[Campaignforrealdemocracy] Village Communes

[Mark Barrett]

*For a lesson in localism go to Switzerland*
*If the coalition really wants to give power back to the people, it should
look to the Alps*
**
They say that if you ask Swiss children where babies come from, they don’t
reply “the stork brings them,” or “from under a gooseberry bush”. Instead,
they say “it all depends on which canton you come from.”

While sceptics in Britain worry that David Cameron’s localism agenda might
create “postcode lotteries”, the Swiss rejoice in their local diversity.
There are 26 cantons and 2,600 communes in the country, each setting its own
policy and raising its own different taxes. Even methods of choosing
representatives in the federal government are decided locally, provided the
method is democratic.

Cantons have their own constitutions, their own laws and their own courts.
They decide their own rates for local income tax, inheritance tax and road
tax. They raise about 40 per cent of the tax take, the communes another 30
per cent and there are big policy differences between localities.

For example, cantons decide the minimum legal age for buying alcohol, a
measure far stronger than Theresa May’s plan to let local authorities decide
pub opening hours. Cantons set their own rules on issues such as
prostitution and drugs. Some of them recognised civil partnerships well
before they were adopted nationally, while others banned smoking in public
long before it became national policy. Cantons even decide who is eligible
to become a citizen (in one, this involved a popular vote on each candidate
until the Supreme Court ruled that tests must be more objective).

Cantons decide how much autonomy communes should have, but they have plenty.
For example, they are responsible for their own policing — local control
that is, again, much stronger than the Home Secretary’s proposal for elected
police commissioners. They also manage their own welfare, local transport
and (dream on, Michael Gove) schools.

Switzerland’s federal Government, does only the things that need some
measure of co-ordination. It issues the national currency. It is responsible
for defence and foreign policy. It manages transport, telecoms and energy
networks. But even where policy is decided centrally, the cantons and
communes often decide exactly how it will be implemented.

The idea of Eric Pickles, the Local Government Minister, to allow local
voters to veto above-inflation rises in council tax is another measure that
would scarcely register on the Swiss scale. In all but one canton, spending
proposals can be rejected or amended in a referendum. In one, all large and
exceptional spending plans are approved by referendum.

Some rural cantons even have a system allowing local people to meet and
debate local policy — a form of direct democracy that David Cameron must
envy. One such assembly of 4,000 people in Appenzell Innerrhoden banned nude
hiking after efforts by the canton (Switzerland’s smallest) to tax nude
hikers had failed to curb the craze.

Because the cantons enjoy enormously wide powers to decide the level of
taxes and services, competition between them is sharp. In particular, they
compete on low taxes to induce businesses to locate in their area. One
canton, Zug, with its 11 per cent top rate of income tax and 16 per cent
company tax, has proved so successful at attracting national and
multinational firms — 1,600 of them last year alone — that it is running out
of housing and office space. But other cantons are happy to step into the
breach, such as Obwalden, which now undercuts Zug with a company tax rate of
12.7 per cent. Geneva, with its 35 per cent top rate of income tax, has been
happy to welcome British hedge-fund managers who have balked at the UK’s 50
per cent top rate.

Diversity on this scale makes the UK coalition’s efforts at direct democracy
look pretty faltering. When we are all paying the same taxes, postcode
lotteries in public service quality are, of course, unacceptable. But it is
hardly unfair if towns with ageing populations vote for higher taxes to fund
better NHS care, or cities with teen-binge problems raise the drinking age
or other places decide that they would rather have fewer services but lower
taxes.

Switzerland shows that very few things really have to be decided nationally,
and that there is huge scope for giving power back to our communities — and
indeed directly to electors themselves.

Dr Eamonn Butler is director of the Adam Smith Institute and author of The
Rotten State of Britain (Gibson Square)
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