POLITICS
Is local politics too unimportant to be left to the politicians?
NOEL MALCOLM
One school of thought pretends that local elections offer a sort of national mega-opinion poll, which can immediately be 'projected' into the form of potential general election results. We may be hear- ing this line of argument from Labour spokesmen on Friday .morning, if the per- centages have moved in their direction. But it is an unconvincing argument at the best of times. The crucial issues do, after all, differ to some extent at local and national elections: people may vote for bus-stops and speed-limits in general elec- tions, but there are some national issues, notably defence, which play no real part at the local level. And the turn-out is miser- ably lower where council elections are concerned. The floating voters who make and break general elections will have spent Thursday evening quietly at anchor, moored to their armchairs and their televi- sion sets.
Another school of thought . dismisses government losses in mid-term local elec- tions in just the same way that one dis- counts the slashing of majorities and the losing of seats at parliamentary by- elections. We all take it for granted that governments do badly in by-elections; but we have only to start listing the reasons for this to see that they cannot be applied in any straightforward way to local govern- ment elections. Take the Complacency Factor, for example. Naturally, govern- ment supporters are less inclined to bother at by-elections, because their lot are safely in power anyway. But in Thursday's elec- tions the same factor should operate with Labour supporters in safe Labour areas: why bother to vote, given that two-thirds of the Labour majority is staying in place? The 'opinion poll' model and the 'par- liamentary by-election' argument are both mistaken, because they try to fit local elections too hastily into the straitjacket of national politics. The mechanics of voting at the local level are more complicated than that; and the range of national issues which impinge on local politics is both narrow and fluctuating.
Does this mean that local politics is too unimportant to be left to the politicians? The idea that national party politics should be kept out of local affairs is a surprisingly popular one, and many people still hanker for a golden age in which all local politi- cians were elected as independent indi- viduals. And yet it is difficult to look for long at almost any humdrum local issue without the division of opinion beginning to take shape along rudimentary party lines. In the City of Cambridge, for exam- ple, the great debate is about whether, and where, to build more car-parks. Those who support the building or digging of addition- al car-parks in the city centre are likely to be car-owning exhaust-emitting Thatcher- ite individualists; and those who favour 'park and ride' schemes on the outskirts of the town are showing a preference for benign socialist planning — the sort of planning that produces schemes which people will approve of in theory but never want to use in practice.
Conservatives are fond of pointing out that the imposition of national party lines on local politicians was started by Labour. In organisational terms this is true; the 1929 Labour Conference was the innova- tor, drawing up a set of rules for Labour groups on local councils which still operate in most areas. The last 50 years have seen a steady decline in the number of 'Indepen- dents' in local government, as they have been gobbled up by the mobilising and politicising of the major parties. But the Independents were often, in reality, crypto-Conservatives — local landowners, for example, who felt that they had suffi- cient ties of duty and loyalty in their areas not to need the ties of party allegiance.
In the mid-1970s there was a small but significant revival of the cult of local independence from national politics. The massive rate increases of 1974 (increases, in some cases, of more than 100 per cent) led to a high-pressure campaign by the 'National Association of Ratepayer Action Groups', who revived the tradition of 'ratepayer' candidates campaigning on the single issue of reducing the rates. A de- putation of them was welcomed with open arms by the shadow environment spokesperson, Mrs Thatcher, who obvious- ly felt that they were natural Conservative voters. As her own thinking about local government was consolidated over the next few years, every Conservative argument seemed to align itself with the attack on high-spending councils: there was the poli- tical argument against the wild spending of the loony Left, the monetarist argument against the overall effect of council bor- rowing on inflation, and so on.
Looked at one way, Mrs Thatcher's achievement on the issue of local govern- ment is to have dragged it screaming into the arena of national politics. Those 'Rate- payer' candidates who thought they were being strictly non-party political have been firmly told that they are waging a Con- servative crusade.
But in another sense, Conservatism under Mrs Thatcher has put itself at a disadvantage in local politics by implying that the real issues at the local level should be financial rather than ideological. According to the Thatcherite model, local government looks increasingly like a group of service industries, where the only scope for change lies in putting them under better or worse Management. It's as if the direc- tion of local affairs should be something no more politically contentious than the direc- tion of Sainsbury's.
The poll tax was envisaged, from the outset, as a way of ensuring that people would always vote with their wallets. This is why the Tory backbenchers have had so little success in their attempts to persuade Mrs Thatcher to soften the blow of the poll tax — the whole point about the poll tax is that it should hurt people enough to motivate them to vote against higher spending. The Government has been aware for some time now that the poll tax proposals represent an insoluble dilemma: if it hurts, it won't be 'fair', and if it is 'fair', it won't hurt. But there is a third possibil- ity, more terrible still: that it will hurt, but that people will somehow blame the pain they experience not on the councils they elect but on the government which in- vented the tax. It will take a few more unspectacular elections before we know whether this tax is capable of having such a spectacular effect.
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