Why I Wish My Vote Was in Llangollen

Every Labour councillor who loses a seat in Thursday's local elections will hold the government at Westminster directly responsible. Sometimes the complaint will be justified, for May's municipal polls give voters a chance to be unpleasant about the prime minister without removing him from office - a combination of emotion and judgment that typifies most people's attitude to Tony Blair. The savage reduction in town hall powers has increased the inclination to use the municipal vote as a protest. The few burghers who actually know what councillors are still allowed to do are unlikely to believe that their mayor and corporation take life-and-death decisions. So, one way or another, ministers deserve the blame.

There have been times when it was possible to identify a precise incident that swung the local pendulum away from Labour. In 1969, Dick Crossman, the secretary of state for social services, announced a 25% increase in the cost of health service teeth and spectacles 48 hours before polling day, and then admitted that he had forgotten about the municipal elections. His diary does not give the details of the following Thursday's catastrophe. However, he did record that a year earlier "in Birmingham every ward had been lost" and that Labour was no longer in control of Islington, Hackney and Sheffield - tragedies he associated with other ministers.

The elections of both those years illustrate a theory of local government that may be based less on fact than on folk law. Labour councils - see Lambeth and Liverpool years ago and Sheffield more recently - damage and defeat themselves by pursuing policies that are too far to the left. When they are destroyed by Whitehall and Westminster, the blame lies with governments that are too far to the right.

A second explanation is already being dusted down for Thursday (even though the losses are unlikely to be half as bad as those that Labour suffered in the 60s). The activists are said to have lost heart, and the floating voters - unhappy at progress in the health service and education - will not bother to walk to the polling booth.

I do not knock on as many doors as once I did. But one thing is clear even from my sedentary participation in the campaign. Next Thursday there are national, as well as local, elections. Social democrats who fail to vote Labour in Scotland or Wales because of disenchantment with Tony Blair's government ought to have their constitutional theories examined. Devolution has given Edinburgh and Cardiff independent powers. The way in which they have been used is proof that social democracy is not dead but sleeping in a shallow grave in England.

In Scotland and Wales, Labour - free from the shackles of the London party - is offering programmes that amount to a rejection of much of the Westminster cabinet's domestic policy. The Scottish manifesto asserts that the "comprehensive system has improved educational opportunity for all our children" - a declaration Tony Blair would reject out of hand. In Wales, secondary-education policy - including the rejection of the "specialist schools" idea - is so different from the English alternative that the London party tried, unsuccessfully, to postpone publication of the Welsh position paper. How many "foundation hospitals" should we expect outside England?

In Wales, Labour is equally progressive about higher education. "We'll rule out top-up fees in Welsh universities for the next four years." Labour in Scotland takes the same view and has its record to rely on. It responds to critics of the Edinburgh parliament - who say that devolution has made no difference - with a challenge: "Tell that to the student who is not paying tuition fees to get into university." And the principles applied to education are being extended to the social services. The Welsh party has made a promise that would have lightened Aneurin Bevan's heart: "A Labour win on May 1 means free prescriptions for all."

Concessions have been made to New Labour rhetoric - presumably in the hope of moderating Tony Blair's hostility. But that is a small price to pay for a criminal justice policy based less on filling the prisons than on tackling reoffending. It may seem small beer compared with imposing a new world order, but I rejoice that in Wales a Labour administration will "keep free bus travel for the over-60s and the disabled and look to provide half-price travel for 16- to 18-year-olds".

The paradox of Blairite government is that a cabinet packed with Scots and Welsh people makes most of its proselytising speeches about policies that the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly reject. I hope Ian McCartney, the new "party chairman", will one day explain how he finds that possible. In the meantime, I wish I had a vote in Linlithgow or Llangollen rather than in London.