Corrigan's piece is a clear challenge to Liberal Denmocrats. We can't just be in favour of local govenment devolution because that is where we have lots of councillors and we can't just advocate transferring power from one layer of government to another unless we can demostrate it works better. The challenge to the localism is coming from those on the left who say that only central government can deliver social justice, and devloving power will only result in more postcode lotteries. What is the libdem answer to that?

The community politics resolution of 1970 that changed the face o0f liberalism in the UK was not a political means it was a philosophy.
That decisions taken at the lowest possible level are inevitably the best.
in business everyone seeks ownership of change - that's what the left and the current government don't seem to understand in this debate over devolution.

Decisions taken at the lowest possible level are inevitably the best? That's quite a claim...

There's a passage in Conrad Russell's "Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", my copy of which I cannot seem to find at the moment, that says, if memory serves, that Adam Smith suggested some tests for whether something was in the purview of government on the one hand or the individual or voluntary groupings of individuals on the other. We should assume that *self-governance* or perhaps voluntary mutual governance is the best, or at least the most liberal, aim and work upwards from that.

By the way - who are the "Liberal Denmocrats"? I quite like the idea. It sounds like a party that might win in Christiania!

Also a colleague who is working on new financing models (http://www.opencapital.net) talked me through this idea of change over time in the way markets work and therefore the need for government to help or restrain them at different levels.

Once upon a time markets were decentralised and disconnected. People traded locally around the local market town and needed few external links so little in the way of higher level government. You didn't, for example, need a medium of trade that would apply in different markets.

Then came decentralised but connected markets where people traded locally but had links with the other markets to buy and sell what others needed or you couldn't produce. This created a need for government structures, a trusted medium of exchange and mechanisms to transport goods and so on.

Later markets became centralised and connected - local banking systems merged into one national one. The national government and trade structures were needed to broker between distant markets.

And we may be moving into an era where markets are increasingly less centralised but more connected. I can now, as a matter of routine, buy a single computer for personal use from some student topping up his income in Wisconsin (where this one came from), via something like eBay based not on the fact that we share a medium of exchange (we don't, but it doesn't stop me nowadays) but on the evidence from eBayers' feedback that this is a decent trustworthy chap to deal with. I can buy wine from a small producers' co-op in France without having Berry Brothers intervene for me... I hope one day I'll be able to choose the individual producer I buy my coffee from and pay them a fair price compared with the global conglomerate's supposed economies of scale that includes silly add-ons like advertising costs and corporate HQ salaries.

If one of the few legitimate functions of a liberal government is to try to maintain a level playing field, we should be concentrating efforts on making sure people are not excluded from these benefits of an interconnected world rather than providing a lowest common denominator service for them.

It is a claim that is the very basis of liberalism: I should be able to do whatever I want so long as I don't impede on anyone else's liberty. The closest decisions are made to individuals, the better therefore.

The opposite argument is the one that is crying out for justification: decisions should not be made at the lowest possible level because they are not always the best.

It is up to you to justify that.

"The challenge to the localism is coming from those on the left who say that only central government can deliver social justice, and devloving power will only result in more postcode lotteries. What is the libdem answer to that?"

Centralisation leads to postcode lotteries; localism leads to postcode democracies.

Part of the problem is surely that we are being driven by new forms of technology. IT and the difficulties of providing highly specialised and expensive medical units in the health service, for example, are drivers for the delivery of a much more centralised approach. But I don't think we can oppose such changes and need to be realistic about what can truly be delivered best locally. What I have more contention with is Corrigan's assertion of national priorities and national standards. Yes, we all aspire to the highest quality of standards, but local and regional variations should also flourish - and that may actually mean different(not sub-standard) 'standards' in some areas. As for national intervention, that should surely be only when peer reviews etc have clearly failed. Many seem to forget that Britain is not a uniform nation following identical public policy paths - Scotland, Wales and NI have all developed quite seperate routes and there one finds that local authorities, schools and health boards are often fiercely independent, whilst still delivering excellent services.