Josh Coldspring-White: Becoming the party of local champions is our route to renewal in towns halls and Westminster

Josh Coldspring-White is Communications Officer for the Social Market Foundation, and a councillor for Hayes & Coney Hall in the London Borough of Bromley.

I’m certainly pleased my own seat wasn’t up for grabs this year.

These years set of local elections can be appropriately described as an absolute drubbing for the Conservatives, with Reform UK confirmed as the insurgent party across swathes of the country.

Although there are rays of sunshine through the pickup of the Mayoralty in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, the pincer movement of Liberal Democrats in the South and Reform in the Midlands and North has confirmed the party faces it’s biggest challenge for relevance in many electoral cycles.

This is though, in many ways, to be expected – no one on the centre-right of politics would tell you that the party could (or even should) be miraculously forgiven in the space of less than a year since the General Election – especially in the context of a Conservative landslide the last time these Councils were contested.

So then the question becomes, what can the party do in the future to cement themselves as the alternative Government – seeing off this pincer movement from rearing its ugly head? To me (and yes, I might be biased) the answer starts with local government.

We live in a time when cynicism of politics and politicians is rife. Many look at the public realm – their local high street, park and leisure centre – and see it creaking at the seams. In fact, I think I could make a safe wager on the hypothesis that the amount of potholes a given voter drives past increases their rage towards Westminster.

Excellent analysis by Archie Hall in the Economist recently seems to corroborate this, shining a light on increasing pessimism (even for Brits) amongst the general public on issues from road maintenance and crime to the local economy and increasing taxation. On a much larger scale, the SMF’s own recent analysis found high crime to be one of the factors that is consistent with an increased Reform vote share.

So, in that case, it stands to reason that the party that offers a coherent plan and credible vision to fix the public realm has the potential to appeal to voters. But to put that plan into action, and rebuild bonds with the electorate, they need to control councils.

For the Conservatives, this means passionately taking up the mantle of being the party of the local community champion: the people that will roll up their sleeves, organize the local fete and lobby for funds to improve the local playground, proving they are ready to do the work of renewal.

This is where the Liberal Democrats thrive, and political parties should never be afraid to learn from the successes of their opponents.

Let us not forget, this has usually been the cause the Tories have adopted. This is much of the reason why there was a surprising resilience in Tory fortunes at a local level the last time Labour was in government. Take the example that in the local elections held on the same day as the 1997 general election, Conservatives gained 193 county councillors at the expense of Lib Dems, winning control in places like Kent, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire.

By channeling their focus on the hyper-local, the Conservatives can credibly challenge the Liberal Democrats and offer an alternative to Reform, who campaign on solely national issues. It is this approach through which the party can tap into a new generation of candidates for local – but eventually, national – elections, and which offers the most credible path back to government.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s the best chance the Party has to prove to the electorate it is ready to show humility, listen, learn, change, and ultimately ready to wield the awesome responsibility of government.

And all it could take is sprucing up a high street, renovating a leisure center and, of course, getting rid of the damn potholes.