Springtime in Yorkshire and time for talk of revolution in the polling booth

There will be no political earthquakes on Thursday, just a few disgruntled voters voicing their irritation and annoyance at the Westminster parties. And it will be a few.

“But spring in England is like a prolonged adolescence, stumbling, sweet and slow, a thing of infinitesimal shades, false starts, expectations, deferred hopes, and final showers of glory.” Laurie Lee

England has local elections this week. To be accurate, about half of England has local elections this week. Apart from Doncaster, which will elect a mayor, all of England’s metropolitan areas as well as London will not be voting. There are, in addition, a bunch of shire counties with cancelled elections because they are about to be replaced with new (and largely unwanted) unitary councils. Nevertheless, a certain sort of pundit sets about to explain how monumentally important the local elections are going to be, how there is a fin de siècle feeling about England today, and how this is palpably different from other times. Here’s Aris Rousinnos, sounding like he’s writing from the beach, gushing about just this crisis:

“Today, the country is in an unhappy state, the air heavy with the pressure of a storm about to break. Mild-mannered Telegraph columnists write anxious premonitions of approaching civil war, while the nation’s second city slips beneath the basic expectations of First World governance. Civil war may be unlikely, but that the very idea can be seriously entertained by credible people demonstrates a growing fissure entering British life, one which will take serious political reform to avert disaster: requiring a capacity, and appetite to undertake that the Government does not appear to possess.”

Roussinos goes on to describe, in the manner of a 1960s foreign correspondent reporting from a Latin American dictatorship gripped by the Castro-ist fervour of leftist revolution, how “torn between a controlled explosion now, or an uncontrolled one later, the governing party can neither reveal the full extent of the horror nor long actively suppress it”. We are regaled with apocalyptic talk of democratic collapse and how the elections are “a way-station on the road to a different England — one way or another”.

Roussinos is focused on the North of England where he tells us democratic collapse, nascent civil war and angry voters combine to make this emerging apocalypse. I’m sat here in the Spring sunshine rather than the bar in Valencia I imagine is the locale for Rousinnos’s screed, and I feel the need to say that his febrile commentary really doesn’t reflect what’s happening here in Yorkshire. There will be no political earthquakes on Thursday, just a few disgruntled voters using the fact that they consider local elections unimportant to focus their irritation and annoyance on the Westminster Parties and especially Labour. And it will be a few because that’s all that’s needed for these imagined earthquakes to occur.

Back in 2021 when this set of local elections were last held, the turnout was around 35% meaning that six or seven out of every ten people who had a vote didn’t bother to use that vote. This isn’t a surprise because voter turnout in local elections is always lower than for general elections (and, as we saw in 2016, referendums). Most people don’t believe, probably with good cause, that their vote makes a great deal of difference to the service they receive from their local council. So why bother.

The people who do vote will overwhelmingly do so in line with their views on national politics and many of them will see it as the opportunity to aim a well-earned kick at the big parties. Again this isn’t a new phenomenon and is something that has sustained Nigel Farage’s political career, allowed the festering boil of Green politics to persist, and boosted the Lib Dems and assorted independents. While people like Roussinos will write of falling skies and the collapse of civilisation as we know it, the reality is that most people on Thursday will go about their regular business without much change.

It’ll be sunny too here in Yorkshire, so some folk will sneak a pint or two in a beer garden or else pop into the Co-op for a pack of four cold lagers and a bottle of white wine to enjoy on their own patio. No second thoughts will be given to there being an election on, there’ll be no discussion of “systemic reform in the service of national restoration”, and, for all that Roussinos may wish it so, sitting in the sunshine will get more attention because there are no “rebellious people” just regular English men and women doing what they do on a nice Spring Thursday.

I’m not going to make election predictions other than that Tories and Labour will do badly, and Reform, Lib Dems and Greens (plus a mish-mash of independents) will be smiling come Friday evening. Assorted polemics will get written about what this means for Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. There’ll be a new bunch of youthful journalists buying train tickets to Doncaster, Grimsby or Hull, where they’ll vox pop unsuspecting and mostly bemused locals who didn’t vote and, even the few who did, don’t really care much about what it all means for politics down in SW1. What they probably do want, but won’t get, is some better shops on the high street, the roads fixing up, a little less crime and anti-social behaviour, and for the local hospital to be less of a war zone. But the youthful journalists don’t care about this because their audience in London don’t care about it so they want to report what it all means for the Big Beasts of Westminster not how to make the lives of ordinary Northerners better.

After a week or so, including more articles written in the style of old school foreign correspondents by men who’ve rarely, if ever, visited the North, everything will calm down. The punditry will move on to whatever is the latest hook for their chosen polemical shtick - Israel or Ukraine or trade deals or the bad behaviour of celebrities. Local government in England will return to its prior crumbling state, unable to do the basics of local governance and service because there’s no money, but plagued by politics and a national lobby that refuses to tell government the truth out of fear that its leaders won’t get their knighthoods and peerages. Local elections ought to be about what happens in a given place but in England, almost uniquely, local government now has almost no real authority merely acting as an agent for badly designed entitlements promised by vote-scraping politicians in London.

Still, it will be sunny on Thursday. I will enjoy that. There is no revolution brewing in England, not even in the North. Most people think we are governed by the stupid and self-serving but that’s neither new nor unexpected. It is probably true that England needs that “systemic reform in the service of national restoration” but this should be understood as simply getting a better government not as some great upheaval tearing down the institutions and constitution of Britain. It is more about weed free pavements, fewer potholes, nicer parks and discipline in schools than it is about any “bottom-up nationalist” waves and other tommyrot from the cognoscenti of a new right compromised by “America Brain” and the embracing of identity politics.