‘No taxation without representation’ must be non-negotiable

Around this time last week, I was standing in the pouring rain in West Sussex, handing out leaflets to defend something that should never have needed defending: the right of local residents to vote. The TaxPayers’ Alliance had been out across the county campaigning against the Labour government’s plan to cancel elections in 30 local authorities across England. Leading the charge were the Telegraph, which launched its Campaign for Democracy last month, and Reform UK, which had brought a legal challenge that was due to be heard in court on Thursday – and which the government was expected to lose.

But taxpayers should never have had to rely on opposition parties, newspapers and campaign groups to defend the most basic principles of democracy. Holding regular elections should be the bare minimum we expect of the people in charge.

Now, Keir Starmer has performed his latest u-turn and those local elections are back on. But let’s not dress this up as a government listening to the people. The government tried to trample over local democracy, faced the wrath of the British people and backed down.

The official justification for the cancelled elections was always nonsense. Labour’s upcoming local-government reorganisation apparently made elections too expensive, complicated and, in the words of communities secretary Steve Reed, ‘pointless’. But functioning democracies don’t suspend elections because they are inconvenient or expensive. By that logic, any government could put off elections indefinitely.

The more plausible explanation is that Labour looked at the polls, saw the wipeout coming on 7 May and decided that stripping 4.5million people of their vote was preferable to facing the consequences of their own failures.

What made it worse was what these councils were planning to do had the elections not gone ahead. Spared the inconvenience of facing voters, they weren’t even willing to show a modicum of humility or contrition by freezing council tax. Indeed, the councils that planned to delay their elections are expected to add £121million more in council tax compared with the previous year. Some of them would have been postponing elections for the second year in a row and yet they were still planning to hike bills.

The average band-D household in England is paying 16 per cent more in council tax than in 2022-23. Councillors would have been adding even more to that burden without any democratic mandate to do so. The principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ is centuries old, dating back well beyond the American Revolution. Sadly, this age-old tenet is incomprehensible to the posse of petty authoritarians we call our elected politicians.

Depending on how generously you’re counting, this is somewhere around Labour’s 14th u-turn in government. At this point, the u-turn is Keir Starmer’s only consistent governing philosophy. Announce something outrageous. Face pushback. Retreat. Repeat. Future historians trying to summarise the Starmer years will struggle to find a defining achievement, but they won’t struggle to find a defining pattern.

Now, thanks to the legal incompetence of our former prosecutor turned prime minister, councils face a scramble to organise elections they had written off. Reversing the bad decision won’t reverse the damage it caused. Taxpayers will be forced to foot the £63million bill that central government has put aside to help councils deal with the fallout from this u-turn and the chaotic reorganisation of town halls.

If Keir Starmer wants to pretend that he even has a shred of respect for the local democracy and the hard-working taxpayers that he has spent months trying to crush, there is only one thing he should be doing: bringing in an iron clad law to prevent this from ever happening again. If in future there is ever another attempt to trample on local democracy, councils should be forced to freeze council tax and all other charges. The principle is simple: no vote, no tax rise. It’s the least councils could do.

While some may take the local-elections u-turn and claim it as a win, what we won’t do is pretend it represents anything other than a government that tried to strip millions of people of their vote, failed, and is now hoping we’ll forget about it and move on. This is a stain that will indelibly mark this government for as long as the British electorate is condemned to suffer under its rule.

Anne Strickland is a researcher at the TaxPayers’ Alliance