Some notes taken in March, most writing in May, returned to and finished on 16th July (all in 2025)

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Intro

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It seems to be election season around a lot of the world again lately, Canada and Australia saw the Trump effect demolish conservative parties, Poland saw a tussle between liberalism and right wing populism that came out in favour of populism on a very thin margin, Singapore returned another comfortable grip on power to its ruling party, these are just a few countries I’ve read about casting their ballots lately; Hell, even the Vatican got in on it by holding their once in a generation papal election, the secretive Conclave, and at an uncharacteristically fast pace too.

And here in the UK we’ve been voting too, not on the national level (that was last year) but on the local level.

Local Democracy is something I’ve been planning to write about since around March, as a kind of bonus to the other parts of the democracy series, but since it’s a niche subject even by my standards I didn’t get any further than taking some notes. But on the 1st of May we had our latest round of local elections, and I figured it was as good a time as any to write.

Unlike my other 2 main democracy articles, which toured the whole world for case studies and examples, this one points just to my own experience and my own country, given that local democracy is generally overlooked understanding how it works in other countries would need a lot more research and time, compared to national democracy where systems, controversies and ideas are a lot easier to find, so if you’re not a Brit you might find this one a lot less relevant or interesting than the rest of the series.

So I would consider this more of a bonus article than a 3rd article in the series, will there be a third article or did I already say everything I needed to say on the big picture in the first 2? I don’t really know, but this one is about basically showing another story in my growing experience and train of thought with democracy, and highlighting a part of politics that’s very important but rarely seen that way.

To put this story in context I need to explain a bit about what the UK’s local democracy actually looks like, it’s a pretty complex mess of councils and leaders with a wide range of jobs and powers, inconsistent from area to area thanks to years of tweaking by different national politicians with different ideas and ambitions. So here’s my attempt to summarise that clusterfuck several hundred years in the making in just a few pages worth of text.

Council Dynamics

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Types and Turnouts

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Councils can be split up into 3 basic tiers, Lowest, Middle and Highest, based on the level of power they hold, here’s the different names they go by and the hierarchy.

Every region will have at least a council in the mid tier. Sometimes just one of these, called a “unitary authority” runs everything in the region, it’s how Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and about half of England run things.

_{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:English_unitary_authorities_map_2023.svg
Authors: Nilfanion, Dr Greg (based on copyrighted Ordnance Survey data) Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0}

The other half of England has what’s called a “2 tier” model, where the mid tier is split between a larger council and several smaller ones. For example, Cambridgeshire is split between Cambridgeshire County Council and 5 District Councils: Cambridge, South Cambridgeshire, East Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Fenland.

Then there’s the lowest tier, parish and community councils, representing many small areas and without a huge amount of power, their “parish” or community might be a town or a village or something like that.

There are thousands of them out there but not every area bothers with them ( practicing a small form of direct democracy, the “parish meeting” instead) and some areas don’t even have a Parish at all.

_{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parishes_in_England_map,_2021.svg
Author: FollowTheTortoise (based on copyrighted Ordnance Survey data) Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0}

And there’s the highest tier, almost all of these are “Combined Authorities”, which cover a larger region, and they’re made up of the heads of all the mid tier councils in that region, so for example the West Midlands region covers 3 cities: Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, and 4 Boroughs: Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull and Walsall, which each cover several towns and villages each. These 7 areas each have their own councils, and those council leaders make up the West Midlands Combined Authority, which makes decisions for the wider region.

But just 1 of these high tier councils is its own thing altogether: The London Assembly.

Greater London has 32 Boroughs plus the City of London Corporation, so 33 Councils, but instead of those council leaders being in a CA Greater London has its own directly elected higher tier instead.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between the City of London and Greater London, the City of London is the original London, where London first started, and it’s still legally considered its own city to this day. Greater London is the big urban sprawl that grew out around it, first as separate towns then merging into one big concrete jungle, it’s what people culturally think of as the city of London, but legally it’s a region instead (originally called the County of London, now just called Greater London).

_{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:City_of_London_in_Greater_London.svg
Author: TUBS (Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Greater London in beige, City of London in red, surrounding UK regions in grey}

Click here for a more detailed tier breakdown.

