No taxation or spending without consent.

With our Chancellor spending money like water it's appropriate to consider our fifth demand which is quite clear that there should be no taxation or spending without the consent of the people in an annual referendum.

Currently our Chancellor and government can tax, spend and borrow without so much as a thought as to whether the majority of people approve of what they are doing.

You can take your pick on numbers but give or take the odd billion our total national debt is currently 2.3 trillion, which equates to around 105% of our GDP, while we will now need to borrow around 100 billion each year, of our 750 billion national expenditure, to pay our bills.

The obvious question is whether we have had any say in these levels of expenditure and borrowing and of course the resounding anwer is a big NO - that's zilch input. These decisions have been made by virtually one man, our Chancellor, who the government supports.

I know the obvious concern is that the people are not responsible enough to be involved in  deciding how much the government spends each year but past experience, from local government referendums on rate increases, proves that the people welcomed the chance to give their opinion and can make reasonable decisions. In brief outline in 1999 Milton Keynes, followed in 2001 by Bristol City and Croydon asked their rate payers whether they wanted their rates to be less, stay the same, or rise and the clear majority in all cases voted for their councils to  reject decreases or increases in expenditure and to accept small rises to keep the budgets at thr same level as the year before. By rejecting decreases the people proved that they can be responsible. 

The government has NO money of its own and and over 50% of its income comes from income tax and National Insurance contributions so I can see no reason why we should not be asked each year to approve the governments annual budget.

Again we explain in our pamphlet that should the people vote down any government plans to increase spending then the governemnt automatically get the previous years budget to kept them going while they trim the budget before presenting it to us again.

I cannot think that anyone would disagree that governments waste our money so to ask them every year to present their budget to us for approval would be common sense. I doubt the  government of the day would like the discipline of this but that is their problem not ours.

The classic refain of 'No taxation without representation' needs a slight adaptation to '  No taxation without our approval'.