At the root of the debate about delaying local elections this year is a dilemma. If you choose your democratic right for them to go ahead, you risk delaying the implementation of a change which could give you more agency in the long run. Perhaps the biggest positive change of any in recent history.
Why it matters
Devolution is one of the current government’s flagship policies, one of its core manifesto pledges, and arguably the single most impactful change to how democracy is done on our island this century. It simplifies the current muddle of different local councils, and creates new elected mayors with serious strategic powers. It is a historically rare show of humility: largely London-based politicians admitting that they do not know how best to run our areas.
The plan acknowledges that they cannot run England as if it is London; it recognises that we know best how our own home works. Devolution will give us the ability to elect someone who can do more than chase up the council to sweep the roads – it will give us someone who can decide things way further up the line. It could transcend the jurisdictional malaise that has set in across many parts of the country; the constant name-calling and blaming that happens between the city, borough, district and county councils so desperately in need of unification. Because who, bar hopeless idealists like myself – interested in politics because we hope we have access to our own agency – actually knows what any of those actually are?
Political apathy
To grasp the importance of devolution, we need to recognise the vicious circle behind the oft-lamented lack of interest in politics. The more disenfranchised a person feels in the system, the less they feel they can affect it, the less they will participate. This leaves us in a place where the people who have the most to gain from choosing their vote carefully are the least likely to do so, or to vote at all.
They are more likely to believe the people who live far, far away, and who know nothing about their community. The people who decide what they read, watch and hear because they have more zeros tacked on to the end of their net worth. And we as a society seem to have decided that that is reason enough to give them control over the information we access about the world around us.
In reality, we should recognise how impressionable we are and therefore how far we should run away from people who want to conserve their wealth; how misaligned their interests and ours truly are.
Devolution is the answer
If we truly believe in a democratic system, if we want to make choices for ourselves and believe we are up to the task of making them, if we don’t want to outsource our brain processing either to AI or to the first rich man who talks about the problems we face. We must scream and cry and gasp for devolution, for localised governance of our services.
We must understand that this is our last stand against the army of billionaires and their puppets threatening to return to power. We need to arm ourselves with patience while we sort out the bureaucracy of reorganisation.
As the leader of Tory Norfolk County Council put it: “If our elections go ahead in 2026, I cannot guarantee that my council will be able to deliver devolution because of the governance restraints.
“In the case of implementing local government reorganisation successfully, we will face significant challenges in the reorganisation of eight councils into a currently unknown number of unitaries. In both these cases there is the added issue of the political will and capacity of the new administration to implement the government’s priorities.”
This is not an issue along party lines. There is, and has always been, consensus among all vaguely pragmatic politicians that elections in the middle of local government reorganisation harms the process. In our case it’s the invaluable process of devolution, of control, of a path to a world where we do not feel so hopeless. Where we feel we have someone to turn to when things need improving. A world of comfort, community and conviviality which feels intensely British, vividly Norfolk. May the mayor we choose to elect live up to this vision.
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