Earlier this week David Cameron launched a policy green paper entitled “Control Shift – Returning Power to Local Communities”. According to the party website this sets out “a series of policies that will see powers transferred from the central state to local people and local institutions”.

If true, this is surely very welcome: it is indeed quite right that power in Britain is far too centralised, and that many decisions would be very much more effectively and democratically made closer to the people they affect.

But does the Conservative party actually really believe this? They have started to talk of localism more in recent years, but the test is in their deeds, not their words.

The history is not promising: the last Conservative government famously centralised all sorts of elements of power, from abolishing regional government in London to, for example, introducing national control of local taxation (rate-capping).

Cameron Conservatives of course claim that the party has changed radically since those days, and it’s not fair to judge them today on actions of two decades ago.

Fair enough. So are they are now proposing to, say, remove central control of local taxation?

Hardly. In fact on the contrary, they seem to believe that the level of local taxation should not just operate within nationally-set parameters, as Mrs Thatcher thought, but in fact have its actual level set by the national tier. Here is George Osborne making a national pledge about the level of every Council in the country at their party’s autumn conference last year. Mr Cameron himself confirmed the pledge again at Christmas.

They are not crude enough to propose formally removing this power from local authorities, but make it very clear that they expect Councils to fall in line, and when local authorities receive the vast majority of their funding not through local taxation but in a grant from central government – a system Cameron does not appear to be proposing to change – and are regulated and inspected to the nth degree, then central government can have overwhelming influence on what Councils actually do.

Quite simply, you cannot be taken remotely seriously as actually believing in decentralisation of power, while simultaneously making policies to set every Town Hall’s Council Tax from the centre.

Not everything they suggest in their paper is itself a bad idea: some of their proposals might, at the relative margins, improve local Councils’ control of their local area.

But they do not address the real, big questions about greater local control. Will their proposals give local people greater control over, say, their education and health services? They will not. Above all, they make no proposal to give local communities greater control of their finances, and without control of the money, much of their talk of empowering local communities is just playing with shadows.

The truth is that, away from the margins, at heart the Conservatives fundamentally believe that real power belongs uniquely in Whitehall. In their minds, there is simply something special about the national level.

In the twenty first century, this is simply wrong. Certainly many things are best done at the national level. But others are best done locally – and others best done at a global or European level.

So while the Cameron Conservatives might talk some of the talk about local empowerment, the reality is that when it comes down to it, this idea doesn’t even run as far as their own policy proposals while in opposition. Why on earth would we think that when in government - where the temptations are much greater - they would reverse some of the centralisation that they themselves introduced last time?