Thursday’s council elections are undermined by a political system in which power and resources are hoarded by Whitehall
The 19th-century Birmingham pastor Robert Dale would have been dismayed by today’s apathy towards local elections. As one of the greatest proselytisers for the role of municipal government in Victorian England, Dale made it his job to celebrate the virtues of public-spirited service in the interests of the community: “If we are true to each other and true to the town,” he suggested in one 1881 sermon, “we may do deeds as great as those done by Pisa, Florence and Venice in their triumphant days.”
Slightly ambitious perhaps. Nevertheless, such pioneering idealism inspired an era of civic achievement that transformed England’s towns and cities. But the better housing, libraries, swimming pools and schools would not have been possible without locally controlled revenues, which were then hoovered up by the centralising state in the 20th century. The Thatcher era, in which metropolitan councils were distrusted as dangerous sites of socialist experimentation, led to a further concentration of powers in the centre. Under David Cameron and George Osborne, local councils subsequently became the fall guys of austerity, forced to swallow crippling cuts to grants from Westminster.