Highest Tier (16):

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Names: Combined Authority/Combined County Authority(England)/Assembly (London)

Roles:

• transport
• policing
• development funding

Covers:

• Combined Authorities (England)
• Greater London

Mid Tier (several hundred):

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Names:

County Council/County Borough Council (Wales)

^

District Council/Metropolitan District Council (Alternate Names: Borough Council/Metropolitan Borough Council/City Council)

Roles:

County

These are responsible for services across the whole of a county, like:

• education
• transport
• planning
• fire and public safety
• social care
• libraries
• waste management
• trading standards

^

District

These cover a smaller area than county councils. They’re usually responsible for services like:

• rubbish collection
• recycling
• Council Tax collections
• housing
• planning applications

“Two Tier” Authorities (found in parts of England) have both of these tiers, “Unitary Authorities” (parts of England, all of Wales, Scotland, NI) merge them into one

Covers:

• Counties (parts of England), Districts ( England and Northern Ireland), Council Areas (Scotland), Principal Areas (Wales)
  • Councils can gain permission to use the alternate names ( Boroughs or Cities) by royal decree, but this is symbolic and has no practical meaning
  • The rest of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland also have Counties, but these are only historical/cultural and don’t have their own government institutions

Lowest Tier (thousands):

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Names:

Parish Council/Community Council (Alternate Names: Town Council, Village Council, Neighbourhood Council)

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Parish Meeting

Roles:

These operate at a level below district and borough councils and in some cases, unitary authorities.

They’re elected and can help on a number of local issues, like providing:

• allotments
• public clocks
• bus shelters
• community centres
• play areas and play equipment
• grants to help local organisations
• consultation on neighbourhood planning

They also have the power to issue fixed penalty fines for things like:

• litter
• graffiti
• fly posting
• dog offences

Covers:

• Parishes ( England and Northern Ireland)
• Communities ( Scotland and Wales)
  • English Parish Councils can choose to call themselves a Community Council even though the area they cover is still legally called a Parish rather than a Community
  • Parishes and Communities can also be called cities by decree, even though they don’t match the cultural idea of what a city is, for example the Welsh community of St Davids (a small village of 1.5k population) and its surroundings is technically a city
    • The alternate names are names Parish and Community Councils can choose to call themselves, but are symbolic and have no practical meaning

Others (37):

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Names: Police and Crime Commissioners/Police Fire and Crime Commissioners (England and Wales only)

Roles:

Community needs and relationships Partnerships Police and Crime Plans – setting police and crime objectives for their area Budget setting – setting the force budget and determining its regulation Contributing to national and international policing capabilities Community safety and criminal justice Appointing the chief constable – holding them to account for running the force, and if necessary, dismissing them Complaint functions Fire governance – (PFCCs) Commissioning services – victims services, reducing reoffending, youth diversion schemes, and drugs and alcohol services

Covers:

• Police Authorities (England and Wales)
  • Scotland and Northern Ireland have Police Authority areas as well, but these don’t have PCCs or PFCCs
  • The Scottish Police Authority is appointed by the Scottish Government while the Northern Ireland Policing Board is appointed by the Northern Ireland Assembly and the UK Minister of Justice

The Low and varying Mid Tier councils have existed in different forms for hundreds of years, as well as ceremonial Mayors, being tinkered with, organised and reorganised semi often in the last few decades, but the other bodies were formed in a 3 decade long experiment started by the government of Labour’s Tony Blair, called “Devolution”: The idea of taking power away from the central government and bringing it closer to home for people across the country, with more representation and decision making for their local areas.

The key focus of this was creating national parliaments for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: The Welsh Assembly (now called the Welsh Parliament or the Senedd) the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly, but they also created the English Combined Authorities, the London Assembly, and elected Mayors.

The Tories then created elected figures called the Police and Crime Commissioners to replace unelected “Police Authorities” in England and Wales (some of which were later expanded to include fire services too, called PFCCs - Police Fire and Crime Commissioners), while the national parliaments remodelled local councils in their countries. 

Now Labour is tinkering again, creating more Mayors, more Combined Authorities and arranging deals to turn more of the 2 tier models into unitary ones.

The result of all this is a bunch of councils created at different times by different people with different ideas, so they vary wildly in their voting systems and even the timelines of when elections happen.

In England and Wales council elections use Block Voting and First Past the Post, where the candidates who get the most votes win (in BV you can vote for multiple councillors, in FPTP it’s just one), in Northern Ireland and Scotland they use the proportional Single Transferable Vote, the London Assembly uses the Additional Member System. Mayoral elections used to use a system called the Supplementary Vote, but that was binned by the Tories just before they bowed out and replaced with FPTP.

