Opinion: I Will Not Be Voting in the County Council Election Today

Published on: 30 Apr, 2025
Updated on: 5 May, 2025

Bernard Quoroll, former CEO of several local authorities and official observer of foreign elections, considers today’s non-election…

Who would I have voted for today? The question is academic, the county council election that had been due to be held today was cancelled, so my wishes and those of all the other citizens in Guildford and Surrey do not seem to be needed.

County councillors will get a free pass to continue to receive their financial allowances and to decide on local services for another couple of years, whatever our feelings as an electorate might be.

And all of this because someone in the central Government has decided that it is perfectly acceptable to remove all our local democratic rights and expectations for a while in the interests of expediency.  It smacks of arrogance and disdain.

No one even bothered to ask us in advance what we might think about that.  Perhaps that is not quite true because the leader of Surrey County Council did get first dibs to write and tell the Government how very much he agrees with them.

In doing so, he of course gets to avoid the ballot box at which some local citizens might have wanted to express an unhelpful opinion about how well he and his colleagues have been performing on our behalf.  That must be worthy of an Honour.

Now the Government will say that this is all just a necessary corollary of their decision to impose local government reorganisation on shire counties and districts (all at break-neck speed and all in pursuit of the ambition to impose large remote unitary bodies on a population which has been given no meaningful chance to express an opinion).

The Government will also say that it even obtained a mandate for its plans at the last election.  And anyway, what it is doing is not a denial but only a delay to the exercise of our democratic rights. So what is the problem?

Well here’s the rub: the Government may have received a mandate for a policy but they certainly did not get one for the detail and that is where the devil lies.  Remote unitary councils, with populations of around 600,000 people are not local government.  They are extensions of central Government, amounting to little more than centrally dictated local administration.

Why am I getting so hot under the collar?  After all, it is only local government and local democracy does not seem to matter too much in the greater scheme of things. That is certainly true, insofar as both the largest political parties have seen things over at least the last 50 years.

In modern times, real local government, locally funded and with its own mandate, strong enough to resist the centralising tendencies of nationally focused governments and fight for local causes, has always been anathema.

There has been some devolution to constituent countries during that period but when you look at long-term trends, central government has never loosened its purse strings (quite the reverse).

Laughingly called “devolution”, there has been an obsession with imposing “strong” mayors on regionally sized communities, designed to encourage local deals for centrally-inspired purposes which have never decreased.

That is not devolution. But it tells us all we need to know about the line of travel.

Yet despite massive underfunding, local government continues to try to deliver vital services to some of the most deprived people in our community, spending over £120 billion each year.  It ought to matter more.  Can you imagine what would be said if central Government did something similar? But actually it did, courtesy of Mr Johnson who tried to prorogue Parliament and look what happened there!

During what now seems to be a relentless march toward authoritarianism, how we are governed locally really matters.  Already one of the most centralised countries among western democracies, we fail to notice and resist these centralising tendencies at our peril.

It is no exaggeration to say that every step toward a system in which our opinions are denied or delayed is a downward one.  Having observed over 30 elections in different parts of the world, it is striking how often authoritarian governments build their power over decades by flexing rules in their own interests and how thin the dividing line is between rule-making and rule-breaking.

The playbook is now well established.  It is also salutary to note how often local politicians in some places have been able to use local positions of elected power to present alternatives to would-be dictatorships.

A healthy democracy depends on real checks and balances at local and national levels.  When that is degraded, we all suffer.   But of course there is no risk of that happening here and those who suggest otherwise are just conspiracy theorists or must be exaggerating (as they were and are in the USA, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France, Turkey…

Sadly, it is a growing list and we are not immune.

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