I had meant to write

Let’s have a public confidence test by all means, but let’s not make it absolute: do you have confidence in local government? Let’s make it relative: who do you have more confidence in, local or central government

But while the replacement of confidence with trust may be an interesting Freudian slip on my part I’m not sure it changes the terms of the argument which is basically that it only makes sense to say that devolving powers to local government is dependent on public confidence if the public has more confidence in the body that currently exercises that power i.e. central government, and I’m not sure that it does.

In other words, given that these powers must reside somewhere any confidence test should be relative who does the public have most confidence in.

If you recouched all that in terms of trust it would be more politically loaded but would still apply I think.

I agree with you of course, that centralism is deep rooted and has many causes and that Denham’s personal attitudes are unlikely to make much difference one way or another but I thought the comments were interesting in as far as they seemed to reflect a cultural attitude that central government is the natural seat of power from which it devolves (to local government, to communities? To people?) only when we have earned our little share of that power.

I thought that was a little depressing