Conservative local government proposals

The Tories have launched their manifesto today with a lot of the material from their 2009 Shift Control document [pdf] making the final cut.

It may be worth pointing to Anthony’s detailed crit of this document (below) as a good deal of it is relevant today.

• Shift Delete
• Command backspace
• SysRq F12
• Home PgDn
• Escape End

I’m looking forward to reading a few crits of what has made the final cut, but in the meantime, here’s a purely personal observation on this:

I’m no Tory myself, and it would be unfair of me to present myself as any kind of neutral on this question, but the Tories’ plans for local government are easily the most worrying aspect of their policy development in recent years. Sir Jeremy Beecham highlighted the threat that this has presented to representative democracy at the time:

The truth is that the effect of these proposals would be to undercut representative local democracy and diminish the appeal of service as a local councillor.

For me, one of the biggest local policy foul-ups has been the implementation of choice in local schools – where pushy-parents can game the system to ensure that their kids end up in schools that are more socially exclusive than the old Grammar Schools. As far as I can see, so many of aspects of public policy today seem to be about finding ways of getting people who could be paying tax into a position where they aren’t – and where they are the key beneficiaries of those who do pay it.

Is every aspect of local public spending going to be gamed in this way? I think that this is what the Tories have in mind, and we should be worried about that.