Give Us Back Our Local Elections!

Local candidates are going door to door canvassing, and their supporters are delivering a small forest's worth of leaflets, all to get a few hundred people to turn out and put an X against their name on May 3rd.  Some of them are discussing local issues, while some seem to be avoiding them.

I haven't heard from Labour or the Lib Dems yet, but the UKIP and Conservative candidates in Hedge End have been willing to engage on local issues in the pages of this blog.

The leaders of Eastleigh's Lib Dems and Conservatives are locking their electoral horns in the local press over local issues: the wisdom of buying the Ageas (Rose) Bowl, and the business case for demolishing the civic offices and moving to new accommodation in the centre of Eastleigh.

Yet all three major Westminster party machines seem intent on turning our local elections into a massive opinion poll on their national policies.

Labour's party election broadcast (presented, admittedly, by the reliable and knowledgeable Professor Robert Winston) is all about the NHS (the clue is in the 'N' - it's a national, not a local issue).  If you missed it on TV, it's available on i-player here.

The Lib Dems still think it's a good idea to have Nick Clegg in their broadcast, despite opinion polls showing that three quarters of us think he is doing a bad job.  Only last year he claimed "Localism is in our DNA", but here he is concentrating almost entirely on national issues of tax cuts and pensions.

David Cameron, described this week by one of his own MPs as an "arrogant posh boy with no passion to understand the lives of others", does at least start and end his broadcast with the claim that Tory Councils give "value for money services" (I guess no-one has told him that Tory Hampshire has been creating new cabinet posts while cutting youth services).  But the meat in his sound-bite sandwich is all about the national economy, interest rates, taxes and apprenticeships.

This hi-jacking of the local elections presents voters with a dilemma.   National politicians will be interviewed on national television on election light claiming any slight increase in vote, or number of councillors, as an endorsement of what they are doing nationally.  And if you think that the Coalition's flogging off of the NHS to Richard Branson is the single most unforgivable breaking of several election promises, it must be tempting to vote Labour to stick up for Robert Winston.  On the other hand if you vote for one of the coalition parties you can be sure they will take any good news on May 3rd as an endorsement for their national policies.

Local elections should be about electing local candidates to represent local people.  If the national parties are going to insist on using them as expensive, publicly funded opinion polls on national issues, perhaps the answer is to take the parties out of local politics and if you have a good, local, independent candidate, to give them your vote.


Relevant links:
Conservative candidate Hedge End St John's ward
Conservative candidate Hedge End St Helen's ward
UKIP candidate Hedge End
Labour party election broadcast
Lib Dem party election broadcast
Conservative party election broadcast