Skip to content

There\’s an easy solution to this Polly

How many people live in Britain? The census next March is supposed to tell us. Population matters desperately for fair distribution of the wretchedly dwindling sums handed out to councils, police and the health service.

Simply move to a system where local services are paid for by locally raised taxes.

As happens in Denmark and Sweden of course.

We do want to be more like the Nordic social democracies, don\’t we?

4 thoughts on “There\’s an easy solution to this Polly”

  1. The best place I ever visited was some village out of Zurich (and out of the Zurich taxation zone). As far as I could tell through the language barrier there was no tax and no public services of any description.

  2. This will never happen – how will the lefties grossly over subsidise their northern and celtic support bases without fleecing the south east?

  3. Note that the “local services are paid for by locally raised taxes” isn’t exactly the case with Sweden. There are significant state grants to fund schooling, etc.

    Same where I live, Finland (which has, for hysterical raisins, much common ground with Sweden): I’d say that the direction should be other way round.

    The state has been mandating lots of things that the municipalities have to do – for instance, how schools should be run, what health care practices are mandatory, what are the permissible max waiting times for getting treatment, how much money has to be given by the municipality to people who get no other income, etc. The local municipalities just cannot meet these requirements without getting more funding from the state. I think that welfare payments, schools and health care really should be paid from the state budget, because the local budgets have way too much variation in this respect. If not, then also minimum welfare payments, dole payments, state-run VAT scheme etc should be adjusted locally, and e.g. right to get treatment to diseases and injuries would depend on where you live, because local funding capabilities are so different.

    This is certainly the case in Finland and Sweden, and I’d think it’s the same in Britain.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *