Britain is weird. This coming year its unelected, hereditary head of state will celebrate seven full and uninterrupted decades of, well, doing whatever it is that unelected hereditary heads of state do.

The Queen will mark her Platinum Jubilee by declaring that from now on some towns are – for completely stupid reasons – to be called cities and that some mayors and provosts can append lord to their title.

Last week her government in London announced a list of settlements applying for a change in their entirely arbitrary civic status.

This is supposed to be a good thing. Towns which fancy being cities include storied St Andrews, Dumfries, Dunfermline, Greenock, Oban, Ayr and Elgin and the, erm, perhaps less historic Livingston.

I only mention this short list for the benefit of voters who might want to ask their councillors why they are wasting their efforts on this meaningless nonsense.

Sorry, this sounds mean-spirited. A contest for city status is usually seen as a fun distraction, a harmless enough little manifestation of British weirdness, sorry, eccentricity. And I suppose somebody will pop along in a moment to argue that city status will be a boost for tourism. Sure, maybe, but no.

Apart from anything else these periodic royal to-dos elevating towns to cities must baffle our fellow Europeans. After all, most of them get by without just the one word for both town and city, the latter usually being translated as a big version of the former.

Americans at least make a bit more sense: when they say cities they mean settlements with self-government. And that of course is not the case for any of the towns in Britain (or her last remaining imperial possessions) vying to be cities.

New town Livvy might be about to become a tourist Mecca with city status – thanks to Her Maj – but it is not going to be deemed fit to run its own street cleaning or make its own planning decisions. That will still be up to West Lothian Council.

For me, this is the rub. All the places in Scotland which want to be cities are great towns but cannot run any of their own affairs.

Residents, I am sure, will be quick to point out that these communities are not perfect. And that is certainly true. And some are far more prosperous and successful than others. But these are strong, distinct communities.

Me? I think we should be celebrating them as towns, and thinking about how we restore local democracy, rather than just civic pride, in Scotland.

Eyes will roll at the prospect of another round of local government reform. There is not much appetite for changing council borders in Scotland. Fair enough.

But that does not mean we should not be looking at how to empower communities, especially towns.

In recent years there has been a real focus on cities, on large conurbations as engines of economic activity, education and creativity. This comes with funding, for example, for city region growth funds.

Planners will say that makes sense. And I am sure they have a point. But are we at risk of leaving towns and villages behind? We might be.

Take housing. There was a time when any picture editor wanting a stock picture of poverty – substandard homes, basically – would dispatch a photographer to a Glasgow council scheme. Now they would aim for a former pit village in the central belt.

Just before Christmas I was in the Falkirk Braes, where old local authority homes, from the outside, look stout.

Inside, residents - including young children and the elderly - were freezing. Why? Doors and windows had not been replaced for decades and heating systems were ill-suited and terrifyingly expensive, and not just for the many residents who depend on stingy welfare payments.

On the last Saturday before Christmas distressed and distraught residents picketed the local authority HQ. There were people there whose electricity bills were hitting £150 a week. Power executives told the local MP that some council house residents were using as much electricity as mansions with heated pools. These homes are just not fit for the 21st century.

Campaigners have bandied together to form a group called Falkirk’s Forgotten Villages. They are making life very difficult for council chiefs. They might be cold in the Braes, but they have real community spirit.

But the name of their campaign has real resonance. Across Europe, there are small towns and villages which are ‘forgotten', perhaps because a local employer closed or simply because young people are sucked in to bigger cities and never come back.

In Spain, Greece and Croatia, for example, local authorities have looked to Scotland - of all places - for lessons in preserving remote communities.

They, of course, are thinking about efforts in the Highlands and Islands, such as community ownerships, the UHI and H&I Development and air and ferry subsidies. Northern Scots often scoff at such interest, pointing out that swathes of their region are still depopulating. But Scotland, by international standards, looks like a relative success.

Take Inverness. It is now practically a boom town, sorry boom city. (The Highland capital got a status upgrade – but no powers – a while back. Indeed, Highland Council is now bidding for Inverness’s provost to become a “lord” as part of Jubilee celebrations).

We really do have “forgotten" towns and villages in the lowlands. We could waste our time in royal fripperies. Or we could start to champion these places and give voice and power to those that live there. That might mean better local democracy, more tenant control of public housing, or just better buses. But should it involve pinning our hopes on arbitrary, royal whims about meaningless civic status?

Britain is weird. But we can choose not to be.

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