Passionately British
From Douglas Carswell Sir: Mark Steyn is correct that British Conservatives should be wary of being seen as wanting to ape US-style local democracy ('How to save the Tory party', 25 October). As the 'Tory policy cove' who made the case for directly elected sheriffs in Direct Democracy ('Conservatives for Change', October 2002), I can assure him that the idea arose from an overarching critique of what is not working in the UK, rather than merely importing ad hoc from the US what does.
In Britain today, remote elites make decisions on policing and much else. Local people take the rap. No one sitting on the quangos is held accountable; no one seems to get sacked.
The Conservatives have at last begun to embrace direct democracy with gusto, announcing bold new policies aimed at pushing power away from the highly centralised body politic down as far as possible, to either elected sheriffs or to the individual in the case of education and health. In one or two thinktanks, some of us are finalising ideas that would take tax-raising powers from Whitehall to the town hall.
It is possible that we may come to not dissimilar conclusions to those that have been reached on Mr Steyn's side of the Atlantic. However, in giving us a consisten
cy in terms of what we say, from the running of local schools and police services, through to our opposition to that most remote and unaccountable elite of them all — the Eurocracy in Brussels — we remain passionately, and very distinctly, British.
Douglas Carswell
Clacton-on-Sea, Essex
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