Local democracy: sham elections

A little while ago, I was asked to look at a transport policy for the Homeland Party with a particular emphasis on local politics. I can’t say I was the most qualified person to look into that since I’m far out of touch. I have very little recent experience of public transport, and having lived out in the sticks for a few years, it’s not an issue that especially presses on me.

It’s also difficult since I know very little about local politics. I only really have one requirement of my local council and that’s to collect the bins, which they do without any fuss. As such, I have no real cause to get involved. My local government largely fulfils my main personal requirement of government, which is to stay out of the way and leave me alone.

Were it that I lived in York, my nearest city, I might have more to say, with them constantly digging up roads, causing traffic and ramping up parking charges. All this has simply caused me to stop going there, which is apparently what they actually want to happen. If I do go into town, I use the park and ride, which is clean, quick and safe. York works well as a pedestrianised town centre, and it needs to be to cope with the vast foot traffic of tourists.

The real villain in York is not the council though. It’s the university, which is ever expanding, putting bums on seats and passing the externalities on to the local area. Thanks to houses being turned into student HMOs, even people who work at the university cannot afford to live in York. In the UK, local councils have very limited direct influence over the running of universities. Perhaps that needs to change.

On the whole, I think local government where I live does a reasonable job. The local NHS is pretty good too. My recent experiences of it have been as good as you could possibly expect even from a private service. This is partly why there is so little interest in local government and local elections. There’s no real pressing need for most people to get involved.

As such, shire politics tends to attract a certain breed of meddlesome prodnose, or those doing the groundwork for a more ambitious political career. The sort of people who approve of meddling schemes such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and Low Emission Zones etc.

I think, though, I might have more to say about local politics if I lived in my hometown of Bradford. Bradford has suffered heavily over the years, largely at the hands of successive bad administrations.

First came the parking restrictions that led to an out of town retail park on the edge of the city, driving foot traffic away from town. Then came a chain of stalled regeneration projects that gutted the city of its vitality. A lot of that regeneration is starting to bear fruit in terms of how the city looks, but the town centre community that used to exist has gone. It’s cleaner and more modern now, but a lot of the history has been swept away.

The one issue that really seems to plague the city is congestion. Most journeys across the city take no more than half an hour except for rush hour when just about every main artery and back lane is gridlocked. The bottom line is there are more cars on the road than the city was ever designed to cope with. Everybody now drives their kids to school even when they live locally. You could attempt to displace the traffic by putting on more buses, but nobody would use them. Even when the buses were good they were infrequent, late and dirty. Now they’re even less frequent, and not especially safe. I wouldn’t want to hang around Bradford interchange in the dark either.

As such, there is plenty to get stuck into in terms of local politics. It’s all relative to where you live. I’m not surprised there wasn’t a peep of protest when North Yorkshire councils were amalgamated because things work just well enough here for people not to care about local politics.

That said, I do care about what goes on in my locality. I’m not particularly happy that my little village is going to double in size with the granting of planning permission for new houses. I object to the erosion of village life but that’s going to vanish forever thanks to mass immigration. I also don’t think residents have the right to tell the landowner what he can do with it since the government we elected has made it perfectly clear that there’s no money to be made in farming it.

What does rather piss me off is the Yorkshire Green national grid infrastructure for Net Zero. Nothing was ever going to stop that. Mr Miliband has committed to paving over the Vale of York with solar panels, and we don’t get a say in that. I expect we will also see battery storage parks popping up all over the countryside. But again, the opinion of the plebs who live here doesn’t have much bearing on that. With local government becoming regional development quangos, local democracy is largely superfluous.

In fact, most of the worst things happening in local politics across the country are either to do with mass immigration or Net Zero. We’re losing more of the countryside all the time to new housing as the natives seek to get as far away form foreign occupied cities as possible. Hamlets become villages, villages become towns and towns become cities. Meanwhile, our landscapes are turned over to Miliband’s solar fetish.

What mass immigration and Net Zero have in common is that both are happening without our consent, and local democracy is largely meaningless. Most of what is being done is being inflicted on us by central government, and local government only really gets to guild the lily.

More often than not, initiatives such as LTNs and ULEZ type schemes are the brainchild of quangos and state-funded NGOs, and their implementation is profoundly undemocratic. In many cases, implementation is outright fraudulent, where councils have ducked proper consultation, ignored findings and even manufactured local consent. There is often little that can be done at the local level to oppose them, and responsibility for infrastructure is moving away from councils and towards regional super authorities and notionally elected mayors.

This is especially true of Wales, where several competences have been “devolved”, where somehow it’s democratically legitimate for Cardiff to impose 20mph speed limits on the rest of Wales. This is widely hated, called for by no-one and is an example of devolved government displacement activity.

With road congestion we often find congestion levels are rising because traffic lanes have been taken away from cars and vans and given to buses, taxis, and cyclists and remain largely unused. Cycle lane infrastructure is often unused because it is not properly maintained, leading to frequent punctures from debris and broken glass. We could halve pollution at a stroke we if we gave the lanes back to cars and vans to get traffic moving again but councils have their centrally planned quotas and statutory obligations to meet.

We also find that such centrally planned schemes often ignore local geography. There is an obvious role for cycling in relatively flat cities like York and Cambridge, but the obligations for cycling infrastructure placed on hilly cities like Bradford and Sheffield make no sense at all. Again, though, local realities come second to implementing statutory obligations and central agendas. Local councillors have become passive spectators, many of whom are so marinated in the same dogma, wouldn’t act even if they could.

The bottom line is that it’s hard to get anyone to engage in local politics when most largely assume, quite correctly, that local democracy is a sham. Successive governments have gradually dismantled it and Labour is set to pull the plug on whatever’s left of it.

On that basis, it’s hard to see yesterday’s election results as anything other than an opinion poll on the establishment parties. Reform have swept the boards but it’s hard to imagine this having a tangible effect on anything. I rather imagine it will make local politics function rather less well in some cases, in that long-standing and dedicated councillors of all parties will have been ejected in favour of unvetted novices with no concept of what it entails, and no real urge to put the work in.

I don’t really recall any time in my life when local politics was ever taken all that seriously. This, ultimately, is why sectarian influences have been so able to capture local politics. The bar to win has never been lower and you win by turning up. On that basis we have corrupt ethnic mafias running our cities, running city affairs in the interests of their ethnic group, and directing public contracts to their friends. This is why Oldham council spends more time debating Gaza than the grooming epidemic. Overpaid council CEOs see to the actual running of things and meeting statutory obligations.

If ever we want meaningful local politics, we need to break up councils, free them of top-down agendas and give them constitutional powers of their own. If the role of councillor has no serious power and very little prestige or bragging rights, you cannot expect serious people to want to do the job or take local politics seriously. At present, local elections are little more than an elaborate voting ritual to maintain the illusion of democracy.