I read this article looking for specific proposals, but there were none.

Without control over tax raising and spending, local authorities have no power.

If you want to revive local government – here are a few off the wall suggestions.

1. Education is a national service and ringfenced spending – councils don’t run it, they administer it. Take it out of council control.

2. Double council tax and remove all exemptions and discounts – such as the single person discount. Reduce central govt funding by a similar ammount.

3. Watch as people hit for a bill for £3000 suddenly become a lot keener on knowing how the council spendings their money.

I don’t know about tyrants and indirect elections. Honestly. Who? Nonetheless, you may be mistaking me for a supporter of a “nation state” at any level – I am not! I think those community councils would act as procurement bodies, sending representatives to the local mutual hospital building project and so on. I don’t envisage (as Fred Foldvary does because he is positing the idea as an alternative mechanism for electing a federal government) them necessarily agreeing to ever higher levels of governent with any kind of “general competence”, merely to bodies that address specific issues.

Richard Huzzey

We are fellow travellers. Could federalism for England be on the basis of regions made up of local authorities who want to come together? Shouldn’t we expect some LibDem Councils also to act locally in ways which do not match national policy? Given that the EU preach ‘subsidiarity’ (their word for the old Liberal principle of local decision that you quote), isn’t the problem to get them to actually apply it?

David Hall-Matthews

Thanks for thinking that these ideas are worth improving on. Is it still the case that the Councils which cut local spending to reduce Council Tax tend to be rural? Isn’t a problem in many countries that inner city authorities tend to spend more on services and deliver less? Am I wrong in thinking that the worst ‘postcode lottery’ is between the centrally administered NHS regions?

James Graham

Thanks for your full-blooded commitment to this Forum. How does more voters turning out in smaller wards square with the idea that smaller wards would be electorally unpopular? Would not simple per capita redistribution of tax money leave the authorities with the worst needs very poorly funded? How would my proposals prevent national government from enacting entitlements, such as the entitlement to education? (I will look further at Land Tax; present property taxation through Council Tax and the National Business Rate are certainly a mess).

Jock

” … people elected by just their street for example are likely to care more about the people they elect and less about what rosette they might wear.” Right on! However, doesn’t the way tyrants prefer indirect elections make you nervous about the layers of indirect elections embedded in cellular democracy? ( I think something similar to cellular democracy used to be referred to as a form of communalism.) And isn’t the problem now to get from where we are towards much more bottom up government?

I tend to view this from the other side – that we shift from a top down government to a bottom up government; so called cellular democracy (nothing to do with phone-in voting!).

The default is that no higher tier of government has any power other than what local neighbourhood councils explicity collaborate upwards on. And these may be bodies that we currently think of as “government” or they may be single purpose associations of neighbourhood councils for example clubbing together to justify the building of a school or hospital or some such.

Of course this would probably be a step too far for a political party to want to advocate – after all, it would almost inevitably lead to less of a political silo mentality as people elected by just their street for example are likely to care more about the people they elect and less about what rosette they might wear. Which would be a good thing I think, but it would be like turkeys voting for Christmas to a political party! Albeit a real test of just how far we would go in support of “devolution”.