Local elections: just fix the potholes

We live in a quiet valley surrounded by forest and farmland, around 40 minutes north of London. It’s a classically rural area mostly populated (until recently) by shire Tories with a deep attachment to the land, shoots and the old ways.

The floor of nearby Ashridge forest in late April is a blaze of bluebells. New-born lambs dot the hillsides. Our neighbouring fields are a shock of mustard yellow – great sweeps of rapeseed planted in response to a spike in world prices, due partly to extreme weather and the war in Ukraine, historically a major supplier.

Our nearest market town, six miles over the hill and into the next valley, is historic Berkhamsted. It’s where King Harold’s Anglo-Saxon nobles surrendered to the Normans in 1066. It’s an area steeped in tradition, ancient pubs and outsized tractors hauling hay in the summer.

The drive from our village to this ancient market town has, in recent years, been something of an obstacle course. Not deer or badgers that suddenly materialise in your headlights out of nowhere on dark, windswept nights, but potholes.

About a month ago the northern approach to Berkhamsted was suddenly, miraculously, smoother. Fresh tarmac had been laid, overnight, on a three-quarter mile stretch of road. Further back, where white chalk squares had appeared in March, several dozen potholes were filled. It was mood changer.

This was done with seamless efficiency, just in time for the local elections in England and Wales on May 1. Not a coincidence. All 78 Hertfordshire Council seats are up for grabs. The Tories – the only party to have overall control of the council since it was formed in 1974 – have been slowly haemorrhaging support as Berkhamsted and other towns grow and change.

The soaring cost of housing in London and a spate of newbuilds in the area has attracted a younger crowd with a more metropolitan outlook. There’s a notable increase in smart SUVs. A Gail’s bakery has triggered an explosion of chi-chi coffee shops populated by yummy mummies and their monster double buggies.

Potholes matter. A pothole in a car-owning democracy is a loud political failure. It may not be as profound a symbol of incompetence as, say, a broken social care system. But it does speak to a government’s willingness to listen and act. If it can’t fix a few potholes, how can it possibly fix the NHS or climate change?

In recent years the Lib Dems have made deep inroads into these Tory strongholds. They took over Dacorum in 2023. They already had St Albans — a thriving and trendy alternative to the blandness of London’s commuter sprawl — Watford and Three Rivers council.

Britain is changing. British politics is becoming more fragmented, unstable and emotional. Changing demographics transforming towns like Berkhamsted, St Albans and Harpenden are producing new loyalties and more complex battlegrounds.

Rural voters who feel forgotten by the political establishment are turning to independent candidates or protest parties: Reform or the Lib Dems. Deeply embedded Tory heritage, from Devon to Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire, is being ruthlessly uprooted.

In the past as rural Britain (including small market towns like Berkhamsted) has skewed towards older voters, they’ve stuck with the Conservatives. Those vividly described by Edmund Burke, that great sceptic of centralised power, as society’s Little Platoons. But scandals, poor services, more potholes and the post-Brexit loss of EU subsidies and cheap food imports have blown a hole in that support.

On the other side of this equation is the equal and opposite demographic trend: Millennials, younger voters less rooted in time and place, have flooded in. They are tech-savvy, more demanding, more connected. They care less about tradition than about consumption and doing well.

The beneficiaries of these wild swings in preference could be Reform or the Lib Dems or the Greens. Or none of the above. Which isn’t much of an analysis, I grant you, but that’s the whole point. The electoral horizon is shrouded in fog. Local – and to a certain extent national — elections are becoming harder to predict.

Reform UK are fielding 1,600 candidates in the May elections. Nigel Farage, its leader, has chosen climate change and net-zero – the target set by the Conservatives and Labour for 2050 — as his “next Brexit”. As a sweetener, he has also vowed to be Britain’s Elon Musk by slashing council spending. Good luck with that.

Which brings us back to potholes. Or, at any rate, potholes as a metaphor for what ails us and what needs to be done to restore our plummeting faith in politicians and in the state as an instrument of change and improvement.

Commentators often talk about how political parties need to develop a meaningful “narrative” if they’re to be taken seriously by the electorate. They need a “good story” to tell. Party spin doctors are particular afficionados of this approach to winning the hearts if not the minds of voters.

I wish I could say this is bunkum. But it’s not. Voters all too often fall for a narrative they vote for but later come to regret: Take back control; for the many not the few; make America great again.

But as the rise of Reform UK and a topsy-turvy Trump II starkly demonstrate, a good story isn’t enough. In fact, it’s worse than useless because it raises expectations that cannot be met.

It’s balm to the angry soul but it does nothing to improve our lives, as the Brexit flop has shown and American voters are finding out. The spike in benchmark 10-year Treasury bills yields — the amount borrowers charge to buy them and fund US government spending – tells the story. Confidence in America is sinking.

Politicians are fond of saying that all politics is local. That’s not true either. The blowback from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a perfect example of why politicians need to work across national borders. What happens in Ukraine doesn’t stay in Ukraine. Which is why pure nationalism is ultimately self-defeating.

No, the answer lies in potholes. How do we fix them? How do we fix the NHS, how do we clean up our rivers, how do we replace local post offices, banks, bus routes, GP surgeries, libraries that are disappearing faster than yesterday’s slogan? How do we manage change that is inevitable without hurting too many people?

One of the genuinely disappointing aspects of Keir Starmer’s government so far is the absence of tangible, measurable gains. Perhaps the problems Britain faces are too profound, too systemic, too long-term to be fixed in any one lifetime.

Or perhaps they’re simply too politically inconvenient. Our leaders are too busy looking over the shoulders at the next political threat – desperately searching for that magic narrative, the killer slogan, to focus on fixing potholes.

If the experience in Berkhamsted is anything to go by, forget the narrative. Just fix the potholes.

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