ALL OF the parties came out of the council elections in Scotland with something to smile about — yes, even the Tories. 

Having a very bad night indeed, though, was whole idea of local government. So the losers on Thursday were pretty much all of us.  

The contest to run Scotland’s councils might be over, but the fight to defend local government really needs to get started. 

All of Scotland’s 1,204 council seats were up for election on Thursday. These are spread across multimember wards in 32 single-tier local authorities, with election via a single transferrable vote system. 

The SNP went into the election as the largest party, and that’s how it came out — with both more seats and a sightly increased vote share. 

Final scores on the doors were SNP: 453 (+22) Labour: 282 (+20) Conservative: 214 (-62) Independent: 149 (-19) Lib Dem: 87 (+20) Green: 35 (+16). 

The breakdown of this locally is that 30 of the 32 councils will be run by coalitions or minorities — the exceptions being Dundee, where the SNP has gone from minority to majority, and West Dunbartonshire, where Labour has done the same.

Naturally all parties, except the Tories, were keen to proclaim the results as harbingers of great things. The reality of course is somewhat different and more complex. 

The Lib Dems spoke of “revival” and Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, quite innacurately, of “the best result in a decade.”

In Labour’s case the result was a 1.2 per cent increase in vote share on the previous council elections (compare this with the SNP whose vote went up 1.8 per cent). 

This was mostly at the expense of the Tories rather than as result of taking votes from the SNP. This put Labour into a welcome second place but unless and until the party adopts an approach that can take significant votes from the SNP, second place — and a poor one at that — is all that can be achieved. 

The Greens were more likely to benefit from areas where the SNP faced local difficulties. This conforms to post indyref voting in Scotland where votes shift within pro/against indy parties than between the different outlooks. 

With seats in more councils and more councillors in previously established areas, there is the potential for the Scottish Greens to play a significant role in some areas. Glasgow, where there 10 councillors, could hold the balance of power. 

It would, though, be a mistake to believe this will usher in any degree of radicalism to council chambers. If their participation in the Scottish government is anything to go by, we can expect Green councillors to be lauding selling off public assets cheaply and explaining why public ownership of energy isn’t necessary. 

For the SNP, yes, there were reverses, but compared to a higher vote share, more seats, more councils where they have the lead in seats, is fairly small beer. 

They even managed, in the north-east particularly, to reach across the indy divide and exploit the Tory collapse. This is reminiscent of an older voting pattern in the area that was crucial to Scotland being a “Tory-free zone” in the New Labour era. The Tories revived once it looked like the SNP was serious about independence. 

As their former councillors contemplate being returned to the private sector, this is the small comfort that can be taken by the Tories. 

Nicola Sturgeon made noises about another indyref in the run-up to this election. She always does. Having comfortably won another election, Sturgeon can return to do doing nothing about holding one. 

If they had done badly, it would have put her and her (ahem) strategy under pressure. There is, however, no need for that now, so her masterly inactivity in regard to independence can continue.  
 
The most upsetting feature of the night for radicals was the result in North Ayrshire. There a radical minority Labour council led by Joe Cullinane was pursuing an explicit community wealth-building agenda. 

This included building council housing, municipally owned solar farms and long-term investment in anchor institutions. 

Sadly this was squeezed between the twin poles of Scottish and British nationalism, losing two seats, ending (for now) Scotland’s only example of municipal socialism. 

The North Ayrshire result is a twofold tragedy. Cullinane’s council was unique in Scotland, not just in its redistributive progressive agenda, but also in having a belief in the capacity of local government — the idea that the state at local level can drive change and improvement in local communities and economies. 

What passes for civic leadership in the rest of Scotland generally content themselves with being either managers of decline of administrators of diktats from Edinburgh.

A council election should be about our children’s school, our elderly relatives care, libraries and leisure centres, roads and bin collections. These weren’t. 

Instead the SNP called on us to “send a message to Boris” or about the legislation they were going to pass. 

It certainly didn’t campaign on its record — in 2020-21, the average spend per primary pupil fell by £75 in real terms on the previous year, and the average spend per secondary pupil dropped by £411 in real terms. 

Campaigning on their plans which could be accurately summarised as “We are going to gut councils like Rick Stein guts fish” probably wasn’t a runner either. 

The SNP Scottish government is looking to remove all legal responsibility for social care and social work from councils. This is under the guise of a “national care service.” 

How much this will be the equivalent of a National Health Service can perhaps be grasped from the Scottish government’s paying KPMG £90,000 a month to design it.

Before the election, Scottish secretary of Unison Tracey Dalling warned that unless local democracy is fought for, councils will be left with responsibility only for “bins and burials.” 

This is a real, dismal and undemocratic prospect. The defence of local democracy, of councils as agents of change and improvement is about to become an urgent political task.