Tom Gordon: Please can we have less stupidity in the local elections?

Use them to send a message to Boris Johnson about the cost of living, say Nicola Sturgeon and Anas Sarwar.

Use them to send a message to Nicola Sturgeon about the SNP’s record, said Ruth Davidson yesterday. Oh, and the Union. They’re also about the Union.

None of these people is actually standing for election next month, mind you. Two are based in the Westminster parliament, two at Holyrood. None of them has even been a councillor.

Yet they go banging on about national personalities and national issues, while only now and again being jerked back to reality and forced to say something about the tier of government that is actually being elected in a few week’s time.

Some of this is simply down to the nature of elections. They’re like tumbleweeds made out of sellotape, rolling wherever the national conversation blows them, picking up issues as they go.

If the electorate have inflation on their minds, then inflation they shall hear about it, whether the election has any bearing on it or not. If it’s partygate, then partygate will be made a feature of the campaign.

Politicians are forever twiddling the dial in search of the right frequency on which to communicate. The Darwinian struggle for popularity is inevitable and usually a good thing, as it makes them tune into what voters actually want from them.

But not all that our tribunes do in elections is necessary or useful. Some of it is plain dumb. And in this particular election, there is one thing that keeps coming up and driving me mad.

In 2004, the then Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition running Scotland, at the behest of the LibDem part, changed the voting system for Scotland’s council elections to the proportional Single Transferable Vote from 2007 onwards.

The impact was profound.

The 2003 local election, under first-past-the post, saw 13 of Scotland’s 32 local authorities return a majority Labour administration, while the SNP and LibDems had one majority each. Independents had majorities in three mainland councils plus the three island ones, and 11 were “no overall control”.

In 2007, the PR system resulted in 27 councils moving to “no overall control”, with Labour holding on to just two majorities, and the three island councils Independent-run as usual.

In 2012, there were 23 mainland councils with no overall control.

And in 2017, all 29 mainland councils ended up as no overall control.

The point being that the days of parties having comfortable local government majorities are long gone, and cross-party working, whether advertised in formal coalitions or achieved through the subtler understandings which sustain minority administrations, is the norm.

And yet, as it warps most things, the constitutional dimension is now twisting this plain and simple, and introducing gratuitous stupidity into May’s vote.

The past week has seen a plethora of boasts and demands from the main parties about potential coalitions.

The Liberal Democrats and SNP aren’t ruling out coalitions with anyone else, although the SNP have always baulked at working with the Tories and vice versa.

Still, after the 2012 election, the SNP and Tories struck coalitions in Dumfries & Galloway and East Ayrshire, so it’s not a purely theoretical arrangement.

The Greens said they will work with all other parties except the Tories because of their “denial of climate science”.

The Tories, meanwhile, ruled out pacts with the SNP and Greens because of their support for independence. The Tories also urged “pro-UK” voters to help end SNP-Labour coalitions (six after 2017).

But taking the biscuit has been Scottish Labour, with an uber-Unionist Mr Sarwar saying he doesn’t want formal coalitions with any other party (perhaps especially the SNP), despite such deals being vital to Labour’s clout in local government for years.

This from a party whose manifesto promises to “strengthen local democracy by campaigning for local people to have the authority to decide how decision-making and power should be exercised”.

Except if those local people are unlucky enough to be Labour councillors, it seems.

It’s unfathomably dim. If the arithmetic after May 5 puts Labour councillors in reach of power, with a deal to be done, they’ll want to take it. They’d be pretty lousy politicians if they didn’t.

Their requests will then go to Scottish Labour’s ruling body for approval (or not), pitting councils against Mr Sarwar in an avoidable fight, which will probably end in a clumsy definitional fudge about what exactly a formal coalition is or isn’t.

But party leaders banning coalitions is more than just bad PR. It’s disrespectful.

Given the quirks of the electoral system, it’s unlikely voters will mark their ballots with a specific coalition in mind. Not just because several permutations may be possible, but because most voters normally want one particular party to prosper.

However it is a safe bet that they want their vote to do something. They want it to count. They are voting in the hope their preferred candidate and party can obtain and exercise power and make a difference.

They are not voting for a candidate and party in the hope they’ll be impotent for the next five years, rotating languidly in the swivel chair of opposition.

And they are certainly not voting for a candidate and party in the hope that, if offered a chance to obtain and wield power fairly, they then turn in down.

“Sorry, we’ve taken a vow of political celibacy. Self-denial’s our game. Thanks for all your votes, but we’ve decided not to put them to best use. We’d rather watch from across the aisle like a bunch of twittering old maids while the other parties get down to business.”

That’s no way for leaders to behave. It’s centralising and anti-democratic.

Telling councillors they can’t have power. That it’s purer to be in opposition. That the people have spoken and we must ignore what they said.

Even in an election, surely we can have some common sense?