LOCAL government elections should be about rubbish and roads, potholes and planning. Tomorrow’s vote will be about anything but. The big issue is windfall taxes on energy companies according to Labour’s Anas Sarwar. About “sending a message” to Boris Johnson over Partygate, according to Nicola Sturgeon. And of course independence, yay or nay, for all parties.

What’s blindingly obvious is that local government isn’t local any more. And it’s delivering poor turnout, poor quality candidates, poor performance in office. In recent days, my Herald colleagues have given many and various analyses of this decline and many and various solutions.

The estimable Lesley Riddoch wants more councils – hundreds of them, Norway-style, to revive voter engagement. At the other end of the political spectrum, Adam Tomkins has called for elected mayors to overcome the shifting coalitions that run most Scottish councils. Mark Smith took the political parties to task for deliberately making local elections about national issues.

I agree with all of the above – sort of. But there’s a bigger issue still. If you want to understand why council democracy is dying just follow the money. Local councils have been deprived of revenue by a centralist government that treats them like constitutional poodles.

Read more: Top-down Scotland needs to become more local

The freezing of council tax after 2007 made local authorities ever more dependent on central funding. Councils have had real-terms cash cuts year on year. They lost £1 billion between 2011 and 2020 alone – around eight per cent of revenue. Promises to introduce a local income tax have been quietly forgotten.

Scotland’s largest council, Glasgow, can’t even keep the bins cleared. Countless quangos and central government initiatives have undermined the last important function of local government: education. The creation of a National Care Service will further erode local autonomy and finance.

Now, this hollowing out of the local state doesn’t mean that voter disengagement isn’t an issue too. It’s chicken and egg, really. Scotland lacks a culture of local initiative, especially in rural areas. This stems largely from the history of land ownership, the vast private estates.

In Norway you can’t buy more than half a hectare without local government approval. And then you have to live on it. But Scotland isn’t Norway. Given the dire image of our existing councils it would be a brave politician who called for many more of them.

Anyway, we already have hyper-local democracy in the form of community councils – 1,200 of them. Most people are unaware of their existence and they have no fundraising or formal powers, but community councils are not unimportant. Councils have to consult them on planning issues, for example. I know some very able and active community councillors. But they toil in obscurity. It would be hard to mobilise Scottish voters to demand greater powers to the CCs, desirable thought that may be.

Scotland’s 32 unitary councils are both too small and too large. Too small to challenge big government; too large to represent the interests of the street. But the most obvious deficiency is that no one knows who runs them. Too many councils are push-me-pull-you coalitions where nobody is really in charge.

This is down to the Single Transferable Vote system of election introduced in 2007. It was largely designed to prevent any one party being in overall control, but STV has not been good for local accountability. Many voters remain confused about ranking candidates they’ve never heard of in obscure multi-member constituencies. Should you vote for your chosen candidate alone or "vote till you boak"? The parties try to game the system which adds confusion. Who wins, or rather doesn’t, seems a lottery.

The result is that when things go wrong in local government, as they invariably do, no one is to blame because everyone is to blame in faceless, self-perpetuating coalitions. Edinburgh’s trams scandal was a case in point. Glasgow has a more visible council leader in the SNP’s Susan Aitken. But that’s largely because she got personally involved in rows over rubbish in the streets and the collapse of the retail economy. And because she called Nicola Sturgeon “the boss”.

The introduction of mayors in England has been a modest success. Andy Burnham in Manchester is a powerful political personality able to challenge the UK Government during Covid. Ben Houchan has transformed Tory politics in Teeside. Mayors work because the vast majority of voters know who they are. There’s someone to blame and, occasionally, to praise. You can’t identify with a coalition. Fewer than 10% of us can name our council leader.

However, there appears to be little obvious demand for elected mayors in Scotland, and they probably wouldn’t work outside cities. This SNP Government would never allow them anyway because they would be a rival power base. But elected mayors would at least offer a counterweight to the people who really run Scotland’s moribund councils: unelected officials.

Read more: I've voted Tory at the local elections. But now I regret it

Part-time councillors, often retired, are no match for powerful bureaucrats, with their networks of professional bodies and joint committees. Unsurprisingly, these officials have started paying themselves vast salaries to reflect their power. Edinburgh’s “Director of Place” earns more more than the First Minister. Elected members, meanwhile, continue to diminish in public esteem and visibility.

The tendency for parties to campaign on national issues rather than local ones certainly doesn’t help. But I’m afraid this is very much demand-led. Anyone canvassing for the Conservatives will be aware, in the most painful terms, that Scottish voters have a visceral hatred of Boris Johnson. He's become even more of a hate figure than Margaret Thatcher, something most of us thought impossible.

If voters choose to make a local election about Partygate rather than potholes then I’m afraid that is their right. The parties tailor their campaigns accordingly. This has led to the SNP saying they'll not enter coalitions with the Tories, defeating the very purpose of the STV electoral system.

Labour’s Anas Sarwar says he'll refuse to enter coalitions with ANY party. This even though his party is already involved in numerous "blended" local administrations across Scotland. Labour might as well not be standing tomorrow, because their leader is basically saying they don’t want to be in power. It seems even Scotland’s political leaders don’t understand STV. There is little hope for Scottish local democracy.

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