1..2..3...10 paragraphs to get to Mrs T. He makes a few good point but there is alot of chaff in there. Unfortunately he ignores the fact that the current government spent £70bn on getting outsourced professionals to duplicate the work of the civil service through consultancy contracts. If he has concern for the concentration of both power and money he should really have adressed that.
EDIT: Actually the direction of his centralisation argument period is a little off. I'll write something up about that.
I didn't post this because of what it said about current domestic politics in Britain specifically, but because of the general arguments about centralisation and why it happens. Which is why it was posted in this board.
In any case you can hardly write a piece on centralisation in Britain and not mention the government that abolished the GLC and the Met Councils and which generally did more damage to local government than any since the introduction of local democracy in the 19th century. From a historical perspective a more valid complaint would be a failure to mention the proposals for local government reform in the '50's, 60's and early '70's and what kind of reform was actually introduced (after all, the GLC itself was the product of centralisation; despite covering a larger area than the LCC it was actually less powerful).
Well the main issue I had was with power and centralisation within the civil service and that's what I responded to.
As for local government, considering the same principles and hierarchies are becoming more prevailant within local authorites (I'm not going to insult your intelligence by asking if you read
Rotten Boroughs in Private Eye, my favourite part of the magazine
) Such structures operating in local or national government still result in a centralisation of power to the same people and the same fashions in which I talked about.
Therefore creating smaller units of local government on the map with the pretence of 'decentralisation' (not that I'm saying that is a bad thing as I am a proponent of root and branch reorganisation of local government) may simply lead to replication of the practice over a wider scale. Power is then centralised in the hands of them same sorts of people.
It's a culture of that will survive and operate regardless of the re-organisation of power bodies into smaller or larger units (as we have seen with reorganisation of government departments and ministries since '97) Thats a wider problem in the democratic process than simply 'how many councils you have'.