WHAT IS THE point of party politics? I find myself enormously heartened by the news that a record number of independent candidates are standing in the local elections this year. From North to South, East to West, Save Huddersfield NHS to People Against Bureaucracy, Christian Peoples Alliance to Local Education Action by Parents, independent candidates are becoming a real headache for the mainstream national parties, and about time too. Some 500 independent candidates are standing on May 4, hoping to add to the 2,000 independent councillors already elected in the UK.

They are threatening Labour strongholds in the North for the first time. In Barnsley, for instance, independents are standing in all 21 seats up for election and Labour could lose control of the council. It currently holds 33 seats with the Tories on 4 and Liberal Democrats 3, but the Barnsley Independent Group, which campaigns mainly to keep local the services it believes are being regionalised by stealth, already has 23. And it’s really only taken off in the past five years.

As details of the national parties’ multimillion-pound expenditure in the last general election are revealed — £300 for a Star Trek costume for Labour, £1,200 for a groundhog outfit for the Tories, £5,000 for Charles Kennedy’s suits, millions on polling and mailshots — you could forgive a voter for asking what national parties are for. They run campaigns, yes; but those campaigns neither increase turnout nor the party share of the vote.

National parties do not really develop policy; that is done by think-tanks either externally or set up in government departments — No 10’s policy unit, the Cabinet Office strategy unit or Gordon Brown’s “council of economic advisers” — or in the Tory party’s case, by external “policy commissions”. Anyway, since they broadly agree on everything, there isn’t a lot to think about or develop. They might go round in circles a bit but they all come back to the same conclusions in the end.

There is a broad consensus between Labour and the Conservatives on the fundamentals of everything from the NHS to Iraq, control orders to climate change. Hence their increasingly desperate election campaigns: trying to prove there are differences where they barely exist. Where Labour does have something to shout about — its significantly increased assistance to the poor and single-parent families, for instance — it is embarrassed even to mention it. It hires a chameleon and changes its name to Dave instead. Do they have any idea how mad this kind of stuff looks to the world outside?

The electorate, then, shrugs and switches off or starts to look at independent candidates instead. And the main political parties suddenly discover the value of “ground-level” campaigning, on local issues, street by street, which is what they all claim to be doing for the May 4 poll.

Well, you can’t get much more ground-level than the obscene amount of street works that local councils suddenly carry out at the end of each financial year to swallow up whatever budget it is they need to spend. With absolutely no regard whatsoever for the convenience, even sanity, of their residents, they pour contractors into the task of making the roads impassable in pursuit of idiotic traffic-calming measures or redundant warnings as you go around corners that, er, you are going around a corner.

In the past few weeks I have spotted near my home in West Sussex a new mini-roundabout where we managed perfectly well without one before (and which everyone overshoots as a result), and an ugly parking sign on a beautiful stretch of road — in front of a parking spot that is obviously and always has obviously been a parking spot. Perhaps I should join Matthew Parris’s campaign and stand for the People against Inessential Street Signs party.

Trying to get an answer from Islington council yesterday why it was well nigh impossible to drive through the borough, via any route, to the Angel, because of the amount of roadworks in every approach, the person answering the phone explained that “they don’t speak to members of the public”. Someone called Georgina actually did ring back later, to blame Transport for London, who said it had no record of the roadworks and would get on to . . . oh, who cares. I was just inter- ested to see whether a citizen could actually get anything done these days about the things that infuriate them most.

That’s what an MP is for, I hear someone say. But you don’t need an MP to reflect back to Westminster the concerns of his constituents when an opinion poll or focus group can do it for you. And MPs can rarely solve any of the local problems constituents lay at their feet. The main interest of many MPs is in party-political point-scoring to ensure their re-election next time. The longer they serve, the lazier and the worse they tend to get.

My local MP, by no means the worst, is, for instance, running a campaign to pin some kind of responsibility on the Government for the closure of a popular private hospital — which has nothing to do with the Government. People locally might believe it has and the Conservative MP may shore up his position (and no, I don’t think Labour or Lib Dems would behave any better) — but how has that done his constituents any good?

If party politics has come to operate in the entrenched interests of the people who make it their profession, from staff to politician to adviser and, yes, the journalists who write about them, but not in the interests of the electorate, then let us ban MPs from standing under party colours, or serving for more than two terms, and let us have councillors who might speak to members of the public, and who work in the interests of people not the party. Bring on the independents.

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