To be fair to Mr Cameron, Labour has been just as bad. Ed Miliband and his campaign team have successfully converted the local elections into a national referendum on Nick Clegg. The political press, structurally centralist and Westminster-based, has cheerfully colluded in this strategy. If this sorry saga has any heroes, it is the Lib Dems: as much as possible, they have avoided matters of national importance. This is mainly because their activists are doing their best to avoid guilt by association. They do not go out of the way to stress the fact that Nick Clegg is their leader. Indeed, judging by some of the party literature, Mr Clegg does not exist at all.
This year?s local elections, in other words, have been notable for a triumph for national over local politics. This is very troubling ? for it flatly contradicts the central idea that has dominated the Coalition ever since its inception. In May 2010, the Coalition Agreement announced that it was ?time for a fundamental shift of power from Westminster to people? and an end to ?top-down government?, an admirable aim that was to be achieved by the ?radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups?.
The assertion that central government has become too large, monolithic and unaccountable lies at the heart of everything that David Cameron believes in. It is the essence of his notorious Big Society experiment. Furthermore, localism is one of the very few subjects on which Lib Dems and Conservatives wholeheartedly agree. So what has gone wrong?
Part of the answer is that it takes a long time to change a political culture. Every since the Second World War, the British people have been educated to look to Westminster and Whitehall as the solution to their problems. The Coalition can hardly be expected to reverse this in less than a year. The Localism Bill, for example, is not yet law. Probably its most important measure is to hold votes in 12 major cities on whether to introduce an elected mayor. These referendums, due to be held in May 2012, could reinvigorate local government. Nor is this all. Michael Gove, for example, is stripping power from Whitehall and local bureaucracies, and restoring it to local people, thanks to his free schools and academies.
Yet progress has been cautious. The Localism Bill, as the academic Simon Lee has subversively noted, also incorporates no fewer than 126 new ministerial powers over local communities. And the crucial problem concerns money. As Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP showed in their path-breaking treatise The Plan, there can be no local government independence without local fiscal control. Currently, councils raise only 25 per cent or so of the money they spend. In only two European countries ? Ireland and Malta, which scarcely counts as more than a locality itself ? is the proportion lower. With the important financial decisions still being made in Whitehall, it is scarcely surprising that local elections are driven by national concerns.
So far, George Osborne?s Treasury ? which has been at best indifferent and at worst hostile to David Cameron?s Big Society ? has squashed any thought of reform. Treasury ministers say they do not want to create a new poll tax, which is understandable. This week?s elections will make matters worse, thanks to the huge rise in the number of Labour councillors, practically all of whom are against the cuts. Many will argue that giving them extra fiscal powers would be like putting a drunkard in charge of a pub.
The one exception to the general malaise is in Scotland. By far the biggest surprise of the campaign has been the surge in the SNP vote. British politics has scarcely intruded on the Scottish elections; and even his critics must concede that Alex Salmond has proved the kind of high-profile leader that advocates of localism dream of across all of Britain. There are huge problems with the Scottish financial settlement: but one central reason for the success of the new political architecture is that Holyrood possesses significant fiscal independence.
At some point, David Cameron and Nick Clegg must address exactly this point. The Coalition has made very significant steps in the right direction. But until it opens the door to real reform of local taxation, nothing will fundamentally change the power of Whitehall. Local elections will continue to be marred by low turnout and driven by national concerns ? and Cameron and Clegg?s ?radical devolution of power? simply will not happen.
Noam Chomsky Bill Clinton Hillary Clinton Tom DeLay Elizabeth Dole
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