Looking ahead to the local council elections on 5th May - what do councils do and who stands to lose or gain?

Manchester Town Hall, where the one third of council seats are up for election. Photograph: Manchester Town Hall by Mark Andrew (License) (Cropped)

The return of Members of Parliament to work after the Easter Recess, is a good time to take a look at what is ahead. For MPs, the impact of their efforts over the next month will be for the benefit of others in their party besides themselves.

On the 5th May there will be elections. Amongst them are the Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and London devolved assembly elections. But perhaps most pressing for the situation at Westminster will be the midterm local council elections.

Local government in the UK, in the form of elected councils and council workers in their employ, represents a confusingly multi-tiered system that provides or commissions local services (LGA, 2011) - some of which represent mandatory duties while others are discretionary and the council can charge not-for-profit fees for them.

The services councils provide include those for children, like schools; for adults with needs; social housing and housing benefit; scrutiny of local health services; museums, libraries, sports and recreation facilities; care for local roads and co-ordination of public transport; care for the local environment and management of waste collection and disposal or recycling; planning; collection of local taxes like business rates and council taxes; administration of elections; and the keeping of registers of births, deaths and marriages.

After six years of austerity, with as much as 40% of funding cut from their budgets, and likely cuts more to come, there has been substantial discontent on councils, and in party council associations, with the government (Sparrow, 2015) - not least in the Conservative association. That situation has not been eased by the transfer of further burdens not being matched by the transfer of sufficient means of funding, and central government decisions like the substantial cut to business rates included in Budget 2016 (BBC, 2016).

Governments usually struggle during midterms - especially after spending a long time in government. But after years of austerity, with frontline services slashed even, to his great discontent, in the Prime Minister's own council area (ITV, 2015), the Conservatives must be expecting considerable losses.

So for the Conservatives, this election is fairly simple. Lose as little as they can and hope that their opponents, particularly Labour, fall well short of their own targets - from the Conservative view, embarrassingly enough that it becomes an interesting news story.

What the Conservatives do not want is Jeremy Corbyn's Labour to show itself able to beat the Tories in the popular polls. Labour will almost certainly be under pressure to, at least, achieve results comparable with those of Ed Miliband from 2012, which means gaining a not insignificant number of council seats (Labour List, 2016).

However, possibly of greater importance from the view of the MPs returning to work today, is the national vote share. What MPs at Westminster will want to know is whether a Corbyn-led Labour can come first in the popular vote - because that would establish the party as a realistic option come 2020.

Labour's efforts at achieving gains in vote share and seats will be hampered by the array of parties scrapping with each other, as well as with the Conservatives, to make gains (Ford, 2016). In Scotland, the seemingly unstoppable SNP momentum will make life difficult for Labour, while in Wales Plaid Cymru tend to be much stronger when it is Welsh Assembly election time than in the national polls.

In England, UKIP will likely continue to plague Labour - as they have yet to go away completely despite the failure of their big push in May 2015 and the stats saying their vote share has fallen by a swing of around 8% nationally since then (Britain Elects, 2016), not least because of the European Union Referendum scheduled for June.

There may also be some pressure applied to Labour by the Liberal Democrats. It's one thing for the party to talk up its #LibDemFightback, but another for, over the same period from the May 2015 election, the party to see a positive swing of around 4% (Britain Elects, 2016{2}) - putting it well ahead of the other parties in England in terms of local momentum.

Not least do the Liberal Democrats have a reputation for campaigning at the local level, based on a committed and engaged approach to local government and community-based politics that is even acknowledged by their opponents (BBC, 2015; Labour List, 2016). If momentum swings back their way, they may have a positive showing that gives tangible substance to their fightback.

From Labour's perspective, they may help their own cause by establishing these things as limiting factors (Ford, 2016), allowing them to set their own, much more modest, targets. Yet they are unlikely to have that liberty and will probably be under pressure to make real terms gains.

For MPs at Westminster, the next few weeks and the bills that they will debate could have a substantive impact on the council elections. Policy at the national level will be seen through the lens of its impact on local government - at least a temporary boon for local government that can often feel sidelined from political debate and policy decisions that affect them being made centrally at Westminster.

It should be kept in mind, however, that midterm election results can only tell you so much. Local government elections from 2011 through 2014 all saw Labour under Ed Miliband top the polls - though sometimes only barely as the UKIP spectre ate away at the support of both the Conservatives and Labour.

From a country-wide perspective, what midterm local elections can be is a substantive base with which to demonstrate momentum, a fightback, and upon which to build a platform. For progressives from all parties, under a Conservative government and with council services under increasing strain, that will likely be the main hope with 2020 firmly in mind.

