Government should take less, not more

It's easy to poke fun at Eric Pickles when he says he will he will make mandatory a requirement to hold a referendum, where any local council seeks to impose a Council Tax increase of more than 3.5%.

After all, he preaches localism. But, as he's explained, this means power for local voters, not power for local councils.

Richard North gets this exactly right when he calls it a good start. It plays into his referism meme, which at a local level I support.

Richard reminds us that council tax is a small and diminishing source of councils' overall income. So voters should really have the opportunity to pass verdicts on more than just their council tax demands.

Pickles is behind the times, though, when he implies that a 3.5% rise is acceptable. Why? Because disposable household incomes are projected to fall over the next few years - maybe quite a bit if the euro alarmists turn out to be right.

This raises the tricky question, Are we here for the councils' good, or should the councils be here for our good?

All right, it's a simple question with an obvious answer, but those questions can be the most powerful. And you can see why the local establishment doesn't want to face it, because the clearly right answer is uncomfortable for them.

For it leads to the question, If my disposable household income is going down, surely you, my council, should take less, not more? Not an increase limited to 3.5%, but no increase at all. In fact a reduction. It shouldn't be hard to set the referism question taking the projection for average household incomes as the baseline.

So Pickles' proposal may be a good start. But he's wrong to assume that government should always have more of its subjects' citizens' money.

To that extent it's fundamentally flawed.