No thanks Mr Mayor

I see that over on Left Foot Forward they are arguing that directly elected Mayors will help to reinvigorate local politics. This position is based on the idea that a powerful local Mayor, directly elected by the people empowers the area.

The authors of the piece rightly worry about the budget cuts to come "no matter which party wins" the next general election and that the remedy against this is to give more power, financial autonomy and control to a new generation of super-Mayors.

I think this is a mistaken view, if well intentioned. It's quite right that over the last forty years the balance of power between local authorities and the national government has fundamentally shifted towards the center making local government a mere arm of central government, disempowering local voters.

I believe that's a problem that we need to reverse but it's a mistake to think we need novel new structures to do this, particularly when the proposal would make local government less representative of the people, not more.

For some time local councils have been shifted towards a far more cabinet style structure where the majority of councillors provide for voting fodder and a handful of members take the core decisions, forming a layer of professional politicians. Deepening this 'winner takes all' approach is the very opposite of what all recent democratic reforms have been about.

Concentrating power into the hands of a single person denies the possibility of a diverse, pluralistic political system that represents (proportionally?) the breadth of views of local people. It makes it harder for those who are in minority to influence events, and ironically it disempowers supporters of the majority parties who end up either having to be for or against 'their' Mayor.

It's one thing to argue that local government should have more autonomy, I'm for that, it's quite another to then pass that autonomy to one big cheese rendering local councillors pretty much like a set of stage armies.

Ironically the authors say that more mayors would help undermine the pull towards politics being populated by professional politicians. In fact it would do the exact opposite. The majority of local councillors *are* ordinary people drawn from the local area, it's the centralisation of local government that has undermined those councillors to the benefit of a smaller, more elitist core.