I have long thought Michael Gove was an idiot who knew very little about education and his ongoing pronouncements invariably confirm that view.

I suppose I should have got used by now to the succession of Education minsters of various parties both woefully ignorant of how children actually learn things and disparaging of the professionalism of teachers but Gove really is in a class by himself.

After each election you can obtain what is called a Marked Register. I didn't know such a thing existed before I first stood for election.

The Marked Register doesn't tell you how people voted; it just tells you who actually did vote. The purpose is to allow those involved to satisfy themselves that there was no jiggery-pokery or suspicious voting pattern in the electoral process.

Given my experience last year, I have been asked to provide some advice and insight to sitting Councillors who may lose their seats in this year's municipal election on May 3rd.

The first thing to say is that as a local Councillor, if you do lose your seat, like the Godfather (a good primer for Liverpool politics), it almost certainly isn't personal or - in the great majority of cases - reflective of your performance as a local representative.

The recent coalition government budget included announcement of the confirmation of the £1.2billion City Deal for Greater Manchester, the first one confirmed, which will, amongst other things, target greater investment from China.

We still await final confirmation of a similar deal for Liverpool.

The City of Manchester will have a referendum on May 3rd to decide whether or not they will have an elected mayor.

In Liverpool, the electorate was disgracefully denied that opportunity to decide on the city's governance arrangements. We will be having an election on May 3rd for the post of Mayor instead.

Do you ever look at the small print of your electricity bills? Me neither.

However, my wife Jan (who has been a Councillor since 1994 and is stepping down in May) does.

She drew my attention to the differential pricing which exists in the 14 distribution areas in the UK.

I was a committed Liberal Democrat member for nearly 22 years, the only political party I ever joined.

My membership lapsed on January 1st. I will not be renewing it. Anecdotally, it would seem I am not alone in reaching such a decision.

At the time I joined and for nearly all the subsequent years, this was the party whose political principles and policies most closely corresponded with my own. That is not to say I agreed with every LD policy.

This week saw the conviction and public disgracing of former French President Jacques Chirac for serial instances of corrupt practice during his 16 year tenure as the elected Mayor of Paris. Some people may think this is an isolated case. It is not.

My opposition to the concept of elected mayors in England and especially Liverpool is well known and longstanding.

Enter the words "corruption elected mayor" in Google and see how many myriad results come up within a split second.

I'll concede some references are about incoming elected mayors pledging to root out the corruption of their preceding elected mayor.

The August 2011 riots and the outrageous scenes witnessed with increasing horror by the Great British Public understandably caused a knee jerk portfolio of conflicting and (occasionally) complementary analyses plus a number of suggested instant solutions of the type so loved by the sort of politicians whose main consideration is always the headlines in tomorrow's newspapers, i.e. most of them.

What seems to be largely missing is any searching critique of modern day consumer capitalism and its role in this state of affairs.

James Caan happens to have starred in two of my top 10 favourite films - The Godfather and Rollerball (the original not the second rate 2002 remake).

I saw Rollerball at the cinema in 1975 and was mightily impressed.

An underrated film, set in 2018, it illustrates one way in which human society could be organised in the future, one where asserting one's individuality against the perceived interests of society at large would be actively discouraged.

Over the past 30+ years, successive governments have progressively emasculated the powers and reduced the autonomy of local authorities and their ability to tailor policies to local circumstances almost to vanishing point.

It is plain that central government now views local authorities solely as its robotic creatures, whose primary function is to deliver centrally prescribed policies, especially the less popular ones.

Perhaps this is related to the concomitant process whereby central government has ceded some of its own powers to Brussels during roughly the same time frame and has subsequently compensated. (Ironic that, given that Britain is a signatory to the Maastricht Treaty, containing a supposedly firm commitment to subsidiarity.)