The march of the local council dictators

I was impressed with the passion Sir Keir Starmer managed to whip up within himself when presenting Gordon Brown’s interminable plans for constitutional reform to the British people. He almost sounded engaged with the project. Apparently Gordon has been beavering away, working by the light of a low-wattage electric candle, at this stuff for a couple of years – but frankly, all anyone took from it is that Labour plans to abolish the House of Lords and devolve lots of powers to ‘the regions’.

If I were PM, I’d embrace the House of Lords and abolish the House of Commons, raise the voting age to 25, introduce a property-owning qualification and hold general elections once every ten years, if that. You may quibble with my proposals but surely the one thing that we can all agree upon is that we want much, much less power devolved to locally elected bodies.