Repost of my thoughts on local elections published the last time around - 12 months ago. Very little seems to have changed.
Local elections take place in England on Thursday. Ostensibly, we are electing people to lead local councils. The fact is it doesn't matter much who is elected - the central government dictates what it wants most of the money spent on, so that local councils end up deliberating the most minor details (should X pub be allowed to open until 1am on Friday nights? Should we resurface the high street?...), powerless even to do anything much about astronomical council tax rates.
What then is the meaning of these elections? Today's FT carries a
piece by James Blitz announcing that "Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, will launch on Tuesday a desperate bid to avert a serious setback for his Labour party in this Thursday’s local elections, seeking to draw a line under a week of disastrous news stories for the British government."
The news stories in question concern John Prescott's office romance and the thousand foreign criminals who were released instead of being considered for deportation, for which Home Secretary Charles Clarke ("an important cabinet ally [for Blair]"
another FT story reminds us) has shouldered the blame.
It is surely no accident that the foreign-prisoner story broke when it did. Gordon Brown's allies have determined to make the local elections into an embarrassment for Blair and his allies, hoping to push him towards an early resignation. (On a slight tangent, we might wonder why the media become so astonished and outraged by foreign criminals reoffending, while British criminals' reoffending rates are unremarkable. In
this week's Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins put it down to thinly disguised racism. Perhaps, but I think it has as much to do with Brown allies being able to generate a media controversy through intelligent briefing of the newspapers).
All clear enough, but what are Joe and Jo Public to do? Should they participate in this undemocratic charade, and allow the elections to become an instrument of a disagreement within the ruling party, or refuse to legitimise this nonsense, and be told by the media that low turn-out rates prove that Pop Idol is more important to people than politics? (Quite differently, politics matters to people, but the majority have freed themselves of the illusion that it happens in the House of Commons, or that elections have anything to do with it - an affliction which is increasingly confined to the wealthiest 20% of the population, and even many of them are beginning to wonder).
We need to develop an alternative means of political expression. The old modes are outdated, and have largely been hijacked by a vain few who will collude with anyone who stuffs their pockets and keeps the dream of celebrity alive for them. This is just as true of left politics, which has barely changed at all since 1789 in terms of the technology of popular expression, and in this country has suffered terribly at the hands of George Galloway's RESPECT Coalition, which drained the StopTheWar campaign of all its vitality. These stale forms need some rethinking if we are to regain the democracy and liberty which - in principle - our society holds so dear.
