The paradoxes of local government reorganisation: political pluralism, local identity, and devolution

Going back to the early 1970s if not before, local government reorganisation in the UK has been a contentious and, at times, contested process. One of the more controversial cases of LGR in recent times took place in Dorset on the south coast of England in 2019, where nine councils were merged into two unitary authorities: Dorset Council and Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole (BCP) Council. In the latter case, such was the degree of discord that an unofficial referendum was held to canvass local resentment and a judicial review was even sent up to the High Court. It might be seen as a relatively minor episode in the ongoing fractious relations between local and national government, particularly against a backdrop of austerity and a funding crisis in local government. Paradoxically, however, centralisation has had powerful unintended consequences for the political complexion of the region, enabling a greater degree of political pluralism and diversity than hitherto. At the local elections in 2019, the first local elections to the newly formed BCP council, a new administration was established based on a coalition of different parties, groups, and independent councillors, the ‘Unity Alliance’, which ousted the Conservatives, who had controlled all three of the previous individual borough councils. This paper takes the example of the 2019 LGR in Dorset to understand how political affiliations and identities are being reshaped at the local level. It argues that support for non-Tory parties and groups has not simply been aroused by an increasingly unpopular national government but by a reassertion of the local as a vehicle of political agency, particularly as it has been expressed in civic and town-based identities and through the growth of local independent parties, such as Poole People Party and the Christchurch Independents, which are organised along different lines to existing national political parties. While the creation of unitary authorities in the UK has not brought about any increase in powers or functions of local government, we use this example to consider the more general dynamics at work large-scale processes of devolution and how they animate (or not) local identities and feelings (of pride, jealous, anger), which shape how local actors respond to and engage with national political priorities. It suggests that such identities and feelings are linked to politics in more complex ways, enabling surprising possibilities or alternatives for political change.