THE funniest things are happening up at Chiltern District Council's seat of power in Amersham.

It seems as though everything is going a bit 'parliamentary'.

First the council's committee structure gets booted out of the window by the government's Local Government Act. And then councillors get to be 'portfolio holders' and sit on 'executive' and 'scrutiny' committees.

Now all this is fine up at Westminster where the real power lies but do we really need these sort of titles and political buzz words at dear old Chiltern?

In short, no we don't. It just sounds silly.

One of the saddest things about this whole overhaul of the council is that some of its members are clearly embarrassed about this new council language.

At a meeting of Chiltern's scrutiny committee this week the chairman kept on referring to 'backbenchers'.

I sat in the public gallery bemused. Why on earth were they all talking about backbenchers like Amersham was Britain's new Westminster and Chiltern district councillors were our new MPs?

It turns out Chiltern backbenchers are those councillors that do not belong to the executive or scrutiny committees but I just knew someone was going to take exception to this phraseology.

I was hardly surprised when Cllr Peter Lole (Con, Austenwood, Chalfont St Peter) interrupted to say: "I hope this is a phrase we can stop using. Backbencher is a phrase used in the Houses of Parliament."

Cllr Lole was clearly rattled and rightly so.

Chiltern District Council is just that a district council.

The Government may come up with all these stupid half-baked ideas to "revitalise" local democracy but this sort of approach isn't going to cut any ice.

With the scrapping of the traditional expenses system for reimbursing councillors for financial costs we are well on the way to having fully paid, full time and professional local representatives.

But lets not get the issues confused here. Among other things, district councils deal with planning issues, parking charges, refuse collection and council tax precepts. They do not set the defence budget, pensions payments or run the NHS.

But perhaps with the way things are going in this country we should put Chiltern in charge of the UK. Couldn't get any worse could it?