Scrap Local Government and Replace it With Boroughs

Local Policy Suggestions
21

Yes, the proposal of self-governing towns is something I’d support; however, I have two comments:

  1. All local authorities or boroughs, whatever they might be called, are centrally coordinated, so that their individual policies, or at least, those which aren’t purely local, are common throughout the UK. One of the issues with adopting the system in the USA, is that rules, regulations, and laws, can be different on a state by state basis. There might be something to be said for that in a country as large as the USA, but I suspect it could easily result in messy confusion here in the much smaller UK.
  2. All the councillors within these new authorities or boroughs should be elected based on their willingness and expertise to undertake the specific role within the local authority, not on their party political allegiance. It’s my view that party politics should play minimal to no part in running local authorities. Whilst they should, obviously, follow all applicable central government rulings as determined by the party in power, that should be the extent of its control and influence over them.
22

I’m torn on this kind of local democracy stuff. My own local council is very fond of espousing inane rules that go way beyond the law: trying to change culture without any legal oversight. I’m not even sure how much of it is council policy, and how much is, as you say, some just-graduated activist student deciding to insert her own wording into the messaging that goes out to citizens. I tend to think we’d be better off if that kind of messaging had to come from central government, where all of the lawyers and politicians in the country are equally exposed to it. However, that isn’t working well across the EU.

One thing that making it local does is give people the ability to move to another area, to vote with their feet, as in people leaving California. But that’s poor compensation for bad local government.

23

Local councils were how it used to be, they were all swallowed up on the lie of the economy of scale and in the process turned into quangos