Charles Bannerman discusses the effectiveness of local council, and the issues of party politics

Monday sees the official launch of the 2022 Scottish local government elections where a host of formalities will start with official notification of the poll and run through polling card distribution and nomination of candidates, before culminating in the vote on May 5.

Local councils have such an important part to play in the delivery of local services from schools to social work, from transport to tourism and from planning to pollution management. These are absolutely front line, delivered at a very immediate, local level. As such, I do not believe that they are best administered by a system controlled by political parties and so-called Independent groupings.

I just don’t see what councillors’ views on the free market, on public ownership or on the British constitution have remotely got to do with the efficient emptying of bins, maintenance of schools, fixing of potholes and provision of social housing.

Yet candidates continue to queue up under party colours – and no, I don’t exempt those with “Independent” beside their names because the reality is that Highland Council’s biggest group is effectively an Independent Party.

I’m no great fan of party politics at any level.

Party politics is, in effect, anti-democratic because it results in government being not by the people but by the political parties on which their elected representatives depend for nomination and support. How often, in national government, do we see parliamentarians succumb to the coercion of the whips and do what they are told rather than what they think is right and in the public interest?

In any party political system, the electorate comes a poor second to the requirements of these parties whose priorities are predominantly self-serving, and confrontational towards each other.

Unfortunately for national and devolved government, there seems little alternative to a party system promoting party interest. Even coalitions usually have some cynical trade-off involving how little the senior partner can concede to the often extremely minority views of the junior one.

But if groups of councillors are going to make decisions about these very local services, there’s no need at all for party ideology to be pandered to. Regrettably, though, this is what happens in practice, so by some strange coincidence we find that views on a new school in Thurso or a rest centre in Kingussie polarise in exactly the same way as those on international capitalism or arrangements for the Westminster block grant.

Far too often, local issues are determined not by what councillors actually think but by the relative sizes of their political groupings. There is possibly no better example here than the vote which landed us with the absurd Gathering Place, which split almost totally down party political lines. That there had been years of extensive and strongly expressed public opposition to this wheeze mattered not one jot.

Council elections never seem to attract candidates under the banner “genuinely independent”, with the emphasis on the “genuinely”.

If they did, and if councillors were elected on their personal abilities and locally based viewpoints, then the pool of candidates would produce a much more effective and credibly democratic model of local government.

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