I often find myself really liking the idea of local democracy and wishing for more of it where I live, but then I remember the kind of insane moral puritans with nothing better to do that get attacted to local politics like flies to rubbish tips! My country has a very authoritarian instinct among many in society to ban anything that doesn't neatly fit into their beige conventionality, and as bad as our heavily centralised government can be at least it keeps a muzzle on those sorts of people to an extent.
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Local democracy sounds nice in the abstract, right up until you look at it: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/05/handforth-in...
(Note that a 'parish council' here is for a civil parish, that is the smallest type of administrative unit in the UK; it's not a church parish)
At that point, you will probably be relieved that those idiots aren't allowed do anything important.
I suppose in principle if local authorities were more important, you might get more competent people running for election onto them, but given the average quality of _national_ backbenchers, this seems optimistic.
I think we have to fundamentally change how the party system works if we're going to get people in politics for the right reasons in general, but especially in local politics. There's no reason that the people collecting bins, filling potholes, and providing essential services along those lines need to be associated with the moral abattoirs that are the national political parties for example, at least in my experience these local politicians are voted on based on an area's national political inclinations rather than any individual merit which lets all sorts of lunatics in. The first thing we need to do is break this link and make local government completely non-partisan.
I wish there was an empirical way of screening out moral puritan types with the aim of directly eliminating their influence, but I'm not sure that can be done without endangering democracy itself. A more difficult but much more ethical approach I think is to try and create new social norms that make aggressive conformity something to be ashamed rather than proud of, puritanism in any direction should be made into a sign of weakness rather than strength. We need a society that instinctively defends "witches" when the witch-hunters are in town.
> The first thing we need to do is break this link and make local government completely non-partisan.
That's impossible; political parties naturally emerge in democracies. Very few countries have the official recognition of parties that the US does (party registration, official primaries etc) but all democracies have political parties.
Even if we kept national politics partisan which I'm personally against for a number of reasons, the petty squabbles and power plays of Westminster are utterly irrelevant to the functions of local government and should play no part in its selection.
Non-partisan democracies do exist, some of them are even directly associated with the UK such as the Falkland Islands and the Isle of Man which are roughly the size of a British parish and a council respectively.
I think part of the problem is media coverage of the democracy - at some point, coherent, competent analysis and coverage becomes impractical.