First, I'd really like there to be a prettier word than "subsidiarity" to describe the concept, which seems to me is pretty central to liberty and democracy.

Obviously, subsidiarity as a concept has to apply throughout government, not just in relation to power-games between Brussels and Westminster. But it doesn't stop at the level of local government either: it should go right down to the household and then to the individual.

Then, it seems to me that to ask "what powers should be devolved" is the wrong way round. In a democracy (ignoring for a moment the constitutional fiction of "parliamentary sovereignty"), true sovereignty lies with the citizen. If that's your starting point, then the right question isn't "what power should be devolved" (down from the Crown...), but what responsibility should be pooled, up from the citizen?

You are undoubtedly right about this, but for the purposes of this discussion, I would prefer to stick with the question 'what powers should be devolved?' as this hints at our preference for a shift from the centre to the localities, rather than the other way around. We are starting, after all, from a very centralised starting point.

Fair enough - still not sure I like the idea of the powers being devolved by her gracious maj's ministers, I rather think we should be reclaiming them...

Governance obviously has to change as the world changes. On the one hand we have powerful trans-national bodies, notably corporations, against whom individual nation states have limited powers, but on the other, new technologies, particularly the medium we are working in here, are enabling more and more people to inform themselves, participate in communities of many different kinds, often non-geographical, and to achieve some of the benefits of scale and organisation previously only seen as available to large national level organisations.

I would take a step back even from discussing/deciding at what level of government something ought to be organised and ask, as we should continuously do, what things need to be done by government at any level at all, and whether things previously seen as being in the purview of some elected government, can be better achieved to more peoples' benefit and satisfaction by allowing them to arrange them for themselves, and if so, helping individuals make the best use of other structures and technologies to do so.

The (intentionally I hope) particularly silly example of a "national swimming pool" is a case in point. Can government, local or otherwise, provide something with so specific an application and often a specific customer base, as well as a dedicated sports facilities company? Or will it always be a camel designed by a committee and never really satisfy anyone - we still have the more wealthy joining up to David Lloyd or Esporta facilities and ignoring the often dowdy public sector facilities. Groups such as Greenwich Leisure Limited, co-operative but outside normal government structures, seem to prove the point - producing facilities the local authorities they have contracted to could only dream about and even improving access for the less well off (admittedly there is an argument that local government can only act within cnetrally laid down boundaries on things like borrowing and perhaps could do better if they were the corporate bodies of old with flexibility to decide for themselves where to get their money from).

If we are being radical, we could do worse than to look, for example, at old suggestions like David Hume's "Idea of a perfect Commonwealth" for guidance, just as we might look to people like Adam Smith to help us discover what it is government needs to do and what could be left to individuals or voluntary groupings of individuals. None of these questions has not been asked before. We just perhaps don't ask them often enough.

One thing's for sure, from a personal perspective, I abhor the Westminster/Whitehall monolith. I do not feel represented by my own MP (though I have I suspect a better than the average person's relationship and access to him regardless of party) and coverage of G8 made me nauseus and depressed in turn as a I saw a bunch of people claiming the ability and mandate to make global decisions on my behalf. I try to imagine what I would feel if it were a Lib Dem government - would I feel any more represented by CK than I do by TB. I actually doubt it - I simply do not believe that any individual or structure can properly represent 60,000 of us on a constituency level or 60,000,000 of us at a national level.

And devolution/confederation etc must be accompanied by an equivalent reduction in the structures at the centre. But this may be too much like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.