WE had a discussion in the office the other day about the nature of democracy as one does. Other subjects that come up regularly include whether Waitrose is superior to Tesco and the state of the traffic on the way to the office.

So all human life is here.

The chat about democracy arose from the Free Press's campaign to get the Government to intervene and make health bosses bring back the Wycombe Hospital that everyone remembers, providing most hospital health services locally rather than sharing them with Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

The Government had responded to the campaign by saying, "nothing to do with us, guv".

These were decisions that had to be taken at a local level, it said. It believes in local decision taking.

The feeling here was that the Government was not responding to the strongly expressed views of local people, so it was being undemocratic.

Someone said the Government had only said this was a decision to be made by local health chiefs, because the local bureaucracy was carrying out the Government's programme. If health chiefs had decided to do something contrary to Government policy, you could bet your bottom dollar it would soon have stepped in and made them change their ways. The Government was paying lip service to the idea of local decision making. I can't help feeling that this is almost certainly true, though it doesn't make it undemocratic, just infuriating and frustrating if you have a different point of view.

We cannot have a Government that doesn't have a national view about how the health service, schools, and social welfare should operate and that doesn't try to ensure its policies are carried out.

If it doesn't, what is it there for? (Answers on a postcard). There are all sorts of things that people want, or don't want, that are at odds with what the Government wants. One, now raising its head, is the number of homes to be built in the south east in the next 20 years.

Here we are being warned that Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott could overturn the comparatively low level of building put forward in the South East Plan and impose his own higher figure. If he does this and we don't know that he will he will be overturning decisions have been taken at a local level, in this case by councillors from all over the south east. So, in the Wycombe Hospital case, the Government backs something which is in line with its national policy, saying it's a local decision. In the case of the housing numbers Mr Prescott could overturn a decision taken at local level because it is not in line with Government.

There is a logic here, which is that Government policy is paramount and any excuse will do to justify it What does this tell us about democracy? Nothing much apart from the fact that as Humpty Dumpty said , "a word can mean exactly what I want it to mean". As to whether Wycombe should return to being a hospital that provides everything, though possibly not as well as it should, or whether more homes should be built in the south east so that everyone has a home, that's another story.