Top-down or centralised hierarchies depend on everyone other than those who benefit from the structures not being interested in the real detail of what is going on. They thrive when we aren’t asking the right questions about who really are the main beneficiaries of the process that is unfolding round us.

We quite literally have a rather dangerous habit of simply accepting that the changes around us are actually needed, and that they will be beneficial or work better for us all.

The best example is that of how we are all being manipulated into thinking that power is being given back to us when it isn’t, is through the creation of Metropolitan and Regional Mayors.

In reality, the levels of government already exist where the decisions that these very political roles will be gifted with should in fact be taken. That is what parish and town councils, borough and district councils, and what county councils are already there for.

The big budgets will always be controlled from above, and the function of these unnecessary roles relies on sucking power and influence away from the lowest tiers of government, where the most risk to politicians from being exposed to real democracy is involved.

More layers of government mean more layers of insulation to protect those at the top.

You may have seen how messages get changed if an instruction or information is given to one person, and then passed on to another who didn’t hear the first conversation, with the process then being repeated several times.

The way that a multilayered system of government works when it is as highly politicised as the structure of government in the UK now is, means that it is incredibly easy for the real purpose or intent of overarching public policy to become confused – not always intentionally, but through stupidity  – with something that will actually work, once it is implemented at the bottom of what in some cases can be a long and convoluted chain.

Rest assured that if those at the top are being insulated from risk to themselves and their positions by how messages can be obscured on their way down, whilst being taken up passionately by those who believe they are doing their job, the reality is that the information and feedback that should be informing public policy and really making a difference through public structures that comes from the bottom, is certainly not reaching the top, or being taken seriously on the rare occasion that it does.