Ok so yesterday was the local elections in the UK. And I have to say the coverage is piss poor. I have spent 30 minutes trying to find the results of the race I voted it and have been unable to. BBC only has resolution to the county level, and even local coverage by Cherwell TV only did indepth coverage of one race (Hollywell Ward).
Beyond the paucity of news coverage of the results, there is the lack of campaign information during the race as well. None of the candidates have their own campaign website (WTF do they not know this is the 21st century?) each party at least has a separate site for each county (but for some it is very difficult to find) with a one paragraph bio of each candidate.
However, I don't see how these could be truthfully be called "local elections" there was pretty much 0 coverage of local issues, (I found a grand total of 1 article covering a hustings on local issues for Oxford). The results are being covered as aggregated nation-wide and interpretted as in response to national issues. Local candidates belong to a party similar to national candidates and there seems to be no difference between the local parties and national parties. It doesn't help that local elections are synchronized nation-wide permitting these sorts of national interpretations/comparisions.
The only surprise is that many MPs talk about giving more power to local councils. Perhaps this is because they know it makes no difference to their power because the local doesn't really exist.
I find this totally bizarre. Consider, Hamilton population: 500,000 has a city council of 15 without political parties at the local level and directly elected mayor, vs Oxford population: 150,000 has a city council of 48 with political parties and no directly elected mayor. Which would you expect to have better local representation?
In municipal (local) elections in Canada, every councillor candidate has their own website, in addition every mayoral candidate has their own website, each with their own platform and vision for the city. There are many mayoral debates at various locations around the city. Councillors put up lawn signs at the houses of their supporters and most have telephone campaigns to reach voters directly. Usually you get a flyer from every candidate. Elections are based on local issues not national or provincial ones, and coverage is suitably local with many local radio stations and newspapers having articles/interviews during the campaign.
In the local election in Oxford, I managed to find about a paragraph about each candidate. I saw not a a single sign/poster. I recieved one A4 page from one of the parties/candidates, one half of one side was actually about my candidate the rest was just about the party in general. There was only one debate I heard about and it had a piece meal collection of candidates of various parties from one or two wards. No telephone call, no door knocks. I have no clue what the "issues" were. And coverage even by local sources was composed of one article about the debate and two articles about the results and maybe 10-20minutes of video talking to two candidates after the results came in. Plus a flood of national level coverage about how the results reflect the dissatisfaction with the national austerity measures.
Clearly, the UK (perhaps due to its small size) does not in practice have local politics/local decision making, despite having more local representatives per population.
