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  Rick - sorry to correct you but there is nothing socialist about spreading power, in fact limiting the power and influence of the State is a very Conservative thing while central control and top down Governance is very much the hallmark of Labour.
  
  You can believe that DC means what he says because it runs with the grain of Conservative thinking.
  
  From a previous era, Right to Buy and privatisation are both part of that spreading of power enabling people to own their own homes and a real share in businesses through share ownership were manifestations of this under Mrs T.
  
  Compare that to Labour where they opposed right to buy wanting to keep municipal control over huge swathes of housing stock and also wanting to run huge swathes of industry through nationalisation.
  
  That alone demonstrates the big difference between Conservative and Labour thinking from a different time.
  
  in the present we have a somewhat different set of problems but the differing attitudes still reflect this divide. The old Labour corporate socialism of nationalised industries may have gone but that is replaced by a new Beaurocratic Socialism where they instead try to control industry and businesses through a mass of laws and regulations. You can see daily how they cannot devolve power from their centrally controlled targets and how they feel they can and should interfere in all aspects of our lives nannying.
  
  In the Conservative Party around 5 years there was a renewed thrust to take us in the opposite direction which involves Government standing back from interferance and smaller Government. Dan Hannen was at the forefront of that and he produced a book 'The Plan' iin response. I have posted here about The Plan, some of which formed a significant part of DC's recent speech. If you go to conservativehome.com and read the discussions and threads there you will see that this 'localism' is becoming embedded into Conservative attitudes and there is much discussion of the 'post-beaurocratic age'. All that DC is saying is very much mainstream in the Conservative Party and he really does mean it.
  
  Make no mistake there will be huge changes in the way Britain is run under the Conservatives and peple will be empowered as never before. Locally elected 'sherrifs' to run the local prosecution service and police operations is not a new policy for us, it was in the last manifesto and will be in the next. Then there is indeed, as howard said, a need to reform LG finance and Dan Hannan had a solution for that by converting VAT to a local sales tax (County based). This latter is particularly well argued. There is much, much more and it is very Conservative with smaller Government and personal responsibility at its heart.

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