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• In the closing paragraph of a recent piece in the Daily Telegraph, David Frost offers a sharp critique of modern government.

He argues that failure is inevitable when the state takes on too much, observing that “the only real answer to government failure is to limit what government actually does.” He also questions why we distrust politicians and bureaucrats while continuing to hand them more power.

That argument already points strongly towards localism, even if Frost himself does not yet take the final step.

Frost treats state failure as a political and administrative problem. But it is also an economic one. We are entering a period of economic contraction, not expansion. In a shrinking economy, the present system of government cannot be sustained. Centralised states are built on growth. They rely on rising tax receipts, expanding markets, and increasing discretionary spending to fund complex national systems. When growth ends, those systems begin to fracture.

Economic contraction has the practical effect of breaking up the existing model of government. As resources tighten, the state is forced either to withdraw or to ration more harshly. Attempting to maintain universal, centrally managed systems under these conditions only accelerates failure. Bureaucracy expands as outcomes deteriorate. Control increases as effectiveness declines.

This is where Frost’s argument becomes unanswerable, even if he does not yet acknowledge it. If there can be no more growth, then limiting what government does is not a choice but a necessity. The question is not whether the state should retreat, but how and in whose favour.

Localism provides the answer. When Frost says we must break out of the mindset that nothing can happen unless the state is involved, he is describing the mental barrier that prevents adaptation to contraction. Localism removes that barrier. It allows activity to continue even as national systems weaken, by relocating responsibility, decision-making, and production to the level of the locality.

Farming illustrates this clearly. Frost notes that viability does not have to be made subject to DEFRA and Treasury bureaucrats. In a contracting economy, it cannot be. Food production must respond to local land, labour, and need. Central schemes designed for an expanding economy become obstacles rather than supports. Local systems, though smaller and less uniform, are more resilient.

The same applies to energy, education, and care. Large, national systems depend on surplus. Local systems depend on knowledge, relationships, and adaptability. As discretionary spending declines, only the latter can survive without constant crisis management from the centre.

Frost calls for massive state surgery. Economic contraction ensures that surgery will happen whether politicians like it or not. Localism determines whether that process is chaotic and imposed from above, or deliberate and shaped from below.

The deeper issue is cultural. For decades, people have been trained to expect solutions from the centre. Growth made that illusion affordable. Contraction removes it. Localism restores a more realistic settlement, where responsibility is visible, limits are understood, and society continues to function even as the state does less.

Frost is right that things will keep getting worse until the scale of the state is reduced. Once the reality of permanent economic contraction is accepted, his argument leaves no alternative. Localism is not ideology. It is what remains when growth is gone.