Locally Sourced

I am not surprised that the British Library is determined to hold on to the Lindisfarne Gospels, which it did not even know that it had until the campaign to bring them home to Saint Cuthbert, and which even now it keeps in some filing cabinet. Only an artifact from provincial Britain, rather than from anywhere else on earth, would be treated in this way by the London cultural mafia. Yet even such an artifact must still be "protected", at absolutely any length whatever, from falling back into the hands of the provincial peasants who pay for London museums and galleries to be free while those elsewhere have to charge entrance fees.

It is an extremely recent phenomenon that cultural life in this country has become so centralised, a stark manifestation of the Tory nationalisation of civic life, continued by New Labour. Local grandees used to leave or give the money for such things all over the place, usually to be run by the local council. Or else the council simply set up such a thing out of the money that it was free to raise from those to whom it was duly accountable at the ballot box. But, in this as in so many other areas, even the legal possibility of such arrangements, normal to the point of axiom in any other remotely comparable country, have been eviscerated over the course of a generation and more.

Another example is the once thriving but now vanished municipal sector of tertiary education, a startling expression of British diversity and pluralism, with the particular focus of a given community's college (itself a national resource locally administered) reflecting that community's character, history and priorities.

At present, a number of church-based institutions for the training of clergy and lay ministers are facing what to them are large new bills because of changes to central government funding. (I just happen to know about this - the changes in question must also be having an effect across a range of other professions and activities.) But the sums involved would be very small to a local authority; for example, the entire Cambridge Theological Federation of Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, United Reformed and Jewish institutions is on course to lose £120,000 per annum.

Everywhere facing this challenge (and I repeat that I just happen to know about the clerical ones, but there are bound to be many others by the nature of the changes themselves) should seek to have the new shortfall made up municipally, in return for representation on the Governing Body, leading in turn to participation in civic events. They should bypass central government completely, and in so doing might well help to spark off this country's desperately needed civic renewal at local level. (Also, a bit more distance between ministerial formation and academic theology might not be bad for either of them at present.)

Which leads me to the reaction to my recent post on local government funding. I have received a very large number of emails and "don't publish this, but" comments (post them anonymously, then) in response to that post, and almost all have been strongly supportive of returning to a flat fee set by the council and payable by everyone on the local electoral register.

The administrative nightmares of the last attempt could easily be avoided this time round. The benefits system would again take care of the poor (the return of the rates in the form of the Council Tax was paid for by a 2.5% increase in VAT, a very peculiar way of helping the poor). The continuation of a (greatly reduced) property tax, and the introduction of a modest local sales tax, would enable the rates to be quite low. And it would be clear that the only people "worse off" would be those who could easily afford to pay, but who have not hitherto been required to do so. The very people whose Trotskyist-led rioting destroyed the last attempt at reform, but who could expect to be that lucky again.