Then the timeline? It looks like this:

• Every 5 years (Councillors all elected at once, Wales and Scotland only)
• Every 4 years (Councillors all elected at once, England and Northern Ireland, Mayors, PCCs, London Assembly)
• Every 2 years (Councillors elected in halves, England only)
• Every year, with a gap year every 3 years (Councillors elected in thirds, England only)

This chaotic calendar means there are actually elections going on in the UK every single year, but a lot of people don’t even know about them or if they do, they don’t care.

Yeah, this inconsistent mess would be understandable if it was actually catering to local differences, but it’s not, council elections are very unpopular across the board.

In England and Wales turnout is abysmally low, around the 10-30% range (with some outliers here and there), PCCs and PFCCs are around the same rate, 15-32%, in Scotland it’s better but still below half, in London it’s around 40%, Northern Ireland is the only area to actually go over half, but only just.

And that actually is a big worry, because while yes councils don’t manage the big headline grabber moments of government, war and peace, big trade deals, the balance of rights and obligations people face, they’re actually way more important for people’s daily lives, far more impactful.

Take housing, the private housing market in the UK is an absolute mess, with rents in a lot of areas especially the south, especially in London being sky high, squeezing people to their limits, “council housing” which is designed to be affordable and non profit, can be a lifeline, it can rescue people from homelessness, sleeping rough, and all the disruptions to stability and risks to health that entails, it can decide if people have the freedom to choose where they want to life, or if the market chooses for them by pricing them out.

Or planning permission, these powers can define skylines, decide how urban or rural an area will be, what venues it will or won’t have, defining local culture.

Education, deciding how children can get their school places, the level of support kids with “Special Educational Needs” get, dyslexia, autism, and so on, if those kids find a place or fall behind.

And bin management, it might seem like something so mundane, but if you didn’t have a place to dump all your garbage, no bin workers to take it away, you would quickly be in deep shit, piles in the streets, rats, diseases, as the people of Birmingham are sadly learning the hard way.

These little micro decisions can have knock ons that define people’s lives, let’s take me as an example, I spend pretty much all the time I go out in London instead of my home town, so I’m not as affected by my own council’s decisions, but London’s councils are responsible for deciding which venues are allowed to open, often mediating between their cultural and economic value and the gripings of their residential neighbours who aren’t big fans of blaring music next door, sometimes they find a middle ground, sometimes venues lose support and get shuttered.

And these kinds of disputes aren’t the only feuds, what about transport? The London Underground’s Northern line is less of a single metro line and more of a bunch of branches that happen to connect up to each other at certain spots, it has 2 starting points, Morden and Battersea Power Station, connected by Kennington, 2 branches from there Bank and Charing Cross, connected by Euston, then 2 more branches, High Barnet and Edgware, connected by Camden Town.

_{https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northern_Line_with_Battersea.svg
Authors: HarJIT, ed g2s, James D. Forrester Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0}

It’s been pitched that the branches should be made into 2 completely separate lines, Morden-Bank-High Barnet and Battersea-Charing Cross-Edgware, so that more trains could be run on each of them without worrying about so much traffic, but that would make those few connector stations way more busy, to make it happen it’s argued that Camden Town station, already crowded and small as is, would need to be rebuilt and expanded, at the cost of a sizeable chunk of the street, a street that’s a cultural hub packed full of venues. The connectivity brought by a better service at the cost of a culture hub or vice versa, so far they’ve stuck with the hub.

But if Boroughs like Camden or Hackney became less accommodating towards their music scene that would dramatically affect the look of my routine. At the time I’m writing this this is the first full week since December last year that I haven’t been at a gig, every other week I’ve been at some pub or brewery or repurposed shipping container listening to bands, meeting people, buying merch, that’s my own little cultural and economic impact, a small bit that goes towards keeping the wheels of the scene turning.

If suddenly there’s no home for that, that impact goes, and my schedule changes with it, do I find new venues and new music? Do I just have to face a big vacuum in my calendar? Work out new places to be, things to do? Or get more introspective, stay home and put more time elsewhere? This kind of thing can decide how much money’s in my pocket and how many hours I have in the day, rippling across to others too.

