Surprising literary ventures | 10 September 2008

Ruth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of ‘adventure sex’, is a furious decentraliser. In this small book of 1989 she argues not only for devolution for Scotland and Wales but autonomy for the English regions and a ‘cantonisation’ of the UK along Swiss lines. Undermining the Central Line is nothing to do with the Tube system, therefore, but is a plea to ‘give government back to the people’, published in the year of the introduction of the Poll Tax and a few months before the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. It paints the UK as ‘the most centralised state in Europe, with a few obvious exceptions such as Romania and Albania’ — an interesting conclusion by an author writing at the end of ten years of Thatcherite assaults on the socialist public sector — with a chokehold on local government, education and housing.