On potholes, promises, and the strange intimacy of being governed by your neighbours

It is local election season again, which I can tell because a man in a rosette tried to make meaningful eye contact with me outside the station, and as I wrote for Bohiney Magazine and for the ever-patient editors at The London Prat, who indulge my periodic attempts to take London politics seriously, there is something uniquely intimate, and uniquely absurd, about local democracy in this city. National politics is a distant soap opera. Local politics is the neighbour who wants to talk to you about the bins.

The romance of the pothole

Local politics in London is gloriously, almost touchingly small. Forget grand visions and sweeping ideologies. The battleground here is the pothole, the bin collection, the controversial new cycle lane, the parking permit, the fate of a much-loved tree. The candidates campaign on leaflets that promise to “fix our streets” and “stand up for our community,” phrases so vague and so universal that you could run on them in any ward in the country and never be wrong. And yet, somehow, it matters enormously, because this is the level of government that actually touches your daily life.

The work of London’s local councils and the wider city government, coordinated through bodies like the Greater London Authority, covers exactly the unglamorous, essential things that make a city liveable, the housing, the schools, the social care, the roads, the collection of an astonishing quantity of rubbish. National government gets the headlines. Local government gets the actual job of running the place, on a budget that has been squeezed until it squeaks.

The intimacy of being governed by your neighbours

What I find genuinely fascinating, in my more thoughtful moments, is how personal it all is. Your local councillor is not a remote figure on the news. They are, quite possibly, someone you have seen at the farmers’ market, a person whose number is on a laminated card pushed through your door, who will, if you email them about a broken streetlight, actually email you back. There is something rather wonderful about that, a democracy small enough to be answerable, governed by people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions because they live on the same streets.

And something rather maddening too

Of course, it is also where some of the most heated, most personal, most extraordinarily petty disputes in all of politics play out. I have watched a council meeting descend into open warfare over the placement of a single zebra crossing. I have seen neighbours who once shared a garden wall become mortal enemies over a low-traffic neighbourhood scheme. Local politics has all the passion of national politics and none of the distance, which means it is conducted at a pitch of feeling that the actual stakes, a one-way system, a recycling policy, do not entirely justify, and yet entirely do, because it is happening on your doorstep.

Why the small stuff is the big stuff

Here is the thoughtful conclusion I am building towards, between jokes about rosettes. The temptation is to dismiss local elections as trivial, the boring undercard to the main event of national politics. But the things local government controls, whether the streets are safe, whether the bins are collected, whether there is social housing, whether the libraries stay open, whether the buses run, are not trivial at all. They are the texture of daily life, the difference between a city that works and one that quietly fails the people who depend on it most. The turnout for local elections is always dismally low, and that is a genuine shame, because this is the level of government we can actually influence.

So when the man in the rosette makes his meaningful eye contact, I have decided to stop dodging him. I am going to ask him about the bins. I am going to ask him about housing, and the closed library, and the bus route they keep threatening to cut. I am going to take my small, local, intimate democracy seriously, because for all its absurdity, it is the bit of politics that is genuinely mine, conducted by my neighbours, about my streets, with consequences I will see from my own front window.

Even if it is, mostly, about the bins

And it will mostly be about the bins. It is always, in the end, mostly about the bins. But the bins, I have come to believe, are where democracy actually lives, in the small, shared, unglamorous business of deciding together how a place should be run. So vote in your local elections, Londoners. Talk to the person in the rosette. The pothole you save may be your own.

A note on the squeezed budget

None of this happens in a vacuum. London’s councils have spent years trying to deliver essential services on budgets that have been cut and cut again, a financial reality set largely by decisions taken in central government rather than the town hall. When the library closes or the bus route vanishes, the councillor in the rosette is often the visible face of a squeeze imposed from far above their pay grade. Local democracy is intimate and answerable, which is its charm, but it is also frequently left holding responsibilities without the money to meet them, and the person who suffers is, as ever, the resident at the receiving end.

For more on the comedy of governance, the team enjoys Private Eye, watching the council since forever.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/