I’m not one for conspiracy theories.

So when a few years back the county Tories made the case for a new ‘unitary’ authority saying it would be more cost effective, more efficient and, well, better for us, then it happened, and then the Tories lost control and then the Lib Dems took control, and the county became less cost effective, less efficient and basically one large car boot sale of everything we held dear, I’m not saying the Tories planned that.

The Lib Dems of course should have spotted this.

They’d been here before when in their eagerness to get into government in 2010 they accepted all sorts of ‘conditions’ from the Tories.

‘Drop those anti Tuition fees policies’, ‘support us bringing in austerity’, ‘touch your nose and your ear at the same time’, ‘bark like a squirrel’, ‘come on you can do it!’.

It's like the desperate to be loved Christmas child being handed a parcel that slightly rattles and sounds like it might be full of broken glass.

‘Yes, it was a cut glass decanter when I wrapped it, honest…’

The Lib Dems unwrapped Somerset in 2023 and surprise surprise it was broken.

Maybe irretrievably.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’ accused the Tories.

‘Sold a pup’ is a phrase.

Unitary Somerset was never going to work.

Too big, too remote and came with too many insoluble problems.

But can we fix it?

Yes we c… well…..’maybe’ we can...there’s two options here.

One is Somerset shuts down all its services and sacks all its workers and Bill Revans sets himself up as a DIY self-help group that eventually ‘gets round to everyone’.

Two is the government stepping in and restoring local government funding to 2010 pre-coalition levels.

That one also probably involves removing the social care budget to a national location and removing it from the counties and unitaries.

But there’s also three.

That’s true and honest ‘localism’.

That’s giving the powers and services and amenities to the towns and parishes at the most local level, letting us choose what we want and don’t want and then being accountable to the people in our communities.

It’s not the town councils that are in debt after all.

So, the question is how big should local be?

I’d say, ‘pretty small actually’ and certainly in an area that you can see on a daily basis.

Somewhere that means something to your daily life and not one that you have absolutely no connection with.

Sorry about that Frome, Chard and Ditcheat.

William the Conqueror might have drawn a line around us all at one time, but that was 1,000 years ago.