The UK’s national elections in July stood as a largely muted continuation of the country’s amicable political process. Power was peacefully transferred, the opposition won as most people knew they would, and the government’s subsequent public scandals have mostly been the product of idle minds waiting for something more important to talk about. As the theatre of the election and its aftermath gives way to petty pace of government upkeep, one glaring fact lingers; voter turnout in 2024 was at its lowest since universal suffrage.
This fact would serve as an eerie premonition for the political tension of the following summer far-right riots, in which a dissatisfaction with out of touch elites underpinned much of the discontent. This particular source of anxiety is interesting, for it is steeped in Britain’s complicated political economy dating back to the 1970s. Specifically, the British state’s tentative and incremental erosion of local government power, as Whitehall itself grew into a grotesque, lumbering organism no more productive than the institutions it left in its wake.
The mythos of Margaret Thatcher is perhaps the most well established in British political history. The near reverential references to her legacy by Tory leadership candidates in 2022 and 2024 are reminders of the power the Iron Lady’s spirit holds over Whitehall, a decade after her death, and over 3 decades after she left Number 10. The Thatcher narrative has been carved into the conventional wisdom of British history so much so that the reality of Thatcher’s 11 years as PM has been largely occluded from public view.
Despite the liberal, free-market capitalist political economy associated with her today, Thatcher’s time in power saw the significant extension of central state control, under the guise and justifications that her successors would also come to adopt.
Reforms to the National Health Service, the crown jewel of the post-war state, were to be the most symbolic of Thatcher’s centralising revolution. Here, she continued much of the work of her predecessor Edward Heath, abolishing local health committees and placing the Treasury in charge of all 550 new Trust Hospitals’ investments. More generally, services provided by local governments around the country in areas such as Merseyside and the West Midlands, including fire departments, police, and transport, would also have their mandates passed to a system of centrally elected and funded independent administrations.
As the central government extended its reach, it would also come to attract greater national scrutiny. Where initiatives failed, and reforms failed to live up to their expectations, individuals around the country found the object of their discontent growing larger and easier to criticise.
As the Major years came and went, this trend only snowballed out of proportion. Local councils lost practically all control over their own budgets, where local business tax was now collected by the central government as part of corporation tax, and then redistributed to local councils by a complex formula analysing their needs. In effect, councils had lost their right of self determination, and local communities were left to put their hands together so that Whitehall would take mercy on their local services, as they would refuse to do when they needed it most.
By 1997 and into the 2000s, centralisation had become a bi-partisan force. Gordon Brown’s use of the private sector to reform many of the services already transferred from regional control to the centre would see local government humiliated once again. Having to accept unfair proposals for projects from subcontractors put regional bodies again at the mercy of an outside force. This time, it would be that of centrally-directed shareholder capitalism. As projects failed and firms took flight when it became obvious that profits were no longer viable, the state footed the bill, and local communities suffered.
Despite Blair’s attempts at devolution in Wales and Scotland, this initiative did little to rescue English local government from its impotence, as my colleague Luke Goddard noted in his fantastic piece on the potential benefits of bolstering local government.
As recent political history tells us, much of the pull towards right-populist parties around the world is the underlying anger many feel towards the establishment as they feel their material conditions worsen, with no way to tip the scale themselves. In their desperation, voters lash out and vote for candidates who make empty promises of change and scapegoat vulnerable minorities.
Given the nature of the far-right, an inefficient central government, crushed by the weight of expectations and spread thin by its self-imposed mandate, could not be easier to exploit politically. As the electorate’s potential for self determination is eroded with local government, and their livelihoods are squandered by a cabal of private school blazers and Oxbridge gowns, the existential fear that is right-populism’s lifeblood is quick to set in.
A little over a week after the announcement of the Treasury’s budget, it has become clear that its failure was a foregone conclusion. As Reeves tried to plug the leaking holes of an entire country with a single document and a constrained policy portfolio, it was never going to be enough. Despite talk of ‘fixing the foundations’ of the country, little attention has been paid to the manner in which government is structured and power distributed. Instead, the conversation has been diverted to the easier topic of how to fund that same core which ironically grows more inept as its powers are reinforced.
There is much evidence to suggest that the best way to break down support for the right is to show disenchanted voters that the state works for them, through visible change in their local community. A centralised system of government with little knowledge of regional plights is unlikely to provide the care necessary to understand local concerns, and legislate ad hoc to solve them. Small-scale local government, run by civil servants living in the area, is infinitely more disposed to dealing with concerns on the ground, and making local citizens feel empowered in local elections. For now, the humility required to legislate the devolution of central powers to local authorities remains absent. In the meantime, the rest of the country will have to keep waiting, with their hands cupped together and arms outstretched, for Whitehall to decide their fates.
Image: Flickr/Andy Thornley
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