A good day for democracy, then. The government’s decision to go ahead after all with elections in some 30 local authorities is the right one, even if it does seem motivated by an imminent ruling that their previous postponement was actually illegal.
As many as 4 million people will now have the opportunity to exercise their customary democratic rights in May. This latest U-turn smacks of incompetence rather than venality. But that hardly excuses it. The prime minister is, after all, a lawyer. Indeed, he is a human rights lawyer, and should be conscious of Article 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998, which protects “free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature”.
