Mark Smith: I've voted Tory at the local elections. But now I regret it

Except I forgot, didn't I? I forgot to cancel the postal vote for the local elections and so I was sent a ballot again and there I was at home last week voting for the second time, on my own. Sometimes – quite often actually – I make up my mind on the way to the polling station, which is probably why I’ve voted for every major party at least once. By contrast, doing the postal vote felt more bloodless, more detached, and that may be why I was influenced by factors in a way that now, if I’m honest, I regret.

So what did I vote in the end? Conservative as it happens, with a second preference for the Lib Dems, and I’m trying to think about what was on my mind. As anyone who reads this will know, I’m not likely to vote Yes to Scottish independence any time soon, so perhaps the Tory slogan - less effective than it used to be - about sending a message to Sturgeon on independence was my motivation. Anyway, that’s what happened: I voted Tory.

But now I wonder – and not for the first time – if I did the right thing, partly because of the way I’ve seen the campaign develop and partly because of some of the people I’ve been speaking to recently – politicians, campaigners, voters – about what local elections should be about. I also worry about the dysfunctional relationship between central and local government which I think, with my postal vote, I may just have made a little bit worse.

The problem is that the “local” part of local elections has become increasingly suppressed. When I go to my local polling station, I am supposed to be voting for someone to represent my local community on issues that are important locally. I know I’m starting to sound like the shopkeepers in Royston Vasey here, but it’s important and perhaps being at the polling booth would have reminded me of the fact.

Instead, there are two factors which are increasingly squeezing the ‘local’ out of local elections and the first of them is the increasing centralisation of government. Councils have less control over their own finances than ever before and it’s getting worse, mainly through the Scottish Government’s ring-fencing of funding. What that means is that local authorities are effectively working to central government priorities and that is not what local government is supposed to be about.

Then there’s the second factor in all of this, which in a way is more disturbing because the party leaders should know better. Take a look, for example, at what Douglas Ross said at his campaign launch. The elections were all about local priorities, he insisted – investing in schools, repairing roads and building up local services. But he then went on to say that voters had a clear choice between the Tories and SNP candidates concentrating on another independence referendum. In other words, what Mr Ross was really saying was: vote Tory to stop a second referendum.

Nicola Sturgeon was just as bad – in fact, she went even further in conflating local and national issues. Launching her campaign bus, she said the local elections had taken on an added importance because the PM had been found to be a serial breacher of pandemic rules and had also repeatedly misled the House of Commons. "So this election,” she said, “is an opportunity for people to send a message to Boris Johnson that they find his behaviour and response completely unacceptable.”

No. No, Ms Sturgeon. The election is not about sending a message to Boris Johnson – he really has nothing to do with this at all – but I’m afraid her comments are not unusual: Anas Sarwar was at it as well. Speaking on the Today programme the other day, the Scottish Labour leader said voters had a chance to “come home” to his party and that people worried about the constitution should not “reward Boris Johnson with your vote”. It’s the same thing that the other leaders are doing: talking national when they should be talking local.

I’m not sure how you fix this. We are apparently voting in a local election on local priorities but underneath it all in Scotland are two faultlines that constantly shift the ground: one is how much some Scots hate the Prime Minister and the other is how much some Scots hate the idea of a second referendum. Entirely separating out local and national issues is unrealistic, but neither the PM nor Scottish independence is what should matter in these elections.

And so I regret being led by national issues in deciding how I should vote, and I regret not looking more closely at who my local councillor is and what they’ve done in the job and what they propose to do next time. I also regret not prioritising a party that actually says it supports the decentralisation of local government: the Lib Dems. I suspect that until we decentralise in the way they propose by giving councils more control, we’re going to have more and more elections like this one.

In the meantime, I must accept that I probably made a mistake. I voted Conservative because I’m concerned about the threat to the United Kingdom, but I should have thought about it for longer. I should have realised that has nothing to do with the local elections and all I can do is promise is that, next time, I will vote in person. I will walk past the people at the door with the rosettes and pamphlets and slogans and I’ll go into the booth and vote with the pencil on a string. And perhaps it will remind me what these elections are, or should be, about. Perhaps it will remind me that the key word in “local elections” is “local”.

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