For devolution to make sense as a political programme, there has to be some sense that voters would behave differently in a less centralised country.
We’ve all heard the cliché that ‘all politics is local’. But in England, it might be more accurate to say that ‘most politics is national’. In recent years, local elections for councils and councillors have increasingly come to be seen as mere bellwethers for the national mood, rather than a collection of local contests and issues.
That’s not to say local politics has no impact whatsoever. Sometimes, places do buck the national trend in response to local issues – Tory gains in Croydon in 2022 and Slough in 2023 are recent examples of this.
Nevertheless, the national coverage, national party campaigns, and most voters follow the national story. Sir Keir Starmer last week calling for the local elections to be a test of how national government has delivered on ‘Levelling Up’ is a case in point. This is primarily down to the weakness of local government, and the centralisation of politics, policy, and debate in Westminster and Whitehall.
For devolution to make sense as a political programme, there has to be some sense that voters would behave differently in a less centralised country. A large part of the point of giving powers to local government to improve the local (and national) economy gets missed if voters continue to blame (or reward) everything that goes on locally on happenings in Westminster.
Luckily, even with devolution in its relative infancy, voters appear to think quite differently about the mayors than they do about other politicians.
Our recent polling ahead of this year’s bumper mayoral elections showed that two thirds of people in mayoral areas said that party was more important than the candidate when voting for an MP, but when voting for mayors, the same voters split 50:50 on whether party or candidate was more important.
This same pattern was consistent across all of the mayoral areas, as Figure 1 shows.
What this suggests is that voters in mayoral elections are more likely to vote based upon local issues than they are in normal local elections. Voters hold mayors accountable for their local area – even if their powers are not that developed – because they have a clear electoral mandate at the scale of the local economy.
Voters’ distinct attitude to mayors is exactly what we would expect to see if devolution was changing British politics. By voting on candidates and on local issues, the mayoral model is transferring power out of Westminster and placing it in the hands of local leaders, and ultimately local people.
So, what needs to happen take this political change further? Despite these promising signs, devolution remains unfinished, and England a highly centralised polity, but there are three steps to be taken in the short term.
First, the national conversation needs to understand the mayoral elections as contests in their own right. These elections are not just tea leaves that can be parsed for hints about the “real” election coming later this year – they’re half of England having their say on how their local leaders doing.
Second, the recent changes to the mayoral electoral system should be reversed. In the brief period after Brexit when it appeared the centre right had consolidated around the Conservative Party, the Government replaced the ‘supplementary vote’ system (which gave a first and second preference to voters) that had until that point been used for all mayoral elections with first past the post.
Less than two years later, this change has already backfired. Fragmentation on the right now means that Reform voters in mayoral elections risk undermining Conservative candidates, to the benefit of Labour candidates.
These political ups and downs are for politicians to resolve on their own terms, but the change to the electoral system has been harmful for the devolution agenda. The logic of the mayors is that they give a chance to parties to break through outside their local strongholds with strong local candidates, whatever the national political weather might indicate. First past the post now means more of Westminster politics has the potential to bleed over into local contests, making it harder for good local candidates to give their local campaigns a fair shake.
And third, there needs to be a renewed commitment from national politicians to advance devolution and the mayoral model, including in places where it already exists.
Happily, we are already seeing this. Conservatives have been making steady progress on agreeing devolution deals since the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper, and Labour launched this year’s local election campaign with a commitment to deepening and widening mayoral devolution. As Centre for Cities predicted at the end of 2022, devolution has become England’s new political battleground.
Clichés are normally bad form. But hopefully, the next few years will see politics in England become a little more clichéd by becoming a little more local – even if takes time for Westminster to catch up.
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