John Bercow's misinterpreted laugh was a mirthless acknowledgement of the fruitless fight for political reform

Speaker John Bercow has fought a long uphill battle to improve the public image and engagement of Parliament. Photograph: John Bercow by Julian Mason (License) (Cropped)

During the tense and heated Syria debate, the House of Commons was for once at full capacity. The significance afforded to the event saw not only high attendance by MPs through out the day, but also saw Speaker John Bercow chair the entire eleven-hour session (May, 2015).

While Bercow received praise for his uninterrupted chairing of the debate, he also came in for criticism for a laugh, at the debate's end, that seems to have been widely misinterpreted. Those familiar with the habits of Members of Parliament may well have interpreted that laugh very differently.

When the debate on Syrian intervention came to an end, Bercow's announcement of further business in the Commons was greeted with laughter by MPs rising en masse and heading for the exits. Some have considered the moment disrespectful or part of some ill-judged and ill-timed jest (Dearden, 2015).

And yet, considered in the proper context, that laugh tells a different story.

An empty chamber for Parliamentary debates is not an unusual occurrence, with MPs turning up in the Commons only for matters of their own interest, or for the 'big' occasions, only to leave for the 'smaller' affairs (The Telegraph, 2014).

Over the years of his Speakership, Bercow has been actively attempting to reform how Parliament is run and to update its procedures and, in particular, its public image (Parliament, 2011). Yet his criticisms of MPs heckling (Perraudin, 2015; BBC, 2013), or attempts to modernise elections with e-voting as part of a push towards more public engagement (BBC, 2015), have all too frequently run into a wall.

In that light, Bercow's laugh comes across as a knowing, mirthless, exasperation at the behaviour of Parliamentarians - as can be seen in the fuller version events, captured by Parliament's cameras but not included in the broadcast.

"Order. We come now to the petition... [Bercow smiles, forced to pause by MPs noisily abandoning the chamber]... I ask members leaving the chamber, however unaccountably, please to do so quickly and quietly so we can hear the petition from the Right Honourable Lady the Member for Chesham and Amersham."

That petition was, to labour the point, on the "mandatory reporting of child abuse" - not exactly a matter of small consequence.

Norman Lamb, Liberal Democrat Health spokesperson, is only amongst the latest to run into the not an unusual occurrence of an empty chamber. His debate, regarding out-of-area placements for mental health care appointments (Dickson, 2015), saw a drastically poor turnout of around half a dozen that left Lamb conducting most of the discussion with two of his Lib Dem colleagues.

The archaic institutions of Parliament and the habits of MPs have long been warned of as one source of the alienation felt by the public from politics. The late Charles Kennedy argued that alienating the public from politics was a dangerous venture (2006).

"Fewer people are joining political parties, yet single-issue pressure groups continue to flourish. Mass international movements - from opposition to the war in Iraq to last year's Live 8 - demonstrate how great issues and principles can still motivate on a huge scale. But somehow our current political culture seems unable to accommodate and address such concerns...

...The danger in all of this is that if sufficient people conclude that there is nothing in the conventional political process for them then they may opt for more simplistic and extreme options on offer. I remain an optimist. But across the mainstream political spectrum there is a candid recognition of the danger."

These concerns are not confined to Parliamentary institutions. The efforts of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to carry on a project of reform within the Labour Party, has faced resistance by party MPs who, the reformers say, feel their position and power is threatened the proposed changes (McDonnell, 2015).

In his party reforms, Corbyn has said he wants members to have greater power (Boffey & Helm, 2015). Yet, like Bercow, Corbyn is likely to find the establishment difficult to shift - not least when it comes to increasing public engagement by giving the public more direct power within institutions, often at the expense of their representatives (Bryant, 2015).

Speaker John Bercow has fought a long and seemingly fruitless war to reform how the House of Commons works, up against a Parliament that refuses to shake off its disastrous habits. That fact was clearly on display through the Syria debate, demonstrated in full by the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn during his rebuttal to the Prime Minister in the Syria debate, in which he was loudly heckled and shouted down from the government benches throughout (Stone, 2015).

Today, the UK is governed by a Conservative ministry that holds majority power, although it was elected on only 36% of the vote and hold the support of only a quarter of the registered eligible voters.

Tomorrow, the temporary victory of those campaigning for votes at 16 (Jarrett, 2015) - extending voting rights to finally cover all adult citizens - will likely be extinguished by the Conservative majority in the Commons. With its defeat goes another opportunity for reform.

That inequitable situation will not improve until there is comprehensive political reform. Since the establishment seemingly refuses to bow to even the sternest efforts to change its ways, the burden is now upon citizens to take up the campaign.

Establishment figures like Bercow and party rebels like Corbyn, or vocal campaigners for electoral reform like Caroline Lucas, cannot win lasting change with out active support. Corbyn's election as Labour Party leader was one small demonstration of what can be achieved by engaged citizens. But there is still much more to be done - and it can't be left to representatives.