What is David Cameron’s political philosophy? Some people wonder if he has one, pointing to his work as a PR man. Yet in among his matching of Labour spending commitments and the talk of “sharing the proceeds of growth”, there is an important idea…

At its core, Mr Cameron’s philosophy is a belief in bottom-up solutions rather than top-down ones. This is visible in his preference for “demand-led”, rather than civil-service led, spending of international aid money and in his preference for localism in public services. It is especially in visible the speech he gave yesterday advocating decentralising government computing procurement.

I’m yet to see the poster barring Alistair Darling from entering pubs, but on a visit today to a Wetherspoon pub I had a pint of Welton’s Casablanca beer. It is a real ale brewed in Horsham and its marketing at the pump is distinctly hostile to the Prime Minister.

The branding complains about Gordon Brown and his government’s handling of Northern Rock; his dithering over an election last autumn; his “boom and bust”, high tax and spend policies; the lack of an EU treaty referendum; and the ceding of power “to dictators in Brussels”.

The tragedy is that this sort of embryonic competition is far from the norm. The government has failed to push forward the idea, or indeed engage in any profound thinking about the rail network, perhaps because it was so badly burnt by its misguided nationalisation of Railtrack. The result is that a company that wants to compete on the network finds itself needlessly bogged down by complex rules, uncertainty and tedious consultation processes.

Fortunately, the government has shown little enthusiasm for the hackneyed argument that trains and track should be vertically integrated. That model, which other countries have been abandoning, would truly have the effect of killing off whatever little competition we have. But the government, by failing to be an enthusiastic advocate of competing services, has presided over a system mired by monopoly.

The Conservative plan, reported by Andrew Pierce in today’s Daily Telegraph, to take failing schools out of the grips of local authorities would hugely benefit pupils stuck at England’s worst-performing schools. The model is similar to the charter schools system operating with success in parts of the United States - and, needless to say, with the opposition of some in the educational establishment.

Back in 2002, Reason magazine covered the attempt by the San Francisco School Board to take back control of a charter school, Edison Charter Academy. The parents, who previously had been failed by school board control, were not willing to let the board ruin their children’s education again. They mounted a campaign against the board, and brought their children to meetings holding “Save Our School” signs… Thankfully, in their fight with the school board, the parents won.

Council tax is not just wrong because it is too high, however. It is wrong in principle, too. Those who spend their money on conspicuous consumption normally pay tax only once on their spending (in the form of VAT and duties at the time of purchase). Meanwhile, those who choose to save in property are taxed repeatedly each and every year.

This relentless, yearly tax means that many elderly people, emotionally attached to homes where they have lived for decades, find themselves in difficult financial circumstances. Entrepreneurial individuals establishing new businesses, not yet bringing in much income, can find council tax demands a nightmare.

Incidentally, for a number of years I had Google as my web browser’s homepage. With the addition of a Google search box in the top-right hand corner of the browser window, that’s no longer necessary. This is what my homepage looks like these days:

To use the licence fee to take sports rights against a purely commercial broadcaster like ITV is a horrendous waste of money. It is unfair because it uses taxpayer funding to force up prices and out-compete the private sector. Moreover, despite the BBC spending a reported £150 million for the five-year deal, the BBC will provide no additional public benefit, broadcasting a sport that has previously been available, free of charge, to every household in Britain.

“You’ll be hard-pressed to find a chief executive who’s on less than £100,000,” [Labour MP Martin Salter] says.The comparison shows the vanity and delusion of backbench MPs. The sort of chief executives to which Mr Salter refers generally manage thousands of employees and are generating significant wealth, jobs and prosperity.

An MP, conversely, has only two or three staff, is merely one of 646 unimportant but egotistical managers sitting in the House of Commons, and rarely achieves much if anything to make Britain a better place.

Furthermore, I argue that contempt towards politicians is a positive thing for the economy, helping encourage people away from putting their trust in political solutions to society’s problems.