Our political class has a habit of discussing local politics only as a bellwether for the national trends. The coverage of this week’s local elections has been dominated by Brexit, with the Conservatives expected to perform particularly poorly on the back of their catastrophic mishandling of the process.
This is no big surprise given the historical marginalisation of Britain’s local authorities. The Attlee government based the post-war welfare state on the logic of top-down, national interventionism aimed at raising and reducing disparities in living standards across the country.
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