I was impressed with the passion Sir Keir Starmer managed to whip up within himself when presenting Gordon Brown’s interminable plans for constitutional reform to the British people. He almost sounded engaged with the project. Apparently Gordon has been beavering away, working by the light of a low-wattage electric candle, at this stuff for a couple of years – but frankly, all anyone took from it is that Labour plans to abolish the House of Lords and devolve lots of powers to ‘the regions’.

If I were PM, I’d embrace the House of Lords and abolish the House of Commons, raise the voting age to 25, introduce a property-owning qualification and hold general elections once every ten years, if that. You may quibble with my proposals but surely the one thing that we can all agree upon is that we want much, much less power devolved to locally elected bodies. These institutions, staffed by third-division Pecksniffian martinets with an inferiority complex, already have far too much clout, which is why they take themselves so seriously. They should be allowed to empty our bins and that’s about it. Yet they can’t even do the bin-emptying stuff efficiently, which is why we have an epidemic of fly-tipping. Decentralisation is all very laudable in theory – until you see up close the kind of deranged bastards who will be wielding these new powers.

You may think I am overstating the case a little, but if so have a look at Canterbury City Council, an authority from whose jurisdiction I recently mercifully escaped. The leader of the council is Ben Fitter-Harding, who lives in the Boughton area with his husband, Jonathan, and runs a hipster hotel in the city centre. Ben recently unveiled the council’s extravagant plans to make local people’s lives a misery. He intends to divide the city into five zones. People will not be allowed to travel by car from one zone to another. They have to stay in their zone or walk. If they really need their cars to -travel to another part of Canterbury, they must avail themselves of a new ring road on the outskirts of the city, thus possibly increasing tenfold or more the distance to be travelled. People will not be able to drive to their supermarket of choice – they will be fined if they do so. Many will not be able to drive to work. When presented with objections about how people were to do their week’s shopping, Mr Fitter-Harding said: ‘By 2045, will people actually be driving to their supermarket in the same way that they do now? You could use a hopper bus to get there, choose your shopping and get it delivered back to you.’

In other words – as opposition parties have all pointed out – aside from being a kind of fascistic restriction on the daily lives of the local people, it will also vastly increase journey times and thus emissions. All because Mr Fitter-Harding thinks he is charged with saving the planet rather than running the local council.

Incidentally, I ought to point out that Ben is a Conservative, bless him.

So, that’s Ben Fitter-Harding. Now meet Duncan Enright, a member of the Labour party, who is Oxfordshire County Council’s ‘cabinet member’ (ooh, how they big themselves up) for travel and development. He is going one stage further than Ben in imposing pretty much the same scheme upon the residents of Oxford. Again, the city is being divided up into a number of zones but Duncan is more zealous than Ben, so in Oxford there will be massive roadblocks to prevent people escaping from one of their zones into a neighbouring zone, although if found straying from their own ghetto they will still cop a fine from the council. Duncan wants to create what he calls the ‘15-minute city’. He said: ‘It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs – the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools – which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood.’

Duncan told the Oxford Mail that his little scheme would go ahead regardless or not of whether the public liked it.

Remarkable, isn’t it? Confining residents to one area of a city and punishing them if they stray. It kind of brings back unfortunate memories, doesn’t it? Indeed, one online site commenting upon the proposals in Oxford illustrated their coverage with a photograph of Oswald Mosley. Although I can’t remember the BUF ever proposing anything like this. Perhaps Duncan could be persuaded to use barbed wire and telegenically snarling guard dogs to demarcate the borders between his little 15-minute cities.

What follows is guesswork. I have the suspicion that local councils believe they can get away with these sorts of impositions on the lives of their people for two principal reasons. First, the local authorities noticed how compliant the population became during lockdown, how willing they were to accept restrictions on their daily movements: stay where you are, wear a mask and wash your hands. You are allowed out to do your shopping once every two weeks, and out for a walk once a day for an hour, max. We put up with all that – and the people who have power over our lives noticed and they liked what they saw. They have been itching to recreate lockdowns ever since.

Second – climate change. Because, like Covid, climate change is an ‘emergency’, people such as Duncan and Ben believe they are wholly entitled to introduce what you might call emergency measures. Empty the bins, you say? No, we can’t. We are fighting for this planet’s survival and so you will do as we say. Sod your bins.

The lower down the democratic pyramid you go, the more various institutions are likely to be staffed by goose-stepping social inadequates who fill up the gaping holes in their lives by taking it out on you. If you ever doubt that, just look at Home Owner Associations in the USA. Ben and Dunc are two steps up from that.

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