Too much mud and noise and not enough about local issues

Nobody in politics gets a prize for pointing out that local issues are too often pushed aside in local elections.

But a cliché – in this case that observation – is merely a truth repeated so many times it’s become boring and unenlightening. It remains true none the less.

Legend of children’s TV Tony Hart created a character made of red clay for a stop-go animation long before Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit, called Morph.

As the campaigns ahead of Thursday’s vote go into the last days there is so much mud flying around that any voters, actually bothered about what it is they are voting for could end up like Morph, covered head to toe in a muddy crossfire.

Amidst such frenetic politicking there are however some issues that stand out as worthy of recovery, and analysis within this mudfest.

Kevin Hollinrake, Chairman of the Conservative Party, lays out this morning why a vote for the party is backing for well-run councils, but he knows the mission right now is to ensure the election results are not as bad for the party as had been expected and hope, along with other parties that Reform’s result is not as good as they’ve boasted.

That is their best scenario and demonstrates the key issue for the Tories, that Kemi Badenoch may be increasingly popular but the brand still needs a lot of work.

However it does raise an eyebrow that Nigel Farage was gifted £5 Million before he became an MP, and that it was entirely for his own personal use, and he did not declare it. He does not want to be asked about it, and Fraser Nelson at the Times is right that the issue is as much about the unprecedented sum, as it is a donation.

Zia Yusuf has announced a startling and legally undeliverable election promise, that when – and if – he is not Reform’s home affairs spokesman but Home Secretary (an option not actually on the table this Thursday) that Reform will build immigration detention centres in Green held constituencies but never in Reform ones. That itself is worthy of further analysis. Is that a promise he cannot keep, but is making anyway.

But he and indeed Farage aren’t standing. Nigel won’t run a council, and he isn’t on the ballot. Neither for that matter is Keir Starmer, and yet voters would be forgiven for thinking he really sort of is.

Reform explicitly, but other parties tacitly, have framed the elections as a referendum on Starmer, and his Government. Thing’s for Starmer started badly and have got worse. It long ceased to be a partisan observation that he has not been up to a job he may not have for much longer. Many of his own Cabinet and party rivals clearly think the same.

To list all the reasons why these elections have become quite so focused on the Prime Minister’s fate would be to detain you all longer than I wish to on a Bank Holiday Monday, but a cursory look at the last twenty months would do it.

My own view, on a day the Conservatives reveal more than 600,000 households received more in benefits than the average worker’s salary, is that he was doomed by the failed attempt to restrict the rise in welfare spending, because his own MPs wouldn’t let him. That inability to force change past your own back benchers is what did for the Conservative catalogue of previous Prime Ministers.

Again, away from any local issues, we’ve learned more about Zack Polankski in this campaign, much of it a warning.

Given that successful populism of any kind is predicated on offering people what they want to hear, it’s worth asking who exactly – and we probably know – want’s more antisemitism?

The outrage when you say this is expressed, often, by the same people who liked to pile in on one, back in the Corbyn days.  But there have been two very clear cases of Green candidates called out for naked expression of such, and making ones first concern after the Golders Green incident how the police dealt with the attacker, begs questions.

Tali Fraser’s powerful and personal response to such questions is well worth your time.

I for one am tired of the cynical deployment of Polanski’s riposte that he’s the ‘only Jewish leader of a political party in Britian’ every time he’s asked to account for those in his ranks that actually transparently sell hate not hope. Who exactly are you targeting if ‘globalise the intifada’ doesn’t mean targeting others than the state of Israel?

There is no response from any body, to the fears of British Jews, that should remotely begin with, ‘but given what’s been happening in Gaza…’, and for the record, Gaza is not a council up for election! Been a while since it was as it happens.

The Liberal Democrats seem to have avoided some of the mud, largely because the threat they pose seems to be ignored, and discounted. Whilst it seems obvious they are not going to win big with Ed Davey in charge I think their creeping threat to the Tories and others is being too casually overlooked.

These are the first elections where five party politics, that in Scotland and Wales involves the SNP and Plaid Cymru of course is massively in play. Tactical voting suddenly becomes more effective and again, whilst all of this has little to do with governance on the ground, most of the parties are more interested in the national vote share figures than the numbers of councils or councillors.

After the cavalcade rolls on, and gets, I suspect, increasingly louder, life in English councils, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd will go on, with the minutiae of bins, roads, street lighting, looked after children, schools and care for the elderly.

Who they get to run all that, and why they got there may have very little connection to any of that.