So it’s actually a serious democratic crisis that very few people have anything to do with local government, barely anybody votes for it and fewer still actually have any idea what these institutions actually do, both in terms of the powers they have and what they do with them, for a country that calls itself a democracy to have no involvement in and not even any idea about these decisions that define their homes, their lives, it’s a disaster.

Election 2025

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Sitting things out

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At first I was actually the exception to this problem, although I never kept up with the day to days of what my local councils do I used to be in the minority that actually did care about local elections, in fact a local election was the first one I ever voted in, encouraged by my dad letting me know about the candidates, my family’s habits of showing up, and a general enthusiasm to take part.

And at the time it gave me a pang of enthusiasm about democracy as the candidates I voted for actually won, but when it came to the PCCs I didn’t vote (although to be fair that’s because my area doesn’t have much crime and doesn’t have many cops about, so I don’t need to give that area as much attention) and this time for this round of local elections I didn’t bother either.

Does that make me a hypocrite, as someone that believes in compulsory voting? Maybe, but here’s what I would say: I said the big things needed to fix democracy, or rather create it, would be proportional representation, mandatory turnout and direct accountability, I think those things are needed together, and as I pointed out from some of the case studies in the original article, they don’t work in isolation.

If anything, forced voting without fixing the voting system would be even worse than what we have now, because you’d be forcing people to participate in a system that just doesn’t listen to them, because it’s absolutely broken.

So why didn’t I vote? Well, the local newspaper decided to put up a paywall and with my passionate hatred of subscription fees that was the end of reading that, I couldn’t find any manifestos specific to our local area and the only leaflet we got, which actually hinted at some policies and proposals, was from the Tories, who I’m to put it mildly not the biggest fan of. So I decided that I’d rather be a non voter than an uninformed voter.

I also just didn’t feel much pressure to vote when I knew most people wouldn’t be either, in the locals it’s the voters who are the odd ones out, and with it being on the local level, it felt more low stakes.

I wasn’t even going to bother with watching the results, but I was going on an insane gig marathon, going to an overnight party 10pm Friday-4am Saturday, then a festival midday-10pm Saturday, with nothing between them but a short break to eat, no sleep, so to adjust my body clock to have any hope of surviving I was staying up seriously late, the overnight election results were a good way to kill time.

The Numbers

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Up for election were 24 councils across the country, 6 mayors, a council by-election in London’s Lambeth Borough (held because the ward’s councillor had resigned to become an MP) and a by-election for the national parliament in the northern constituency of Runcorn and Helsby (caused by the local MP having resigned after being convicted of assault for thumping one of his constituents).

Of the 6 Mayoralities, Labour narrowly held 3 of them: 2 of them (Doncaster and North Tyneside) by less than 1000 votes and one, the West of England by just under 6000, and they lost another (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough) to the Tories.

_{Doncaster, North Tyneside, West of England, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough results}

In these a pattern emerged, the upstart far-right Reform UK party actually took second place in all of these contests, then in the last 2 Mayoralities, Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire, they actually won.

_{Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire results}

Then at the councils things were much more chaotic, the Tories lost massively, losing 676 seats, while Labour lost 187, a few independents also lost out. Reform took most of the spoils, gaining 677 council seats, while in second place were the Liberal Democrats on 165, while their wins were much more modest, the Green Party more than doubled their number of councillors.

And in Runcorn Reform won the election by just 6 votes, one of the narrowest majorities a parliamentary election has ever had.

_{Runcorn and Helsby results}

Changes and Failings

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This was the growth of what commentators have been calling “5 party politics”, where Reform, Lib Dems, Greens, Tories and Labour all have a fighting chance, the model of “2 party politics”, the near absolute domination of British politics the Tories and Labour have had for a century, collapsing right in front of us, leading to increasingly more chaotic results as voters become much more split.

Now it’s important to put an asterisk on this, which is, of course, the thing I always bang on about when it comes to elections, turnout. Like I mentioned earlier turnout is way way lower at local elections, usually hovering around 30% vs the 50-60% that’s the norm for national elections, which partly explains the unusual results, but there’s a lot to suggest this isn’t just a fluke.

In broad polls of the population both Labour and the Tories have proved to be extremely unpopular. The Tories got a very brief bump after they chose their new leader, Kemi Badenoch, and some people wanted to give her a chance, but surprise surprise, she’s crap, so that lead has vanished and they’re now as unpopular as they were at the last general election (very unpopular).

