Executive Outcomes
Back from a week pottering around the beach. Having resisted the urge to grab a last minute deal, I am happy to report that the weather in Donegal did us proud.
My leave was definitely budget class, but back in the office I find myself pondering matters Executive. The Scotsman reports that the Scottish executive is intending to create a separate Scottish civil service, along the lines of the current NI civil service headed up by Nigel Hamilton.
The same report also hints that Alex Salmond may drop the term "Executive" to describe his administration. Changing Edinburgh's letterheads to refer to the Scottish "government" would be another way of asserting the SNP's independence from Whitehall. Mr Salmond's Labour predecessor Henry McLeish apparently pondered a similar move, but rowed back after expressions of displeasure from his Labour colleagues at Westminster.
Although students of political science understand what an "executive" and a "legislature" is, I sometimes wonder whether others are confused by the use of the term on our airwaves. Am I talking about our Magnificent Twelve or about some highly paid industrialist?
Our local regime's web page calls the powers-that-be the "Northern Ireland Executive". But elsewhere it refers to "Your Government". Would dropping the "Executive" tag be a leg up for our local authority, or might it lead to confusion over who the real "government" is - Stormont or London? Is it fine to continue using both terms interchangeably?
So if anyone out there has a handy moniker for the junta (somehow I'm not sure that synonym works) let me know. Alternatively you could take the view of the French laissez faire economist, Frederic Bastiat, "Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." Or should that read "Executive"?
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The old Stormont administration was called the 'Government of Northern Ireland' so it might not be a good move in symbolic terms to reuse the title.
Nationalists refused to allow the Assembly to be called a Parliament, which it is, because it sounded too much like that we had before. A similarly pedantic attitude will probably prevail over the term Government.
The macinery of government works like this:
At the apex is The Crown which is the personification of the State in the United Kingdom. There are three branches to The Crown - Legislature, Executive and Judicature.
The Executive comprises Her Majesty's Government and the Privy Council. My understanding is that the Northern Ireland Assembly works directly under The Crown. It is overseen by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and is subject to Westminster's legislative supremacy on certain matters such as defence and foreign policy. All Executive powers are vested in The Crown and exercised, I think, by the SOS for Northern Ireland; so the use of the word 'Executive' in the Northern Ireland Assembly may be meaningless. It seems to me to be contradictory to have two separate Executives under The Crown!