Trust in the political establishment is already at a dangerous low: Labour are playing a game they can only lose
Source - Daily Telegraph - 17/12/24
Justice delayed is justice denied, or so a long-established truism dictates.
But does the same go for democracy?
Yesterday, amid the trumpet fanfare of yet another local government shake-up in England (this one really will work and will embed the local government map for decades to come – promise!), there was much focus on the size of the proposed new single-tier authorities and how many existing district councils were for the chop. It was only later that the second shoe dropped and people started asking whether next May’s local elections were going to happen at all.
Annual spring elections are a familiar feature of the political calendar. No government at Westminster can rest on its laurels for long – even after securing a three-figure majority at the last general election – before it needs to start organising to fight the next tranche of local elections. It’s a healthy state of affairs, providing a more reliable indicator of voter satisfaction with the political parties than mere opinion polling.
But what’s this? It seems that those councils subject to reorganisation could have their elections postponed by up to two years. That’s a lot of areas, given the sweeping changes proposed by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner yesterday.
Twenty-one county councils and ten unitary authorities were due to be re-elected in less than five months’ time, and those for whom politics provides a fascination (not to mention those for whom it provides an income) were looking forward to seeing how voters would judge the Labour Party and its rivals. Would Reform make its much-heralded breakthrough? What would voters make of Kemi Badenoch’s first six months as Tory leader?
These questions and many others may not now be answered, at least not for a while. In one sense, you have to admire the startling, unprecedented efficiency of the Whitehall machine, moving from White Paper to reorganisation of councils within five months. That has certainly never happened before.
When the last reorganisation of local government happened in Scotland, there was a three-year gap between the initial White Paper setting out the case for reform and the elections to the new authorities. That didn’t stop elections to the outgoing regional councils being held in the interim. But those were different days with different priorities. Perhaps it is entirely plausible that the million complex decisions about boundaries, membership and powers of the new authorities will have been done and dusted by next May, making elections a moot point.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps local government is more complicated than that, and that while such large decisions are being mulled over by ministers, the little people for whom – at least ostensibly – local services are provided should continue to have their say in which party, if any, should be privileged with running existing authorities, irrespective of how long those authorities have got left.
We should be wary of indulging in conspiracy theories about this government’s machinations to prevent local people having a say at the ballot box. Local elections have been postponed in the past, after all, and for similar reasons. All we can say for certain is that it’s not a good look for any government – especially one, such as this, that has struggled to assert itself in the public mind as remotely competent – to avoid, for however justifiable a reason, the judgment of the voters.
A more confident administration would go ahead with next year’s elections in the certainty that, however advanced its plans to reshape the local government map, the new authorities will be nowhere near a launchable state, and therefore existing authorities should be able to seek a fresh mandate for however long they have left.
Even if ministers’ motives are entirely honourable, postponing elections looks and feels like a cynical move because it is clearly unnecessary and because the beneficiaries of such a development will be the governing party.
Trust in the political establishment is already at a dangerous low: can’t we avoid handing Reform yet another excuse for grievance, one they will exploit mercilessly? Is that really too much to ask of this government?
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