Comment by doc_holliday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doc_holliday | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Politically it is very interesting and a result that in a lot of ways can bring about real change too (however, I do have obvious scepticism).

The tide is now with change as for the Union to continue change must happen. A lot of the high yes vote was not because people 100% believed Scotland should be independent but more they wanted change to the system (and I do believe a Scottish Parliment offered a better system), it did come with a lot of risk and a possible lose / lose for the people of the UK as a whole.

It opens up the question of representation for people of the regions of England, Northern Ireland and Wales. I think a lot of momentum has been gathered for something a kin to federal government in the UK and is something I would very much welcome.

In essence that is in a lot of ways what that Nationalists wanted... to keep the currency union and have essentially the same terms of attachment to the EU.

I voted no on the day after a long time believing in a yes, the tide of politcal change swayed me that we may ultimately be better in a UK that had the momentum with change to our representation. The no campaign however ran an abysmal campaign and it pained me to end up siding with them, and that was in more in spite of what they had to say.

Being part of the UK benefits Scotland's internal trade immensely and to think terms would have remained the same with the rUK who would have become a foreign nation at that point was naive. I think a Union with the UK has much the same arguments as staying in the EU with respect to trade, contracts and funding. It is just English nationalism and Scottish nationalism have picked differing sides.

I don't know how a federal system could work when England is about 80% of the population. The USA already has issues with California and Texas being so significant in terms of population, but England would dwarf both of them in terms of proportion.

The only way it could work would be to abolish England entirely and break it up into regions.

I think English regions should be split up too, and their is great desire for that. England is made up of many quite distinct regions, the problem is much of the power is concentrated in London and subsequently a lot of investment and money is poured into London and immediate surroundings. The fact that England has such a disparity in investment between it's first city (London) and second city (Birmingham) is a problem. It also isn't helping concentration of populations and jobs which remained close to London.

The issues Scotland has are felt throughout the UK, and Scotland therefore has a lot in common as far as wanting powers as do regions of England out with the immediate surroundings of London. This in essence is why this result could be better for the regions of England.

As someone who lives in a suburb of London (Croydon) that has a city centre bigger than many cities, I think there's a lot of desire for reducing concentration even in parts of London. My local council in fact has kept trying to drum up support for getting city status for decades, and I think some would even like to "break free" of London entirely.

Part of the problem is that London is a bit in the same situation as the old "every road leads to Rome" saying, and amongst many types of businesses in London, anything but Zone 1 or maybe zone 2 is never even considered when deciding where to set up offices as a result.

So even a lot of London suburbs remain underdeveloped and ignored compared to what their population size would justify because we have the behemoth next door sucking everything in.

With the new-ish London rail projects that are increasingly aimed at cutting through central London, as well as the new orbital overground projects (one completed, another one further out in planning stages AFAIK) there'd be lots of opportunities to break the stranglehold of central London by making more of the smaller centres at the edges of London more attractive by making them more accessible.

I hope we'll see more projects like that - making bypassing (central) London easier both on a local level but also nationally.

I think that will actually have far greater long term impact on the UK than devolving more powers to regions (though I'm all for that as well).

The problem is that fixing this would be a long game: To get maximal effect you'd need to upgrade many routes to handle more frequent, faster trains, and increase train frequencies on many of those routes at potentially significant short term losses and commit to continue running them for a decade or more before there'd be much chance in changing peoples decisions about where to place their companies and where to live and work.

This is a lot of why I voted no. Scotland isn't unique in it's struggle in the UK against London concentrated power, it just in happens to have a get out clause from historical geography and politics. This does not mean we should leave behind those we have much in common with in the regions of England.

Please keep on that struggle.

David Cameron's goal from this referendum was to win and close down any suggestion of real reform. There's significant danger that just a few weeks of chatter about it remain.

Dissolving England as an entity with all of it's history would be a very difficult pill to swallow even on a purely emotional level. Do we start sending Manchester United to the world cup for example? What would the flag look like?

I am not saying split England into different countries, but split regions into federal districts. That has nothing to do with separation of England, does the USA send states to the world cup? I don't know what you are saying there.

I think the BBC already does a good job of this. Our regional boundaries are already pretty much defined. eg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_UK_regional_TV_on_satellite...

Growing up, I had absolutely no problems comprehending that my county (cumbria) was part of a region (the north-west), which is why we got Manchester's news on the TV. That region was then part of a country, and a few countries made up our nation.

We already have these tiers of identity. We already have borough seats, county seats, city seats, etc. If we federalized the UK along the same sort of regional identities the BBC does, I don't believe we'd suddenly lose any county/country/national identity.