While Labour’s decision making has proven to be out of touch to say the least, probably the most recent big controversy has been their changes to PIP, the Personal Independence Payment, which goes towards supporting people with disabilities, while they made some genuinely good improvements to the system, like removing the need for people with permanent disabilities to keep going through reassessment to prove they need the aid (like someone who lost an arm having to prove it hasn’t grown back at an interview), in the fine print of these improvements they mentioned that they were massively tightening the criteria for who can apply, so a lot of disabled people just won’t be able to get aid anymore. Why? To save money, yeah, of course.

In this time of crisis, the first people we look to to make sacrifices are, not those who can afford to lose the most, but the disabled, brilliant.

This decision was the second major thing that made me extremely angry and as someone who voted Labour, feeling buyers remorse, the change in leadership from Tory rule was at first a breath of fresh air, but now we’re settling back into the same old routine of a government that’s arrogant and neglectful. They have made genuine good steps forward in a range of areas too, but with outrageous choices like these, whatever pros are being drowned out by the cons.

I hoped that even though they’d gotten a massive majority in the last election, Labour’s leadership would realise just how fragile that majority actually is, built on constituencies won on thin margins, and that fragility would make them a bit more willing to listen, to tread more lightly before showing so much malice, that hope hasn’t gone anywhere.

And the result is our political class is more hated than ever, those that aren’t tuning out are looking elsewhere, Reform is mostly hoovering up ex-Tories, but some Labour voters too, while more liberal and progressive minded voters are looking to the Libs and the Greens.

Good to see an end to the 2 party monopoly? Yes, but this diversification is something our political system isn’t built for, a voting system where “winner takes all” and “most votes wins” is, well, not good, but manageable when you only really have that 2 party contest, when you have a 3, 4 or 5 way contest as became the norm at these elections, and you factor in turnout, the whole thing becomes a total shambles.

And something I liked to see? Proportional representation activist group Make Votes Matter, who I mentioned in the last article, have started playing my game. I came across an Instagram post of theirs pointing out that the West of England mayor had only got 7.5% of her constituents to vote for her, 25% of the vote on a 30% turnout, then a reel doing the same comparison for several different Mayors, rather than just looking at disproportionality, they started looking at how turnout impacts things too, and how when you add the 2 together our “democracy” doesn’t look very democratic at all.

Their newsletter put it this way: 

In Kent, Reform UK won 37% of the vote. But First Past the Post just gave them a whopping 70% of the seats. Labour won the West of England mayor even when three-quarters of voters chose someone else. And a Lib Dem councillor in Cornwall won a seat on a tiny 19% of the vote.

Just a few thousand votes changing hands could radically alter how this country is governed. It was the Tories before, it was Labour last year, and it’s Reform UK now. No matter who they are, politicians who win a minority of the vote shouldn’t be given all of the power. To prevent someone with minority public support from taking 100% of the power, you need Proportional Representation.

• “70% of seats on 37% of votes” - Cormac, MVM

And on their website they even had a stats page that showed the highlights of the most batshit results across the elections, a councillor winning their seat on less than 19% of the vote, Reform managing to get 70% of the seats in Kent on 37% of the vote, Labour managing to get none of the seats in Exeter despite getting the most votes, and overall, just 16% of councillors getting half the vote or more.

Graphs and Graphs

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With these takeaways I became a lot more interested in these elections and decided to get back to whacking out the graphs, every Mayor, each council, and an overall votes/seats set for the councils like the ones I do for the general elections.

But when I looked at the results online, nobody had actually added up the total votes, not the BBC or Wikipedia, all they showed was the total seats, how many councillors each party had and how many councils they controlled, no total votes. The vote details were split between every different council, so to do that overall set I quickly decided to copy a model I’d used in the last democracy series for the US Presidential elections, a huge results spreadsheet with all the results in one place. From there I could easily add them all together and get the final result.

And this one was a lot easier to do, 24 councils + the Lambeth by-election made for just under half the 50 states + DC I had to cover for the US, I didn’t have to deal with kookoo nonsense like one candidate running under 5 or 7 different party labels, and most importantly Wikipedia was more on the ball with grabbing results, so I got by with just using that for the results instead of having to fish for them in 51 different searches through government websites.

I started around midday 6th of May and it took just 4 hours to finish most of the table, with only 6 results missing: County Durham, North Northamptonshire (try saying that 3 times fast) Lambeth, Northumberland, Cornwall and Shropshire.

