The solution to over-centralisation may be localism proper, rather than the avant-garde ideas that grip the prime minister and his court. It is hard to think of comparable countries that are run in as diffuse and communal a way as the Tories hope to see in Britain. Ministers admit that the closest equivalent to their planned giveaway was France’s quite conventional devolution of power to local mayors in the 1980s. The Tories, wary of local government, have ordered a distinctly unlocalist freeze on council-tax rates. (The Lib Dems have the opposite bias, revering town halls over parents desperate for more control over the schools system.)
— “The Big Society: Second Invitation”
