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Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

It may be. I occasionally make the perhaps naive mistake, after only 22 years in this place, of thinking that when the Secretary of State talks about a problem, she means to do something about it. I heard her say that the time of representative democracy is past, and direct democracy is now the thing of the future. I call for caution before we are seduced by that, because it simply is not the case. I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, whose speech I agreed with almost entirely and very much enjoyed, that we have seen precious little in this regard. Everybody needs to make up their mind what they mean when they talk about localism and decentralisation. What decentralisation usually means is that the Government find a way of giving local government's functions to somebody else. This has been a long journey. We had the directly elected assemblies, which were shot down in the north-east, then we had the regional assemblies, which remained significantly toothless and anonymous, and now we have the wonderful notion of the board of leaders. If we draw the conclusion that we are heading towards the wrong destination, perhaps we need to change train. Perhaps we should look at different sorts of structures—the structures of representative democracy—and abandon the search for a regional promised land. In the present world, we need to do two things, one of which we all agree on and one of which some of my colleagues are very uncomfortable about. First, we need to respond to the issues that can be dealt with only on an international scale, such as climate change and population movements that may follow it, the migration of economic power to Asia, and competitiveness; we can all list what they are. We saw the G20 began to move towards a G2 of America and China. We have to ask ourselves which forum will be able to represent our interest and the European interest as regards those global issues. Frankly, that means that we will have to shift some competence and power upwards. That may be a difficult lesson to learn, but it is none the less true. If we have to do that, because otherwise we will not have the capacity to make our voices heard, then we need also to push power downwards in the areas where it is practicable to do so and the citizen can really make decisions at the local level. The background to that is the self-empowering citizenry. I am not a computer anorak; my children will testify that that statement has the ring of truth to it. Nevertheless, the internet has empowered the citizen and disempowered institutions—the Government are the most important of those—like no other invention since the printing press; and printing was limited to a very small circle until relatively recently in modern times. The internet means that in half a day any one of my constituents can become a bigger expert on a subject—with the exception of two or three subjects that I spent my lifetime dealing with—than I can ever be. What we might describe as the sacerdotal role of the MP as somebody sent to London because they had access to the information needed to enable them to take decisions that the citizen was not in a position to take has disappeared out of the window. The citizen can take power, mobilise and do all sorts of things that were not possible in the past, while Governments are disempowered. As a Conservative, I am in favour of the disempowerment of Governments, which is a good way forward.