There are probably two critical points in the development of local government in the UK. First, it has progressed incrementally with little strategic direction except in so far as the central government has been forced at various points in time to address the byzantine local structures and processes that have embodied the consequences of this reactive incrementalism – the ‘Saxon heritage’: as long as ‘the locals’ kept their house in order then London was content to ignore them. Only when disease, squalor or riot infringed upon the metropolis did Whitehall decide to ‘do something’ about the ‘locals’. The longevity of this approach is displayed in Michael Heseltine’s frequently repeated story that the only time when he was in government that a meeting was about ‘a place’ rather than ‘a service’ such as ‘education or health or housing’ was when the riots occurred in Liverpool in 1981. Second, the state has often attempted to realise, but seldom achieved, its aim of centralising control and its own authority for almost a thousand years – since the Norman invasion of 1066. The history of local government in the UK, then, can be described as one rooted in these two dichotomous traditions: the centralising fetish of the state – the veritable ‘Norman Yoke’ – bolted on to the decentralised chaos of the Anglo-Saxon heritage