In this opinion piece, the author writes that England is now well on the way to having the most totalitarian as well as one of the most inefficiently managed schools system in Europe. He states that in the much maligned 1960s, people came from all over the world to learn from what was being achieved in the best of England's publicly-funded, local authority maintained schools, and that few come now. Newsome closes the article with the following warning issued in 1969 by the Royal Commission on local government: "If local self government withers, the roots of democracy grow dry." Newsome argues that over the past forty years, intentionally or otherwise, that withering of democratic involvement in education, both nationally and locally, is what parliament has allowed to happen and successive governments are now close to achieving.