For many people, local government at borough or county level is just as remote as Whitehall - and the bureaucrats just as infuriating. I think that localism can only work when the institutions of local government actually engage with the people they represent, and that may need institutions operating at a much smaller scale: smaller even than borough wards.

For example, local parking regulations would be far less contentious if they were decided on a street-by-street basis by local residents. That means devolving the power to make parking regulations from the highways department of the local authority to street-level residents' associations.

But it also means finding and funding the infrastructure for such associations to function. Could they levy a rate, for example - to pay for the hire of a meeting hall, or the rent of some office-space? And if they agreed to impose parking regulations, who would pay the wardens and who would get the money from fines and from the sale of permits?

ejoftheweb, your example also ignores externalities. A real-world counter-example: Near me, one street is set to have a residents’ parking scheme. People in the adjacent street are up in arms, arguing that this will simply cause all the non-permit-holders to move into their road!

A more general point: From this and your other posts I infer you have a particularly rosy view of the willingness of people to get involved in local politics that certainly runs counter to my experience and, I believe, much empirical evidence. What is the source of your optimism?

Well, to answer your first point first - the people in the adjacent street could, if they had the power to do so, introduce their own residents' parking scheme to deal with the problem. Instead, they're left powerless by a borough bureaucrat's decision.

Your second point is very important but isn't just about local democracy. Falling participation rates at every level are - in my opinion - a much more serious and insidious threat to democracy than international terrorism. But isn't this the objective of localism? to get people directly involved in the decisions that affect their day-to-day lives? It's a tough political challenge, I agree - but I don't think democracy is served by weakly saying that people aren't interested in participating, so don't let's bother.

Besides, I do think that people would be much more interested in participating if they were to have a more direct influence in real decisions.

another point on participation: how much do you think that political parties help or hinder participation?

In Oxford, and no doubt moreso elsewhere where the local council is less of a centralising Labour dinosaur, our area committee meetings once a month seem to attract anywhere between two and two dozen regular attenders.

Scale that up to a national level, say based on the level of expenditure entrusted to that committee (pretty minimal) and you'd be talking about (tens of?) thousands of people attending every debate and committee meeting in Westminster.

"Action planning" events seem to draw reasonable crowds - again, far more than select committee hacks anyway! But what many people do seem to leave with is the impression that despite their efforts, decisions have already been made, or their opinions will count for nothing more than a footnote when the ODPM get their hands on it.

I calculated that in Oxford we are represented by:

• ⅛ of a European representative (c. 1:800,000 citizens)
• 1 Regional representative - not elected but appointed out of the locally elected pool (c. 1:145,000)
• 1 ½ National representatives (c. 1:100,000)
• 16 County representatives (c. 1:9,000)
• 48 District representatives (c. 1:3,000)
• and some parish councillors - only part of the city retains parishes from when they were part of a neighbouring district (c. 1:300)

Yet the ones we tend to see most often (and can influence or get to know) are the ones with the least power. Those 48 district councillors have a budget worth less than 1/4 of the local, but centrally controlled and budgeted, health service. There are probably no more than this number of MPs we regularly see on TV or elsewhere in the media and they're frequently, when they do, not talking about things we are interested in personally.

I've read and been horrified by Robert Puttnam's "Bowling Alone" but it may be that it's the very growth of more remote/centralised administrations and campaigns that have put many off personal participation and into the mindset that the annual direct debit to your favourite political party or charity is "doing their bit".