(Perhaps not exactly the same boundaries, but I can't help looking at their map and thinking - yeah, that's a good start)

Presumably he's comparing it to the existing situation of Scotland. But Scotland (and Wales) of course is a somewhat different situation in that it is considered a constituent country of the UK for historical reasons, which wouldn't be likely to be the case for regions in a federal UK.

If you split England into states then it ceases to exist in any meaningful way. The USA model is simple, you have the federal government and you have the states. Thus you send a USA team to the world cup. Under this model, we would have to send a British team to the world cup rather than an England team.

It's less of a problem for the Germans because they are comparatively more invested in europe, for example using the currency.

As a sovereign nation, the UK has virtually limitless freedom in deciding its internal structure. You can pick and choose which things are decided at which level, and how different subdivisions might be grouped into higher levels for some purposes but not others. You are not required to follow any established model -- and you are certainly not required to follow the US's rigid structure.

If you want to keep sending an England team, keep sending an England team. Big deal.

Germany doesn't send Saxony and Bavaria to the world cup.

As I noted in a different comment: The current situation of an England team is an historical oddity: England, Scotland and Wales are considered constituent countries of the UK. Only a handful of countries worldwide have constituent countries, and the exact details of in what context they are treated as countries vary greatly.

But if the UK was turned federal, there's no reason why the new federal entities would be considered countries any more than e.g. the states of Germany are, even though in the case of the states of Germany, many of the states still closely match countries with a long history as independent states.

Sure, it's workable but how people would feel about it is another question. It would probably transpire that the countries of Wales and NI would both map directly to states with the same names (with powers). You then have a country of England (with no powers) broken into constituent states (with powers) and the whole thing starts to look like a CGP grey video.

Historically, Germany is quite different to the UK for obvious reasons. I also suspect Scotland , Wales etc would be more likely to table flip when dealing with a UK parliament than say Saxony would.

nor do FC barcelona/Athletic Bilbao play at the world cup..heh

Not the only way: The Norwegian system is such that regions are compensated for their geography - rural areas with less direct access to government have disproportionately more representatives.

The EU also works quite well for small nations.

It does not compensate all that much. It's admittedly been quite a few years since I lived in Norway so I haven't kept up with the numbers, but last I checked it, it took about 12,000 votes to win a seat in Finnmark, the lowest nationwide at that point vs. about 19,000 votes to win a seat in Oslo (the highest). Currently Finnmark has 5 seats and Oslo 17. That gave Finnmark an over-representation of 2 or so.

[for those interested, the weighting is done by assigning 1 point per person in a region, and 1.8 points per square kilometer of area and using that to redistribute the seats in parliament across the regions, and is adjusted every 8 years; the 1.8 is/was tweaked to fit political realities at the time - I don't think there's any deeper thinking behind that specific factor]

That's what we do in the US. It's not a great system.

The US is very similar to the Westminster system and has the same major underlying problem: with no attempt towards proportionality, very few people end up with their first choice of representation.

Norway's electoral system, based on proportionality first, has a very good reputation. Indeed, it scores highest (9.93/10) in the Democracy Index 2012 compared to UK in 16th (8.21/10) and USA in 21st (8.11/10)

> The US is very similar to the Westminster system and has the same major underlying problem: with no attempt towards proportionality, very few people end up with their first choice of representation.

Actually, I'd say the bigger problem is that with no attempt towards proportionality, very many people end up with only their last choice of representation in at least some bodies of government -- that is, they are represented, in at least one body of government and possibly at all levels of government, exclusively by people who they view (and who view them) as enemies.

Agreed. And many people have to vote tactically for the lesser of two evils, completely obscuring the true scale of the problem (which is nonetheless still very evident).

I fear that the EU would seek to usurp a UK parliament that presided over a collection of small states and want each state to go direct to Brussels where they would have a marginal voice due to their small size.

On what basis do you fear that? The EU already have several federations as member states: Germany, Austria and Belgium.

The more powers you devolve the more risks you have. How do you deal with a situation where the EU and Welsh parliaments agree on a policy but it is blocked by the federal UK gov? If I was a cynic I might suspect that the EU would look for ways to do this on purpose.

Wales already have the Welsh Assembly, yet the EU does not seem to have tried this.

I think you'd find that on the contrary a lot of EU states are terrified of any steps that would legitimise more demands for devolution because they have their own independence movements to deal with.

And if anything, if the UK vote in important EU organs were split, it'd greatly increase UK influence on many matters in all the situations where interests are aligned, because most EU organs does not have representation proportional to population size, and many have requirements for super-majorities or even unanimous decisions on many things. That too would make many of the other large EU countries push back against any attempts to bypass a federal government.

I don't necessarily mean the states becoming EU members in their own right, but rather the EU using them as tools to pressure UK gov into making certain decisions. With more referendums becoming an increasing threat to Westminster, thus weakening it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com