No doubt my fellow Camdenonians desperately “need” the magazine that the council throws around, informing us of “the latest gigs” in Camden. Not as if we can get this information elsewhere.

Silly for quite a few reasons. Supermarkets can pick or chose which services they want to provide, councils are statutorily obliged to provide most of their services, and to do it in order of need not in order of who is most willing to pay. The need for many of the services councils provide is growing rapidly due to social circumstances e.g. rapid growth of very aged people requiring either rapid increase in expenditure in social services care for the very elderly, or cuts in it to keep level of expenditure still. Supermarkets are in the business of supplying goods, councils are in the business of supplying services (so a better comparison might be with prices of private education or private social care, for example). Supermarkets have worked by squeezing down on agricultural suppliers, and bringing in cheapo foreign labour to do the job (well, ok, maybe not such a big difference here – let others deal with the social costs of that). Supermarkets can open branches where they think they can make profits, councils have to be everywhere.

Now that above is without thinking too deeply on this matter. One might rather hope someone who aspires to be leader of this country and is talking to councillors would have a little knowledge on this issues and shown capability to think for more than the few seconds it took me to think of the above issues with the points he was making.

His idea was that councils should make available everything they spend their money on, after a model of Windsor and Maidenhead who make public every item of expenditure over £500.

Er, yes – when council were run using the committee system, committees had to agree to expenditure are detailed level like this, and their papers were in the public domain. New Labour forced councils to abandon this and have this new swishy cabinet system, or even better executive mayors, where all this fuddy-duddy detail was swept away and only summaries appeared in the public papers.

So in that case why bother electing councillor or any politician to make decisions at all?

We can debate the practicalities of individal choice versus council control, but surely at least the idea that liberal means individual as opposed to group is one which is going to stay?