If the Government resolved now in 1995 to return the powers to local authorities they would be handing them straight to Labour and the
Posted in General on 26. Jul, 2010
If the Government resolved now, in 1995, to return the powers to local authorities, they would be handing them straight to Labour and the Lib Dems, empowering the very people they have laboured to make impotent. So even if the Conservatives come to realise their disastrous constitutional error, they are unlikely to do anything about it After years of warnings, it is too late. The lack of strong local Tory parties will contribute, one day, to a lack of Tory MPs.Is there anything the Conservatives can now do about this? The dramatic thing would be to come clean, admit that the Tory failure to nurture and protect local democracy in this country has been a disastrous mistake, and try, even now, to reverse it.Yet here our destructive dynamic returns. All parties need their local workers and their local bases, and the Conservatives are now losing both Members have flooded out Councils have been voted out. They have allowed Labour to establish political leadership in target seats across their heartland territory. After years of centralist politics, they have ended up with a grotesquely over-centralised party, whose local roots are being grubbed up. This is protest-vote stuff which doesn’t have any consequences for a proper election.I predict that the shallowness and danger of this view will be demonstrated over the next couple of years so visibly that even the most blinkered cabinet ministers will be forced to abjure it.
The logical end point would be a system of local government which had almost no power and almost no Tory councillors – and that is just about where we are today.There are Conservative theorists who will ask, so what? Scotland’s gone Now Wales is gone. Labour, smashed at national level, retreated to its local bastions. She followed in remorseless pursuit, abolishing the GLC, introducing ever tighter spending controls and a stream of changes in education, training, housing and much else.Whatever the justification for this act or that, the cumulative effect has been to make local democracy matter much less. How many inhabitants of those councils which changed hands this week will notice a real difference over the next 12 months? That is the real answer to those ministers who whinge that voters fail to treat these elections as serious events.The public was merely following the centralist obsession of the Thatcher and Major governments.
If they didn’t take local democracy seriously – and since 1979 there have been more than 150 Acts of Parliament reducing the powers of local authorities – then why should those “discounted” local voters?The destructive dynamic is obvious. As central government takes powers from the local level, encouraging voters to treat local elections as mere opinion polls (and, more positively, a weak defence against the growth of centralised power), so local authorities fall ever more dramatically into the hands of opposition parties So the Tory centre takes more power away And so on. Whether it was Labour and the grammar schools, or the Tories and competitive tendering, successive cabinets crushed local autonomies without a backward glance.This tendency became much sharper under Margaret Thatcher. There is a dramatic constitutional dynamic at work in Britain which has produced its most extreme consequence this week.The lack of a planned and balanced British constitution has been a problem for local government since the dawn of mass democracy. The party-politicisation of local politics, which reached its full flood after the Second World War, means that local councils under the control of Opposition parties are at the mercy of Westminster.
But there is a more serious story behind Thursday’s drama, which goes back many years. The Conservatives have walked with their eyes open into a constitutional trap. They have undermined local democracy and now, by doing so, have undermined themselves.When ministers complain that voters have allowed their anger about things that are nothing to do with these elections to overwhelm their local interests, they have a point. How many people went out into the heat on Thursday angry about tax rises, interest rates and job insecurity caused by vain ministerial struggles with the global economy – and then vented that anger on poor old Gladys Pippin CBE, who had done nothing worse than spend 20 years of her spare time trying to keep down local taxes and increase local security through her doughty service on the police committee? Unjust? Of course: all those hurt old faces at town hall counts across rural England told the story.