Labour has forgotten the first rule of politics: let the people have a say

Four million people will be denied the right to vote in local elections this year, unless Nigel Farage succeeds in a legal action to overturn the government’s decision. Twenty-seven councils, most of them Labour-controlled, have asked to delay elections that were due in May, because they will be abolished in 2028 or 2029. In other words, councillors who were elected for four years are asking to serve another two or three years without bothering the voters.

Steve Reed, the local government secretary, says opposition parties “want pointless elections” while “Labour wants to fix potholes”. He has written an article lecturing the voters on what they really want. “Ask the public if they think it’s a good idea to elect thousands of councillors to jobs that are set to be abolished,” he says.

But that is precisely the problem. He is not planning to ask the public. Instead, he asked the councillors whether they thought it was a good idea not to have elections. Two-thirds of Labour councils said they thought it was, and one-third of Conservative councils. That allowed the government to pretend that this was a cross-party betrayal of democracy: Tory councils had requested “postponement”, the government said, and it would not be so partisan as to refuse.

This ruse succeeded in making life awkward for Kemi Badenoch, who had to declare “I am not a dictator” when she said that she wasn’t keen on abolishing elections but it was up to local councillors if they wanted to take up the government’s offer.

But the attempt to embarrass the Tory leader only opened up a greater opportunity for Farage, who has been given the free hit of condemning the “democratic outrage” of the two traditional parties denying people’s rights.

It is as if Labour has forgotten one of the most basic laws of politics: that it looks bad to oppose a campaign to give people a say. When Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council, Ken Livingstone mobilised London voters behind a campaign for a say. Tony Blair could not resist demands for a referendum on joining the euro, or even on the European constitution – although neither was held in the end.

And David Cameron finally yielded to the decades-long campaign to give the people a say on our membership of the EU. For Farage, “let the people vote” has been the foundation stone of his career.

What is extraordinary is that Labour, for the sake of a few million pounds in savings and in an attempt to minimise the humiliation of election defeat, has fallen into Farage’s trap again.

Reed tries to deflect the onslaught by arguing that reorganising local government into a single tier is a good idea (just as Thatcher did with the abolition of the GLC), which may or may not be true.

He recounts an interesting but irrelevant fact: “Before their area was re-formed in 2020, Buckinghamshire County Council was spending over £30,000 a year picking up the phone just to tell callers they had contacted the wrong local authority.”

But reorganising local government does not require democracy to be cancelled. The argument that councils do not have the “capacity” to run elections and order a new logo for their website at the same time does not seem to apply to those councils that are going ahead with elections despite reorganisation.

Opinion polls suggest that most voters who have a view think that Labour is postponing elections because it thinks it will lose them. But Labour is going to be beaten badly anyway in those places – the majority – that will hold elections. It is defending seats won during the Tory chaos of 2022. In London, it is defending its second-best results in six decades. The results are going to be terrible, and no gaps in the data in places without elections are going to conceal the full awfulness of Labour’s unpopularity.

So why make matters worse by handing Farage the easiest propaganda gift possible, allowing him to portray himself as the defender of democratic rights?