The case for slower, local politics

There is a peculiar snobbery in contemporary political discourse that I want to push back against. It is the snobbery of scale: the assumption that bigger is more serious, that national politics matters more than local politics, that continental institutions are more important than regional ones.

I understand where this comes from. The problems that feel most pressing — climate, migration, economic inequality — are genuinely transnational. They require coordination across borders. The impulse to focus on the level at which solutions can be implemented is rational.

But I think it has gone too far, and has produced a politics that is simultaneously overambitious and underperforming — overambitious in its rhetoric about what pan-European coordination can achieve, and underperforming in its actual capacity to change the conditions of life for ordinary people in ordinary places.

The village council is where democracy is most legible. It is where you can see, in real time, whether your vote made any difference.

What local politics offers that national and supranational politics cannot is immediacy. When the village council decides to restore the archive or repair the road or build the playground, you can walk past it the following year and see what was decided and whether it worked. The feedback loop is short. The accountability is real.

This is not an argument against national or European institutions. It is an argument for taking local ones seriously — for recognising that the health of democracy depends on its being practised at every level, and that a citizenry that is engaged only with abstract continental debates and disengaged from the specifics of its own community is not a healthy democratic citizenry.