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2 november 2012, swan song

I like clever, opinionated and out-of-step politicians (see 18 june 2011), and michael heseltine, about to turn 80 and finally walk into the sunset, falls into that category, as this remarkable broadcast shows. This week came his swan song, a massive report that leaves "no stone unturned" in its search for economic growth, the defining political question of the day. Though not unqualified, one of the report's more interesting elements is localism, which after many months of speaking to many people (including me !), he seems to have become a champion of. He talks about "reversing a century of centralisation" and bemoans how the UK has "disempowered local government by centralising power and funding". These are familiar themes to those of us that deal with the most centralised government in the western world (see 8 december 2011; 22 january 2011, with photo), but all the more powerful for coming from someone who has managed that machine for decades, and who is writing about economic growth. Local government in england these last years has been scythed down, by some 20% and counting, and as the spotlight turns to similarly scything down the whitehall centre, there is a renewed possibility for good schemes that move functions away from the centre to get real airtime and traction in the middle of what is already shaping up as a westminster-whitehall battle. Those skirmishes between politicians and their civil servants are already breaking out in the response to heseltine, and so it will be interesting to see who gets the upper hand in terms of the overall tone of the government response. I for one am certainly to arms with a renewed spring in the step because in an era when the totality of things that can be done systematically lessens, the prospect of pushing things down from the centre because we can pick them up elsewhere steadily rises.