Okay, I may give the impression that I dislike US politics. But I never cease to be amazed at local government in particular. Relations of mine have been mayors of Decatur (pop c 55,000) and of Double Springs (pop c 1000) in Alabama. But with the controversy raging in Virginia today I was looking at precinct returns there and local ballot measures.

Take Arlington. Population 200,000. The county board of five people from what I can work out run the county with a budget of $900m. They have five elected officials - Sheriff, Revenues Commissioner, Treasurer, Attorney and Clerk of the Circuit Court. Fully half of their budget is raised in local property taxation, and only a tiny fraction - 10% or so comes from state or federal coffers, with the rest apparently raised from local fees and other little taxes like taxes on restaurant bills.

Those five people are technically part time just like British local councillors, but all draw a salary of between about £12,000 and £15,000 a year. Lots of other people get involved on a voluntary basis on advisory boards and consultative bodies (for example the 13 person housing board). The schools budget accounts for about $330m and that, whilst set by the county board, is run by the schools board, again of five people.

43% of the population are minority ethnic and sixty languages are spoken by kids in the county's schools.

This tight little ship maintains property taxes at less than 1% of assessed value and its bonds (for it has the power to contract debt as it put to the electorate yesterday for five major projects totaling just over $200m dollars to spend on capital projects over the next five years, including schools buildings, transport systems, public spaces and so on) are Moody's AAA rated.

Remind me, why do we need 48 city and 16 county councillors to represent Oxford with a budget of about the same sort of figure, plus hundreds of directly employed staff, none of whom are ever accountable to the citizens? Why is getting people to participate in helping those councillors to make decisions (as if they ever listen when they do consult!) like pulling teeth? What is wrong with us in the UK? Why do we seem to need vast numbers of people to do things on our behalf?

And these structures are many and varied across the US. So why the hell is Ms Kelly, who would no doubt be proud of Virginia for other reasons today, deigning to offer English local councils just a few tightly regulated options as to how to run the place. Don't try telling me that on a small island we need more homogeneity. We don't, we need local innovation and public entrepreneurship. We need to tell our Whitehall and Westminster overlords to sod off and leave us to decide for ourselves, locally, how we pool our citizens' skills (and boy, do we have them by the truck load in Oxford) to make local communities work.