Those inside local government are weary of repeating it: those outside local government have, perhaps, yet to realise it, but it is true: the Tories have mounted an unprecedented and sustained attack on the constitutional basis of local government over eighteen years, so that today, the centre has more control over the local than in any other advanced democracy. Not only that, but the centre has decreed that, for many services, ‘local’ control and democratic control will be separated, so that even apparent advances of localism, such as local management of schools, have been achieved by stripping away the element of local elected accountability and substituting a system of local appointment, which might prove to operate in the interests of the locality, but then again might not.

All this has been done in the name of a defence of local government against itself - the government, in effect claiming that, left to its own devices local government cannot be trusted to do the right thing by local people, so the centre must step in to ensure it does. It has been achieved though the application of the doctrine of the unitary state - that local government receives its powers and finance largely by act of parliament , and parliament can, therefore take away what it has the power to give. Indeed, the doctrine of ‘ultra viraes’, beloved of local authority legal officers, is the embodiment of this doctrine in action.

Looked at in this way, the resulting structure of local government then appears as rather fraudulent. Local councillors are elected by the same means as MPs, claiming the authority to do various things and apparently achieving a mandate so to do by election victory, and yet in reality being virtual prisoners of the centre. Even the doctrine of the ‘superior mandate’ has logically to concede that a sphere of activity can be carved out and protected for local electoral judgement; but this as well, has been trampled on by the centre. Local government is left with a rag bag of powers and duties, some of which conflict with financial constraints levied from the centre, and most of which represent what survives after the centre has taken a bite out of pre-existing powers for the particular political purpose of the day.

All this is disastrous in the long term for democracy as a whole, but takes a considerable amount of grown-up reflection to undo. One of the many problems of the UK’s centralised unwritten constitution is that there is no clear mechanism to counterbalance centralism. Federal written constitutions have no such problem, of course, since the relationship of the centre to the local is enshrined in the text: and hence the type of carpet bombing that local government has been subject to would be impossible to mount in , say, Germany or the United States. Consequently, a reforming government should publicly set out the terms on which it will deal with local government. This is not perfect since a future government can use parliamentary sovereignty to overturn it: but in so doing, it would at last have to demonstrate what was being taken away. The European Charter of Local Self-Government, which the new Labour Government recently signed is as good a paradigm as one might wish for: it sets out the proper relationship between the centre and the local whilst accepting that the centre has the right to oversee the strategic allocation of resources and the overall direction of public policy. Indeed I recently learned that the Charter was originally largely written by UK Civil Servants, and is therefore compatible with a unitary state: the refusal of the last government to sign it was for operational reasons and not because of a principled stand.

A ‘framework document’ (to coin a phrase) could therefore very profitably be produced which would set all the elements of what promises to be a radical Labour programme into context. This would build upon the Charter to set out both how this government will ground its approach to local government, and what the proper sphere of autonomy of local government would look like. This innovation would in itself sweep away much of the current mistrust between the local and the centre: it has been the constant redefining of the boundaries of local primacy that has been the most unsettling part of the experience of the past eighteen years: local government is well aware of the limitations of its autonomy in the context of national policy imperatives: what it needs is to be left alone in an agreed sphere of competence.