This is one policy area in which the government is being crushed under the weight of its incoherence. It wants to devolve power from the centre, and it wants to direct newly scarce resources to purposes uncongenial to those to whom it is devolving power. If withdrawing some vital service prevents a cut in executive salaries; or funds construction of fancy, very green offices for councillors; or permits the hiring of a "head of strategic commissioning" at £79,000-£87,000 per annum, surely no one can doubt the wisdom of such a move. And if a civic group appears and volunteers to run a community centre on a self-funding basis, why permit such an intrusion on the government's sphere? Better to close it than to allow creeping privatisation. 

You can't have decentralisation of power to a bureaucracy that quite naturally believes its pay cheques are top priority if you also want to keep libraries open; you can't hand the power to distribute pain to politicians who value easing the social problems of transgender citizens over well-lit streets; and you can't rely on the emergence of a disinterested band of politicians to challenge the entrenched bunch after so many years when the public has had no experience of a better way of running a town, and sees only short-run loss from transferring power to Burke's little platoons, if any such have survived the past decades of local misgovernance.

Despite such examples, the government sees no inconsistency in pursuing both the goal of decentralisation and the goal of resurrecting civil society. But, as in the words of the popular song, "It's gotta be this or that."

So, too, with the government's policies towards the financial sector. The government recognises, as all but the economically illiterate must, that Britain has a huge competitive advantage in the provision of financial services — banking, insurance, lawyering. It also recognises, although this is less certain, that the health of that sector depends on the infrastructure in what is called the City, and on the ability of its inhabitants to interface with comparative ease, grumbling about public transport and traffic notwithstanding. Finally, it recognises, or says it does, that the health of the financial sector depends on its ability to attract wealthy investors, many of them non-subjects of the Crown.

So far, so good. Enter incoherence. More than one government official has preached to me the importance of geographic and economic diversification, which on inquiry often turns out to reflect an anti-City bias: City denizens earn too much, they don't make things, their lifestyles are offensively ostentatious. Scarce resources must be spent, they say, to attract businesses away from the City and into sectors other than finance. The political motive is clear: there are votes to be had, maybe, up North, from a bit of City-bashing. But the economic logic is unclear: the City is a wealth-creating, export-leading jewel in the economy's dented crown. To build economic policy around an animus to it, or some mistaken notion that to grow the rest of the country it is important to neglect the City, borders on the bizarre.