedom bid
Jan 29 2009 By Jonathan Walker
I’ve enjoyed reading the website of the Sovereign Mercia campaign, which wants to create an independent state complete with its own king or queen – democratically elected for seven years at a time.
The administrative centre would be Birmingham but the official residence of the monarch would be Tamworth, which presumably would become our new capital.
Mercia was an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom which lasted in one form or another from 572 AD to 919. New Mercia would take in a huge chunk of central England, annexing Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Cambridgshire as well as anywhere which might today be described as the Midlands.
It sounds very jolly, although plans to make citizenship “an inalienable hereditary right” raise questions about the status of people whose ancestors hail from outside Mercia, which independence campaigners are having a hard time answering.
There’s a healthy debate taking place on The Stirrer website, a local message board.
It may be some time before I’m forced to take a DNA test to see if I’m a genuine Mercian. But a more practical demand for independence is launched today by West Midlands councils, in their ongoing quest to win a little more freedom from Whitehall.
Debates over whether decisions should be made locally or in London tend to come down to money. Often, what we are really talking about is who decides how our taxes are spent.
Labour often claims it is committed to devolving power, but in practice it is loathe to give up the right to tell local authorities how to spend their budgets. The Conservative opposition in Westminster freely admit they were no better when they were in office, although they promise to do better next time.
So the Birmingham, Coventry and Black Country City Region – an alliance of councils in Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Telford and Wrekin, Walsall and Wolverhampton – has drawn up plans to allow authorities to borrow cash to spend on improving the local economy.
They will then pay the money back using the increased business rates they gain from attracting new employers to the area.
Believe it or not, a council which succeeds in attracting new firms, and new employment, currently gets nothing for its efforts. It will collect more business rates, but it simply hands the money over to Whitehall.
Birmingham Council’s chief executive Stephen Hughes set out the problem in a candid remark to the Commons local government committee late last year.
He told MPs: “There is no benefit at all, and that is the current situation. Actually, I have an incentive to reduce the amount of businesses I have in my area and the number of properties that exist, because actually, I do not have the pain of having to collect the tax.”
Crazy stuff. Here’s hoping at least one of our independence proposals succeeds.
