In hindsight, the last 10 days' uproar over council cuts to the voluntary sector and the threat to Big Society may be seen as the time when Number 10 fell out of love with localism.
It will have dawned on the prime minister and his advisers in the past fortnight that once you start ring-fencing specific major services from cuts, such as schools and health, then you must either ring-fence all the remaining services or expect them to disappear as councils struggle to reduce budgets by one-quarter in two years.
