Back in January Steve Reed, the minister responsible for local elections, agreed plans for nearly thirty councils to delay their local elections, meaning that four million people lose their chance to vote.
The official excuse is that these councils are all going to be broken up or merged in a couple of years, so why waste money electing people whose jobs might not exist soon?
From a purely technical and managerial perspective this makes sense, but from a more emotive right to vote perspective it's a potential risk for Labour....
That's the basic message being sent out... your views are less important than saving a few quid.... technicals come first and people second, this is a potential gift to a populist party such as Reform!
And that’s exactly the kind of opening someone like Nigel Farage looks for. He thrives on the idea that “the establishment” is gaming the system. When voters get sidelined, even for a little while, it just feeds the suspicion that democracy isn’t really for them.
Like it or not, Farage has made a career out of calling out elite maneuvering. Cancelling elections, even when the reasons are basically sound, slots perfectly into his narrative.
The call to cancel elections in order to save some money is a purely technocratic one: people in the middle rungs of institutions probably think they've scored massively by saving the country a few quid.
The problem is that even if a council is on its way out it still makes important decisions and is still a democratic institution.
And once you start cancelling elections for technocratic reasons, it opens up the possibility of further cancellations...
I'm not so sure cancelling these elections for the sake of saving a few squid is a bright move, given the downsides?!?
