Leg-iron, at underdogs bite upwards, addresses the issue of Tory councils and their indistinguishability from those of any other party in the matters of inefficiency, corruption, totalitarianism, and all the other well-known features of government.

He contrasts the victim’s view of central government:

…all we hear is ‘what’s best for the country’ while our bins breed flies in the summer because they aren’t emptied every week. We hear promises that never surface, we hear how education is improving while the street gangs grow in size, we hear how knives have been banned while stabbings increase, how we can be arrested, charged and fined for taking a photograph in a public place even though it’s not illegal, how the law protects criminals if they trip over a rug while burgling our houses, and to be honest, we couldn’t give a damn about how you plan to save the banks, the whales, Iraq, the environment, the little children, none of it.

with that of local councils:

They say nothing, they do whatever they please and anyone who objects is dealt with without mercy. Dissent is not permitted. Discussion is futile. Public consultations are a waste of time and money. They do exactly as they please and they are above the law.

But then he concludes:

I wonder if you do really want to lose that election, Mr. Cameron. If you don’t, can I respectfully request that you reign in your attack-dog councillors and remind them where they get the money they throw around so freely? As it stands, I certainly won’t be voting for you.

For myself I would prefer a much more radical solution, centred upon the reduction to the absolute minimum of the involvement of all forms of government with the life of the sovereign individual. I do not believe that Dave the Cardboard Box and his BluLabor clone-zone offer the slightest hope of anything changing at all. Indeed, because they are on average perhaps not quite so financially incompetent as the sociology graduates of the Labour party they might reasonably be expected to be even more corrupt and rather less easy to catch at it (like last time).

The worst of all are the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’. They manage, in local government, to combine both the Masonic / County Set old-boys’ network, the intrinsic corruption and the sad lower-middle-class snobbery of the Tories with the surveillance fetish, the self-satisfied, self-righteous, interfering arrogance and the sad upper-middle-class snobbery of the champagne-socialists. May the ancient gods of Britain (should there be any still correctly dressed and sober) protect us from this loathsome party’s accession to central government.

Better by far to scrap the whole wretched mess and start again. Anyone who has been on industrial ‘efficiency’ courses like I have (so called because it is usually more ‘efficient’ to have British middle-managers away on courses than it is to let them stay in their offices and express their creativity) will know how this goes. We start off by defining the things we want at the end of the process, and work backwards to how most ‘efficiently’ to set about achieving them.

My belief is that this process, applied to local ‘authorities’, would result in everything they do that is desirable being done either by properly competitive private contractors (road maintenance, bins, etc.), or by a properly constituted tribunal (planning permission, etc.). This would leave everything they do that is undesirable to be abolished forthwith.

Hattip Landed Underclass - was just too good not to borrow.