Lowri Griffiths on local democracy, the great British shrug, and the politicians who keep posting leaflets I cannot bring myself to read

There is, on my doormat this morning, a leaflet from a candidate for the council. The leaflet has a photograph of the candidate, who is wearing a high-visibility jacket and is pointing at a pothole with the focused expression of a man who has, recently, been told that pointing at things is what wins elections. Building on my earlier dispatches at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, I have, dear reader, a confession.

The Confession

I do not, as of this morning, know which ward I live in. I know I live in the borough. I know who my MP is. I have a vague sense that there are several council elections happening in the next few weeks, and that I am, in some sense, supposed to care. I do not, however, know who the candidates are, or what they stand for, or, in fact, what the council is empowered to do.

I am a journalist. I write, for a living, about civic life. I have, in my previous columns on North London, made arguments about supply, about transport, about what I think of as the slow erosion of public space. And yet here I am, on the morning of the relevant election, with a leaflet in my hand and no particular sense of what to do with it.

What This Says About Me

You will think, dear reader, that this is bad. It is, in fact, bad. I am not going to defend it. I am, in this column, going to try to understand it, on the grounds that I suspect a substantial number of you are in a similar position, and you have, at minimum, the decency not to be writing newspaper columns about it.

According to The Guardian, recent research has documented substantial declines in UK local election turnout across recent decades. London council elections, in particular, regularly see turnout below the substantial threshold that political scientists describe as a healthy democratic baseline. The research, advocates argue, supports the case for substantial new institutional attention to the broader question of why local democracy has stopped feeling, to many of us, like a thing that is happening to us.

Why I Cannot Bring Myself to Read the Leaflet

The leaflet is, I should say, not bad. It is in colour. It has, in addition to the pothole-pointing photograph, a list of priorities, which include, in this order: bins, parking, the library, anti-social behaviour, and ‘a clean, green Camden.’ The candidate is, I assume, a perfectly reasonable person who has, like the previous candidate, like the candidate before that, decided to spend their evenings and weekends doing the unpaid grunt work of local democracy.

The leaflet is, however, not particularly good either. It does not, as far as I can tell, distinguish itself in any meaningful way from the leaflets of the other candidates. They all promise to deal with bins. They all promise to deal with parking. They all promise to defend the library, which is, I should say, a library I have not been into in eleven months. The candidates are, in their leaflets, indistinguishable in a way that I think is structural rather than accidental.

The Structural Question

The reason the leaflets are indistinguishable, I have come to suspect, is that the council is, in fact, mostly indistinguishable. According to The Evening Standard, recent reporting has documented substantial constraints on UK local government discretion. Substantial portions of council budgets are, in practice, ring-fenced for statutory services. Substantial portions of council policy are, in practice, set by central government. The space within which a council can actually distinguish itself from another council is, by the time you have stripped out all the things they cannot decide, quite small.

This is not, of course, the candidate’s fault. The candidate is constrained, and is making a virtue of the constraints by promising to manage the small remaining space well. But it does explain, I think, why the leaflets read the way they do, and why I cannot bring myself to engage with any of them.

What I Am Going to Do

I am, in the end, going to vote. I am going to vote because not voting is, in my view, a worse outcome than voting, even when the candidates feel indistinguishable. I am going to read all four leaflets, in the bath, this evening, with a glass of wine, and I am going to make a decision based on the available information, which is, I admit, going to come down to which candidate seems least likely to embarrass me when they appear on local television.

This is not, dear reader, civic engagement. This is the absolute floor of civic engagement. I am ashamed of it. I am also, I think, being honest, which is more than the people who do not vote and then tell pollsters that they did, in fact, vote, are doing.

What Would Help

I have been thinking, between the leaflet and the kettle, about what would actually make me engage with local democracy in the way I engage with national democracy. I think, in honesty, it would be one of two things. Either the council would have to be empowered to do substantially more than it currently can, in which case the candidates would have substantial actual policy distinctions, or the candidates themselves would have to do substantially more grass-roots community engagement, in which case I would meet them and form a view of them as people.

Neither of these is going to happen. The candidate has been told, by his party’s central campaigning office, that the most efficient use of his time is leafleting. He is doing the leafleting. The leaflet is going on my doormat. I am writing a column about it. The cycle continues.

The Voting Day

I will, on the day, walk to the polling station, which is in the primary school I went to twenty-eight years ago. I will see, on the way in, the same elderly volunteers who staff every election, who I do not know but recognise, and who do, between them, more for local democracy than the rest of us combined. I will vote. I will, as I always do, feel briefly virtuous and then immediately go for a coffee.

This is, I think, what civic life looks like in 2026. It is not glorious. It is, however, ours. For more of my dispatches from this overpriced and obstinately beloved city, you can find me at my page on The London Prat.

For satirical takes on local-democracy-as-political-question, see Private Eye.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/