PMs who declare war should have to step down immediately

I’m as sure that there are some holes in this idea as I am that it is unlikely to be original

If a serving Prime Minister institutes a vote to declare war on another nation, for whatever reason, they should no longer be the PM after the vote, whether it is carried or not.

If they don’t believe that it is worth sacrificing their own career over, then they really have no business expecting military personnel to sacrifice their lives.

Stick that in your constitution and smoke it.

But I don’t want to be a socialist

Recently I’ve been wondering if I’m a libertarian. Or even a Libertarian.

There are tests one can take to self diagnose the condition, but so far I have scored quite low on these, presumably because I am to much of a pragmatist to answer with a sturdy resounding “Hallelujah brother!” questions like “Should the military budget be cut by 50%?” without first seeing a full cost breakdown, operational disposition and some properly costed risk analysis on current and future threats to the citizenry.

Guthrum at Looking For a Voice is a Libertarian, but he wants me to be a socialist, the bastard.

A Swiss style cantonal system is what is desperatly needed, if the North East wants to be a socialist region- fine, if the South-West wants to be a Libertarian/Social Democrat region – fine. Just do not ask the South West to fund Socialism when it has not voted for it. If Kernow wants to re establish the Stannary Parliament and organise it constitutional position on the lines of Jersey, it should go for it.

I live in the North East of England, I like it here, the air is clean, the sea brutal and the countryside rugged. But I don’t to be a socialist. And I don’t want to live under socialism. It’s entirely possible that that puts me in a minority – although perhaps not as small as you might think and certainly shrinking rapidly.

I like the idea that people ought to be able to try out different political and economic systems, because then competition will see to it that better ways evolve. But I also believe that, for instance, a socialist collective should be entered into voluntarily, that a person’s relationship with such an entity should be legally governed by a properly constructed and equitable contract, and that such a contract should have the requisite termination clauses enabling both the borganism and the individual to dissolve their legal relationship. *

That’s just hoopy, as far as I’m concerned.

But on the other hand, if the NE got a devolved assembly of some kind and there was a choice of styles of government (I’ll come back to that word in a moment) and there was a plebiscite and the trot mentalists won – which they almost certainly would – then the people who didn’t want to live in a creepy socialist mini state would be properly buggered. And a tyranny enforced by a democratic majority is still a tyranny.

The problem that I have with the idea of regional government is that it would still be government, and I do not wish to be governed. What you end up with in a federalist model is even more states! Granted they’d be smaller states, a stated goal of proper Libertarians, but is it really such a great idea to have more of the bastards ? And what good does it do to decentralise powers that the state shouldn’t have in the first place ?

Surely it just makes them harder to take back ?

* Leaving aside, for the moment, the fundamental problem that this kind of arrangement is not backwards compatible with most popular household brands of socialism and/or communism. YMMV

UPDATE : Reading this back I realise that it looks like I’m arguing for the retention of a centralised state apparat, I didn’t mean to and I don’t think centralism a good (or even sustainable) paradigm. More of that later.