Most people don't care what their council does, as long as it keeps the streets clean and doesn't charge too much for any services.

They don't even bother, for the most part, to vote for anyone every four years.

Go along to most council meetings, or the few remaining committees that local authorities generally run by Cabinets, and you will see rows of empty chairs.

A few foamers turn up to shout abuse which makes them, if not the councillors, feel better but otherwise the prevailing emotion is apathy.

The idea of having a directly-elected mayor in Brighton and Hove, which is exciting the chattering classes, is to inject more interest into local government and for that reason alone I back it.

But it's becoming less likely that it will happen.

Only half the people polled by the council, and they were the interested minority, were in favour of the notion.

The council has said that in the forthcoming referendum it will not formally campaign for an elected mayor and it's hard to see who else will do the job.

On the other hand, there is a determined and forceful lobby in favour of the alternative, which could mean returning to the committee system which has run local government for the last century or more.

During that time, there has been a gradual erosion of the power of the council in Brighton. Many can recall when the police and magistrates courts were all in the town hall.

For good measure the council also ran the main utilities such as gas, electricity and water. It controlled the fire brigade and successively ran trams, trolleys and buses.

It controlled housing and education, as it does now. From the cradle to the grave, you could be under civic control.

Some of these services have gone to other bodies such as health trusts and Sussex Police Authority. Others, like the utilities, have been privatised.

While the council has the odd representative on the public organisations, it has no control at all over the rest.

Yet the question I pose is whether they are any worse run than when there was local democratic control.

The answer is almost certainly not. While councillors like to think they run the show, in practice most day-to-day decisions are made by professional officers and always have been.

Even major changes are often proposed by officials but dressed up so elected representatives think they have had an input.

What's more, whole swathes of municipal enterprise, such as street sweeping and leisure, are now run by private firms.

The best way of managing public services is a kind of benevolent dictatorship. The problem is to find the right kind of despots and to ensure, through checks and balances, they remain benign.

It could be achieved through the elected mayor system with careful planning and the signs are so far encouraging in London, where Ken Livingstone has not proved to be the ogre some feared.

Someone once said a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Normally the more often a decision is considered by councillors, the worse the eventual outcome often is.

Any form of new committees adopted by cities such as Brighton and Hove will be in danger of combining the worst of the old with the worst of the new; procrastination and waffle rather than dynamic democracy.

Whichever system is adopted, the public and the press together can form an effective check on excesses.

And we will have to accept there will be defects in it. Democracy is a highly imperfect system, but it's so much better than the rest.