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Great Britain is a democracy, or we are nothing. It beggars belief that the Labour Government – and to a lesser but still scandalous extent, some Tories – are willing to undermine such a central part of our identity. The wanton cancellation of local elections is a disgrace, a stain on our history, a repudiation of a core part of British tradition. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is right to challenge this outrage in a judicial review. Let’s hope he wins.
A common thread connecting our past to our present, starting with Magna Carta in 1215 and moving on to the Bill of Rights of 1689, was the limitation of the arbitrary powers of the monarch – or in today’s terms, the executive, the Government – and the protection of individual liberties.
Magna Carta confirmed, inter alia, trial by jury, that the King must obey the law and the protection of private property; the Bill of Rights established parliamentary supremacy, free parliamentary speech and protection from cruel and unusual punishment. Democracy and individual rights progressed in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, culminating in mass universal suffrage for all adults and the elimination of legal discrimination against Catholics and Jews.
Brexit in 2016 was a democratic restoration: the end of the nostrum that we could and should be governed by Brussels rather than by our own MPs. There would be no more taxation and regulation and administration without genuine representation.
Even though we remain a constitutional monarchy, our culture is strikingly democratic and anti-deferential, and the Anglosphere offshoots we spawned, starting with America, are also imbued with a version of this spirit and adopted the common law and trial by jury.
Democracy is at the heart of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology identified by Joseph Henrich, and which England pioneered.
Ordinarily, Labour pretends to want to extend democracy by giving 16-year-olds the vote (although this particular expansion is an error), and yet it clearly has no real interest in people power when it doesn’t suit its interests. It hopes that the young will vote for it, and likes that idea, and it assumes that it would lose the forthcoming local elections, and doesn’t relish that prospect. Its attachment to democracy is merely instrumental: it no longer believes in anything other than power (even if it doesn’t actually know how to exercise it).
What started with a cross-party refusal to accept Brexit and an attempt to undo or ignore the result of the referendum – a bid that has been reignited since Sir Keir Starmer’s election – has now been extended much more broadly. When you defy democracy once, ignoring voters becomes normalised and cancelling elections becomes easier psychologically. It’s a calamitous, ruinous development that must be fought all the way. Violating democracy must once again become taboo, unthinkable, not a tool of first resort by a political elite that looks down upon ordinary people.
All of this helps to explain why Labour’s announcement that 4.5 million people would be denied a vote at the forthcoming local elections is so outrageous, so important. Infuriatingly, Tory-controlled Suffolk and Norfolk were among 29 authorities given permission to cancel May’s ballot. The Telegraph has been running its Campaign for Democracy on this issue, and many of our readers are furious.
The excuse for the Government’s despicable, regressive attack on the rights of free people to choose their own representatives is pathetically weak. We keep being told that it’s all because of a restructuring of local government under which district councils are set to be abolished and merged into new unitary authorities. This shake-up is taking ages and would, supposedly, be delayed further were elections to be held.
So what? Why can’t these incompetent and cowardly councils walk and chew gum at the same time? And who cares if we need to hold another election in a year or two’s time when the new authorities are up and running? Members of the US House of Representatives stand for election every two years.
Restructuring local government – in a way nobody asked for, and wasting money and ruining local identities in the process – cannot be seen as a case of force majeure. This is not WWIII or a massive pandemic, the only valid reasons to delay elections. In any case, the (delayed) general election of 1945 (the first since 1935) was held after VE-Day but before VJ-Day, while the Second World War was far from over.
The present scandal thus keeps getting worse. Norfolk and Suffolk, which ordinarily hold elections every four years, also cancelled their elections in 2025 and last held a ballot in 2021, as did Tory-controlled East Sussex and West Sussex. How long will this madness go on for? The new unitary councils may not be “ready” until 2028 or even later, which means that a four-year term for many councillors may end up turning into a seven-year stint, the sort of time in office French presidents once enjoyed.
This is unfathomable. The real reason for these delays, surely, is that councils are running scared. Reform would undoubtedly sweep away many Labour and Tory councils. The Greens would also pick up some seats. Our political elites, and especially the Labour Party but, tragically, also some Tories, are running away from democracy. They do not deserve to be forgiven for this latest betrayal.
4.5m people denied vote as more polls axed ➤
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