Cullingworth doesn't want "modern community leadership" but a little bit of old-fashioned service would go amiss.

An assortment of the great and the good have launched something called 21st Century Councillor. This grouping - doubtless well rewarded with dollops of our taxes - suggest that tomorrow's local Councillor will be a:

"... supported, confident, talented and professional community leader."

Now I have no problem with Councillors being confident and talented and I haven't the foggiest what the bureaucrats mean by "supported" but I have my doubts about the remainder. In truth I believe the assumptions that underlie the observation to be dangerously wrong.

Being a local councillor is not a profession (there isn't yet a chartered institute of councillors although I don't doubt the LGA, LGIU, IDeA, NLGN, LACORS and assorted other well-padded London-based local government organisations have it all planned) and local councillors are not elected to provide "community leadership" we are elected to represent the residents of our ward - and I interpret that as meaning to serve their interests not to lead them.

However, as most decision-making power was removed from local councillors by Blair's local government "modernisation", the great and the good have been scrabbling around looking for some kind of role for all us pesky backbenchers. And the solution - promoted by that most New Labour of organisations the New Local Government Network under my pleasingly former MP Chris Leslie - has been the idea of councillors as Community Leaders.

The problem is that places like Cullingworth really don't want community leadership - especially from community leaders who have the role of telling them why the local council, at the behest of some bureaucrat down in London, is imposing something that isn't either needed or wanted. What villagers here desire is a little bit of response from the council, the health service, the police, the Environment Agency and, for that matter, all the myriad other bureaucratic institutions that blight the lives of ordinary folk. And because they don't get that attention most of the time, the councillor's job is to argue, insist, cajole, badger, shout and generally get up the noses of local officialdom in the hope that they will actually listen to local people and act on what they hear.

Where I come from that's not "community leadership" it's service.