It has become increasingly fashionable to talk about Britain’s emerging one-party state. Theresa May’s Conservative party may have a slim majority of 16 in the House of Commons, but, as Labour finds itself languishing in the polls and split over Brexit, the key dynamic shaping contemporary politics seems not to be that between the government and opposition, but within the Tories and especially between Mrs May and her party’s old Eurosceptic right. Wednesday’s softening on the business rates changes follows a backlash from Conservative MPs, not Labour.
A functioning opposition, providing decent scrutiny, is critical to good government. As Sir Francis Pym, the late Conservative chief whip, wryly remarked on election night in 1983, “landslides don’t on the whole produce successful government” – an honest observation for which he was later sacked. Yet a lack of effective opposition is a far greater problem at the local level in England and Wales than in Westminster. A significant number of councils have just a handful of opposition councillors, or – as in the case of Labour-controlled Newham in London – none at all.
A key culprit is the first-past-the-post system still used to elect councillors in the vast majority of English and Welsh wards. The smaller and more homogeneous the geographic region in which this system is used, the more likely these one-party states will emerge. This creates a democratic deficit on a number of levels. A Conservative voter in Manchester, or a Labour voter in East Cambridgeshire, will at least be represented in Westminster by MPs from other parts of the country. In local government, they have no representation at all.
When councils face virtually no opposition, the lack of scrutiny – compounded by the decline of local journalism – makes autocratic government more likely. Decisions end up being taken not in the open during formal council meetings but in back rooms. The doorstep campaigning so critical to keeping councillors in touch with their constituents can trail off, as entrenched local parties take voters for granted and opposition parties put in little effort. At least 10% of seats were uncontested in 24 local authority areas in 2011. So few seats were contested in Fenland, Cambridgeshire, in 2007 and 2011 that the Conservatives won these councils before a single vote was counted, making a mockery of democracy. As disaffection builds up locally, this often paves the way for fringe opposition parties, such as the BNP, Ukip and Respect, to make gains.
Plenty of councils have followed this sorry cycle. The Labour party won every council seat in Stoke-on-Trent in 1996. It presided over years of decline and mismanagement, which proved fertile territory for the BNP. Labour has always dominated politics in Rotherham; in 2015, the government drafted in commissioners to run the council after serious shortcomings including its failure to take action on child sexual exploitation. The evidence is more than anecdotal: analysis for the Electoral Reform Society shows that councils facing little electoral competition tend to display more of the warning symptoms of financial corruption.
The UK is widely considered to be one of the most centralised countries in the OECD. There is a strong, principled case for greater devolution of powers to local government. This has been ignored by the government, which, for all its talk of devolution deals, has eroded the power of local councils: removing their responsibilities for overseeing schools; maintaining services like welfare-to-work as centralised silos; and overseeing a reduction in redistribution from richer to poorer areas.
A prerequisite for greater devolution, however, must be fixing the local democratic deficit, by extending the proportional representation already used in elections in Scotland and Northern Ireland to England and Wales. It will not eradicate poor local government. But, with few downsides, it could make a big difference.
