Oh, Polly, Polly, Polly… I’m tempted to write a letter to theguardian, but rather than cut my rant down to something short and pithy, let’s do the show right here.

Polly wants to see Red Ken given some more powers. Everyone loves good old Ken, so that’s OK. Let’s not have lots different waste authorities for London, but make them into one. Might be sensible. Let’s take powers from the Government Office for London, a UK body, and devolve them to the elected mayor of London. Excellent. She argues that councils need more control of planning to help regenerate their areas. Fine (although this would also give them more powers to be the very NIMBYs she complains about elsewhere in the article).

But… Polly has found herself a worthy-sounding project in Lambeth which might be blocked by local LibDem councillors, but which Ken would back. Ergo, local councils should lose powers over this sort of thing, and it should be up to the Mayor.

Or rather, up to Ken. Because it’s all very well demanding this when you agree with the Mayor and disagree with the borough council, but what if it was the other way around? Making constitutional changes on the basis of who hold particular posts at a particular time is never a good idea. For every Labour voter in a Tory council area wishing the Government would overall the local “tin-pot dictators”, there’ll be a Tory voter in a village somewhere demanding that Labour let the local Tory council veto a new incinerator/wind farm/asylum seeker detention centre. And if the Tories get back into power nationally, the two groups will swap.

Why would a party political Mayor of London be less inclined to oppose automatically, as Polly suggests, a proposal from another party than a local council group? Why should Kenthe Mayor, running the whole of London, be more appropriate to decide on the structure of an estate in Lambeth than Lambeth council? If she wants devolution – she argues that the council should approve the plan because local people back it – Polly should be asking for the local neighbourhood to have the power to institute this sort of change without needing approval from a distant authority, whether that’s the local council, the Mayor of London or the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

Polly cites “accountability” as a reason for giving these powers to Ken:

This is the kind of arbitrary nonsense that happens right across London as tin-pot dictators in the 32 boroughs run economies the size of small African countries with virtually no accountability. In this empty democracy, few people vote and no one knows the name of their council leader, council member or even which party has control. But the one person voters do know is the mayor of London. Give him the power and make him accountable if he gets it wrong. Let them blame him for London’s woes – and praise him for improvements.

(“Small African countries” have their own governments but carrying the analogy to its logical conclusion, a load of them should group together and elect one man – well, it would be a man, wouldn’t it? – to run all of their affairs centrally.)

So how is Ken accountable? Elections are once every four years. In the mean time, the GLA – a body elected by proportional representation (which Polly backs) that is more representative of London than a single Labour mayor – doesn’t have the powers to truly hold him accountable. There is an election every four years, but it’s across the whole of London, so Ken could turn down every popular planning application in Lambeth and still remain Mayor on the votes of the other boroughs. Is that local accountability?

What about those London boroughs who have directly elected mayors themselves. Why should their powers be handed over to Ken?

Local government needs reform, but what it doesn’t need is to be eviscerated. Just because boroughs are part of London doesn’t mean they don’t have their own identities and their own problems, and it doesn’t mean that they should be run from the other side of the city. Taking powers away from bodies the public already take little interest in will not enliven local democracy. Give them the power to make a difference – and, of course, an electoral system that makes them representative of their communities – and people will notice them.

Apparently the smoking age might rise to 18. I’m not going to say that’s a bad idea, regardless of issues of personal liberty, but then I’m 26 and don’t smoke. However, there were a couple of things that struck me…

Campaigners argue bringing the law on cigarettes into line with that on alcohol would reduce under-age smokers.

Of course it wouldn’t. It might reduce the number of under-16s smoking, but by definition under-age would mean under-18s after the change and I imagine there will be more under-18s smoking then than there are under-16s smoking now, if only because there are two more years’ worth of teenagers to factor in.

A poll conducted last year for the BBC found that four out of five people backed lifting the legal age to 18.

Of the 1,010 adults surveyed, 55% said the minimum age should go up to 21.

“Hello, I’m doing a poll. Are you over the age of X?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think privilege Y should only be available to those over the age of X?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
“Gosh, what a surprising result. I must write that up immediately.”

Via MediaWatchWatch comes the news from The Independent (update: link now pay-to-view) that Woolworths and Sainsbury’s have withdrawn from sale our old friend Jerry Springer: The Opera on DVD due to "customer concerns".

Sainsbury has admitted it received just 10 complaints.

Tim was written to both expressing his disappointment. Time for a seasonal, free speech boycott of Woolies and Sainsbury’s? A pledge, perhaps? Or a nice sidebar button?

Either way, I won’t be shopping at either for the rest of 2005. That’ll learn ’em.

theguardian reports that Passport cost rises by 21% to pay for security checks. Now, if I was very cynical, I’d think the Home Office were going to ramp up the cost of passports each year so that when it finally comes the time officially to include ID cards with them, that final leap in price turns out to be much less than anticipated.

But, as I say, that would be very cynical.