We are all localists now?

This week Direct Democracy have published another volume, this one by Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan is entitled "Plan - Twelve Months to Renew Britain". I have ordered my copy and eagerly await its arrival.

It is in the "localist" tradition - the belief that all political decisions should be devolved to the lowest possible level consistent with efficient decision making. (A consequential belief is that if this were followed there would be a revival in democracy - that people would take note of what is happening locally, feel that their vote matters and turn out to vote without any dubious machinery such as proxy, postal or on-line voting. At present the turnout is often very small - hence all the attempts to persuade people to vote at all.)

I hope that a large proportion of Conservatives would subscribe to the principle of localism. Cartainly many of the leaders do, and Direct Democracy is an influential pressure group.

Clegg in his address to the LibDem Conference also claimed to be a localist. This may be true, but if so he is confused because he also argues for greater powers to the European Union, which is very remote and has a large democratic deficit.

NULabour, of course, tries to have it both ways, very much a centrist party with national targets and doing much of their ruling through quangos, as well as transferring powers away from local control to quangos. They keep up a pretence of local decision making by offering token referendums which are unlikely to have any effect on decisions in London.

I hope that Carswell and Hannan have proposed wholesale butchery with the quangos, those deeply wasteful, crony-stuffed, bodies who achieve little in many cases. I hope, too, that they have made proposals to repatriate powers from Brussels, which is productive only in heaping further and further negative restrictions on this country, - the playing field has been more than levelled, it is totally restrictive.

So let us have local financing, preferably by a sales tax replacing council tax, and local accountability, the people who are most affected being able to "eliminate" under-performing and wasteful public servants. The result, if transparency is encouraged rather than hindered, should be more efficient use of resources and greater correspondence with local wishes.

If their book is as good as their usual writings, then we shall have good proposals to consider, as well as a more eloquent exposition of the concept of localism than is here.