Anyway, the academics who have written about this are Reif and Schmitt see this. Their hypothesis holds true for European elections elsewhere, and from what I know of German Länder elections the incumbent government tends to get a good battering. However at a guess a country that has grown up with multi-level governance and multi-party systems should be better able to cope.

However I don’t think the reasons for the Lib Dems proposing local income tax are those you say – it is principally because Council Tax is unrelated to income, which an income tax obviously is (making it a much more progressive tax).

But there is also the exact reason you give – that in order to be meaningful, tiers of government such as councils should be responsible for raising as much of their own money as possible. (In fact I think a small prize may be available to anyone who has ever heard Chris Huhne give a speech without mentioning this

And to be fair to him, this is something that Gordon Brown has made some progress on over the last eleven years (the flipside of Council Tax levels having almost doubled over that time).

I don’t understand jdc’s comment here – raising a much higher proportion of your income locally is entirely compatible with a system of fiscal transfers between localities (it is in the rest of Europe…)

But I’m really interested if this problem of second order elections just being in fact a referendum on the national government, is only a British thing. Isn’t it to a greater or lesser extent true in the rest of Europe too?

When I was out on the doorsteps there was plenty of anger with the 10p tax issue. But more prevalent were local concerns which has made the Labour-led ruling coalition deeply unpopular. To illustrate, in 1995, all 60 councillors in the chamber were Labour. Now, it’s 16.

More here if you fancy an overview of our small corner in the West Midlands.

It’s difficult to do that, though, without either taking money away from poor areas and giving it to rich ones, or else creating perverse incentives.