A different democracy for Scotland

First, centralised Scotland needs the capacity to decentralise, so we need something to decentralise to. But we don’t need even more time-wasting bureaucracy and soul-destroying compliance regimes. That’s why we proposed town-level Development Councils. 

To make this work Scotland would have a system of reserved power. At each level of government from Holyrood to a town council, a specific statement of what (minimal) range of powers must be reserved at that level would mean any layer of democracy below it would be able to draw down any non-reserved power, along with the money to carry out that function itself.