States in Australia and the US and provinces in Canada already have an amount of control undreamed-of in Britain and Aotearoa. And we should head much further in that direction. The best way to protect ordinary people s interests is to give them the power to do so themselves, not to hand it over to someone in a distant capital who is supposed to know what s best. We re back to utopianism again if we talk about abolishing the State immediately. Look at environmental issues.
Greens are keener than anyone to dispense with a centralized government.
But many things they oppose, from acid rain to leaded fuel, depend on there being a State to pass laws which ban them on the grounds that they are harmful to the wider community. And worker-controlled companies still need regulating. Even if workers had a veto over new projects they would have a vested interest in pursuing profit at the expense of the environment. The only way to make Green issues a priority is for the whole community to accept them and elect representatives to make sure individual companies and groups of workers knuckle under. And it gets even more essential when you start accepting more profound Green ideas about abandoning industrial growth and cutting out wasteful products that needlessly consume the world s resources.