Politics & Power Quote by Ferdinand Mount

“Old vigour and independence” is a beautifully loaded phrase: it flatters the listener’s nostalgia while smuggling in a critique of how thin local power has become. Ferdinand Mount isn’t simply praising town halls; he’s hinting that something has been taken away - not by accident, but by decades of centralization that quietly trained citizens to expect decisions to arrive pre-packaged from Westminster. The line works because it pretends to be modest (“I think”) even as it makes an ambitious, cross-party claim about what “a majority” wants. That rhetorical move is strategic: it frames localism as common sense rather than ideology, a repair job rather than a revolution.

The intent is to build a coalition around a deceptively simple proposition: local government should be more than a delivery arm for national policy. “Recover” implies a loss, and “independence” implies a dependency - on central funding, on ministerial targets, on national media agendas that treat local politics as provincial noise. Mount’s subtext is that British democracy has been over-professionalized at the center and underpowered at the edges, leaving voters feeling both governed and unrepresented.

Contextually, this sits inside a long British argument about the hollowing out of councils: rate-capping, audit regimes, ring-fenced grants, and policy-by-press-release. By invoking “all parties,” Mount also needles partisan hypocrisy: everyone praises local control until local control produces inconvenient outcomes. The sentence is less a warm remembrance than a warning that without muscular local institutions, national politics becomes the only arena left - and it buckles under the weight.