Predictions for the 7th May elections in England (the 'don't vote, it only encourages them' edition)

It is one of those purposeless performances, an exercise in democracy where the people elected have no real power beyond the ability to inflate themselves into grand poo-bahs of uselessness.

“So let’s look at our typical idiots. Round here they’re probably in their thirties or forties, employed at a middle management level in business and industry. They worry about how well their kids do at school, they concern themselves with making their family safe, they grumble a bit about paying taxes but have enough cash afterwards for it not to really matter. Such folk are ordinary, hard-working and inherently conservative. But they also see little or no link between the act of voting in a politician from one party or another and the significant things in their lives.”

It is one of those purposeless performances, an exercise in democracy where the people elected have no real power beyond the ability to inflate themselves into grand poo-bahs of uselessness. Most of the population, of course, wised up to this pointlessness some while ago, but the political classes and their media pals will treat it as if what happens on the first Thursday in May is of some significance to the public. What once involved the choosing of men and women to make real decisions about their town or rural area is now little more than a national test of political virility. And not a very good one.

Local government in England is a joke. Not because councils do unimportant or insignificant things but because they really don’t have any say over what they do. Rest assured that nobody standing for election on the 7th May will mention the utter pointlessness of their role and their inability to do anything much to change or improve services in their ward. Instead you’ll get a nice shiny leaflet, probably delivered through your door by a distribution company rather than a volunteer, filled with promises to fight housing developments, fill in potholes, end waste and reduce council tax. Accompanied by badly posed pictures and, often, a bar chart or reference to a “shock poll”. In the more enthusiastic places a few posters will get erected and, very occasionally, polling stations will be manned by volunteers telling for one or other political party.

Local government in England is also broke. Not because local councils and council officers are corrupt incompetents but because national government has mandated entitlements and issued duties without providing councils with the means to fund those duties and entitlements. But despite this, English local government, and its national representative body, the Local Government Association, chooses to ignore this truth for reasons that almost entirely escape me. Is it because the LGA’s bosses rather enjoy those snuggly little meetings with ministers and civil servants? Maybe the gentle sound of gongs calms their rage at the manner in which successive national governments have treated local councils? Or perhaps the endless game of setting different parts of local government against each other means rural versus urban, districts versus counties and town versus city take precedence over facing the real enemy of good local government, Whitehall and Westminster?

I will make a few predictions about the English council elections on 7th May this year. The first is that about two-thirds of voters won’t bother voting, preferring a day at work, a beer in the garden of their local, or an evening binging the latest Netflix murder series. And don’t start shouting about how this is terrible, calling for compulsory voting, and despairing of people who don’t vote. People are rational (well most of them, some of the time at least) and not voting in local council elections is an entirely sensible thing to do. This is because of my second prediction: the outcome of the elections in your local area won’t make the slightest jot of difference to the services you receive, or these days no longer receive, from your council.

Remember what we said earlier: national government has mandated entitlements and issued duties to councils without providing councils with the means to fund those duties and entitlements. So the things we’d like the council to get on with aren’t going to happen (litter picking, street sweeping, nice hanging baskets on the high street, a new playground for the park). Not because councillors don’t want to do these things but because at each local budget another chunk of money gets shifted from locally funded visible services to nationally mandated entitlements to care and support.

My third prediction is that all the analysis of election results in England will be about what it means for the leaders of national parties. Is Keir Starmer going to resign or are his Labour colleagues going to dump him? Are the Conservatives finished? Is Nigel Farage sailing serenely towards Number 10 or has his enterprise been holed below the waterline? And what about the dancing tit whisperer, Zack Polanski? Is his rag bag of Islamists, communists and a few remaining environmentalists headed for power? Now I guess all this does matter but it ignores how the asset-stripping of local government to fund care services means that provincial England struggles on with infrastructure built by our Victorian and Edwardian forebears. And that’s crumbling away for lack of cash to keep it.

The elections in England on the 7th May are futile, little more than a grand and expensive opinion poll (and not a very good one) in which lots of people are chosen for a modestly remunerated sinecure by, at best, 15 or 20% of the local voters. I was a local councillor for 24 years and probably did some good during those years. But I remember my father, a councillor for even longer, saying how the job became less and less purposeful and more and more political. My Dad would talk about how Tory majority Beckenham Urban District would elect a Labour councillor to chair one committee because they considered him the best person for that job. I also recall Syd Collard, old school, Tory-hating Labour councillor in Bradford saying again and again that there was now no point in being a councillor because you couldn’t do anything.

As councillors got more and more pointless, the role became more and more political. Councils acquired political groups with chief whips, voting at council meetings, even little area committees, was done on whipped political lines, and hanging over everything was the malign shadow of elections and another round of politicking. As we watch the parties launch their campaigns for the coming local elections, we see national politics not local issues, national concerns not the betterment of places, and a competition between meaningless promises about planning, council tax and the inevitable potholes. None of the parties will direct our attention to the embarrassing nudity of England’s local councils. They have no clothes on but everyone playing the election game this May will ignore this and promise instead a different style of illusory clothing under their party’s leadership.

I will vote. I’ve always voted. I know who I will vote for too and will be pleased when - if - those people win. But I also know that the quality and range of visible services - the things most people think we have a local council to provide - will continue to deteriorate. Organised street cleaning will be replaced by volunteers running community litter picks. Colourful park planting will be replaced by ‘rewilding’ that’s sold as eco-friendly but is, in truth, just a way to save some money. And the frequency of bin collections will fall and the availability of housing waste sites will drop while councillors have their picture taken calling for action on fly-tipping. Cracked pavements, crumbling roads, shuttered youth and community centres, and ever more expensive parking, all done so the council can stagger through another year with more old people needing care, more kids with special needs at school and more families arriving at the council’s door in need of a home.

Your council simply doesn’t have the money to do the things you want it to do but the political parties don’t tell you this. Those party politicians prefer to lie, blaming other parties for the lack of cash for services, and dissemble by campaigning on issues like immigration, the NHS or wars in distant countries. And I understand this because whoever gets elected, whoever runs the councils, there is no way they can do what councils should be doing until national government takes its fingers out of its ears and fixes the problem with entitlements, duties and the financing of local government.