Lambeth was missing, while the other 5 technically did have all the results, but broken down by each district or ward, the summaries for the whole council were unfinished, so if I wanted to get the results I would’ve had to add up hundreds of results in hundreds of wards manually. How about no.

So I just waited until the totals were finished, they added the first 2 on the same day, and I grabbed the Lambeth results from the local council, then on the 7th Northumberland was added, Cornwall on the 8th (added to the sheet early morning of the 9th) and Shropshire on the 9th (added to sheet early morning 10th), giving me a complete sheet, which I then used to put together the full votes graph.

But as I was finishing up I came across an article: “Residents’ Association hold Nork and Tattenhams in by-election”, which led me to a BBC article mentioning another one, 2 by-elections I’d missed. I’d thought Lambeth was the only one since that’s the only one I’d heard about, from the BBC’s live elections feed, but now I was reading about more I’d missed.

At first I wanted to find and add all of them, but that idea quickly fell apart, even the Electoral Commission itself hadn’t mentioned them on their social media, and “full” lists of the elections going on on the 1st didn’t include any of the by-elections, so rather than endlessly dig through the web and probably come up short, I decided to just not include the by-elections and cut Lambeth from the results.

So here it is, the overall votes and seats compared.

_{Local Elections - Votes vs Seats}

This once again reminded me of why I loved these little graphs, it’s a visual demonstrator of what happened that shows me things I otherwise missed. When putting them together I was surprised to find that vote wise the Tories had actually come second, the only party (alongside Reform) to get over a million votes.

From votes to seats the Tories and Greens had been shrunk, Labour had been massively shrunk, while Reform (and slightly, independents) had been bloated.

The only thing I can’t show is, again, turnout. The election pages on Wiki don’t list it in their summaries, for some councils that’s because they split the turnout data up between wards, meaning I’d have to again add up hundreds of results to figure it out, but in others they just don’t give the numbers at all, and I can’t just go to the council websites themselves to figure it out, because some of them don’t list it either.

So all we have to go on is that roughly 30% average, mid way through the election the BBC’s elections guru Professor John Curtice actually made a point of saying “There is little sign that the electorate’s disillusion with the state of the country has been translated into a reluctance to go to the polls.” and then straight after pointing out “Turnout is so far running at 34%”.

Now obviously he was speaking in relative terms, that was a few points higher than the local elections in 2021 when most of these council seats had been voted on before, so comparing things to last time it was a small improvement! But a small improvement on barely anyone showing up isn’t something to celebrate.

I was thinking about MVM’s stat from earlier, 16% of councillors getting half the vote or more, That’s more than 8 in 10 councillors who failed to even win over the voters, and let’s just remember, those 2 in 10 aren’t doing well, half of 30% is 15%, even if they got all of the vote, that’s still only around a third of their residents that supported them, when we go under half, when we go to 10%, well, let’s say a lot of these councillors don’t have big fan clubs.

And yet they hold power over the most basic services people need, they get to play around with huge sums of public money, they get funded by one of the harshest taxes in the country¹, it’s an absolute fucking joke.

Conclusion

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This is pretty much British democracy at its worst.

Weirdly enough though, I can still see a sunny side, and not just because we’ve been having a lot of good weather lately. This fragmented political climate gives me more hope that the 2 party monopoly could really be brought down for good, and as a result we could really fix the voting system.

And I actually am glad to see more moves towards devolution and local power, I believe that most decisions about people’s lives should be made closer to home by decision makers actually in touch with the communities they decide for, although there’s still a need for more nationwide decisions to be handled centrally².

But either way turnout really is everything, if we just get more experiments that don’t actually manage to engage people, that doesn’t shift the needle on historically low local engagement, devolution could be less of an experiment in empowerment and more of a democratic disaster.

What’s better? Power in the hands of a central government that 30% of people voted for, or a local government 8% voted for? Neither are very good, but a race to the bottom is worse.

So even though it might seem very distant right now I want to hope for better, and if mainstream politics here really is about to fracture, which it really seems it is, it could force both us and our political class to realise that the foundations of our system really aren’t fit for purpose.

This might be the best chance for things to change in over a century, but until then at least I can say I’ve put my voice to use.

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Changelog

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• Edit 1 - 22/07/25 - Added point and footnote about the place for more centralised decisions (mentioning HS2)

Footnotes

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