Livejournal tells me that I am one of 78000 active British bloggers while the UK poliblogs website links to 257 blogs with an entirely political theme. The most popular attracts 15000 visitors a day. On which subject John Papworth had a couple of copies of the Rowntree Report on Power to the People lying around in his kitchen so I was sent off to London with one of them. I had read most of it by the time I arrived at Victoria Coach Station at two o'clock.

Unfortunately despite its title the report is not really concerned with Power to the People but is all about how to get people to vote so that their disengagement from election and party politics is reversed and the political class can carry on with business as usual, keep their salaries and expense accounts, look forward to fat-cat pensions and indulge s in undeserved privileges at tax payer expense while continuing to lead their electorates down garden paths they never asked to walk along and in a direction they repeatedly told their elected representatives they didn't want to go.

If that seems a trifle sceptical my second comment is a back-handed compliment to the Rowntree Commission for sprinkling their report with plenty of quotes from ordinary people so readers are not dependent on reading between the lines of the rather Pravda-esque prose of our ruling political elites who commissioned and wrote the Rowntree Report. These are the best parts but there are too few of them and they are disregarded when the recommendations are cobbled together in response to the problem of the 'disconnect between the political system and the people'.

Let me give you the flavour of some of the more sensible of the report's recommendations...and I exclude silly ideas like 'placing limits on the power of the whips' which gets my King Canute Award. A Concordat between Executive and Parliament might improve matters...and another one between Central and Local Government could be helpful. But a Concordat is a too-clever-by-half English device that takes the good idea of an unwritten constitution…for which there are good sound arguments…and makes a complete dog's dinner of it by putting some of it in writing...those bits being always the few rules of governance and power that the Mandarins do not mind making public...while retaining the power to rewrite it. No prizes for guessing how fast Brussels will kick that one into touch.

And then there are the Quasi Autonomous Non Government Agencies known as quangos to their rich friends in the private sector who use them to fleece the tax payer and enclose the commons. The Rowntree Committee wants them to be 'independently mapped to clarify and renew lines of accountability between the elected and unelected authority'. So it's all tweaking and twiddling with The World of Professional Politics as a prelude to Recommendation 20 which is state funding for political parties. Tick here and three pounds a year goes off to your bparty of choice.

The American Founding Fathers had the good sense to include a ceiling of 30 000 per representative in their Constitution. But only five lines in this 120 000 word tome touches on the question of scale...a crucial parameter in any discussion of governance, democracy and power. Here is the little gem on English Local Government from Gerry Stoker…a Professor of Political Science at Manchester University.

Our Local Government is neither local nor government and it's on too big a scale compared to democracies elsewhere in Europe. On average UK local authorities serve a population of over 100 000…at least twice the average in most European countries. Our system has been reorganised in a way which has taken it away from people. As to what local government does. Local Government, the professor tells us, is no longer government. It's largely administration, putting together programmes that central government wants put together. But let me not be completely negative. Within the framework of formal politics...which is the only framework the report embraces...there are a couple of good ideas from the Danes and the Swiss... which suggests that only small countries do real democracy.

Danish MPs have the power to scrutinise and mandate executive objectives and positions before their governments enter into negotiations with the European Union. Finnish, Swedish and Austrian MPs have similar powers. And the EU Constitution that the Dutch and the French kicked into touch last year enshrines the ambitious idea that national parliaments should have the right to require the European Commission to revise its draft proposals if a third reckons it undermines the principle of subsidiarity. How that stacks up with the European Court in Luxembourg which kicks out any measure from a national government that does not lead to ever-closer union is anybody's guess.

The Swiss who are doing very nicely thank you outside of the European Union enter the picture with Recommendation 24 where the Rowntree Report reaches the outer limit of radical thought by proposing that 'citizens'...we are not citizens but subjects but we can let that pass...be 'given' the right to 'initiate referendums on legislation by collecting a pre-ordained number of signatures on a petition'. Well thank you. How jolly decent of you. California of course goes much further with her Recall Procedures to kick the rascals out and much else besides...but none of this gets a mention in this deeply disappointing report. I do like the title though. Power to the People. Catchy. Could just be an idea whose time has come.