“Your editorial (Local parties should grab the chance to reshape politics, 4 April) misses a very important trend in local government. Ordinary voters have been effectively disenfranchised by the cabinet system operated by local authorities, to the extent that dissent, even within members of majority parties, has been crushed. Residents are now looking to independent parties to represent their views in an open, non-partisan approach as illustrated by the “Flatpack Democracy” movement.
Creating even larger local government bodies, with elite “super-cabinets”, means that our rulers will be even more remote and less accountable. Promoting local government leaders to the “premier league” will have only one result: they will stop listening.
Richard Gilyead
Saffron Walden, Essex
• Imposing mayors on English cities, and the highly politicised “northern powerhouse”, are typical politicians’ solutions to their own economic failure. In sundry policy papers since the mid-80s, I sought to show that the problem with regional development is a voracious central government, as capital, income and the educated have been taxed and fiscally seduced to the south-east. The last thing we in the northern regions need is more political interventions.
Osborne is responsible for the most pernicious attack on the poorest regions, as the business rate revaluation was postponed for two years, massively subsidising London and taxing the poorest regions. Taxes continue to be applied less to profits and more to mere activity (rates, VAT, duties, unindexed capital gains), thus attacking further the poorest and subsidising the richest areas.
Rodney Atkinson
Stocksfield, Northumberland
• English devolution might transform local government leadership but it will have been diminished by the loss of its education services.
John Bailey”
East Devon Watch 