It’s the potholes, stupid. Despite the attempts of national politicians to pretend otherwise, the local elections should have been about potholes. Believe it or not, the state of our roads beat the cost of living, the NHS and immigration as the top election issue in the final YouGov poll. They ranked highest in the Local Government Association’s list of local service dissatisfactions. Voters knew what these elections were about, even if no politician was ready to agree.

Yet potholes featured barely at all in the election coverage. As party leaders queued up to be interviewed, they were not going to descend to street-level. British local politics has been nationalised for decades. To the BBC and the media generally, the elections have been seen as US-style midterms. The issues debated have been the cost of living, immigration and antisemitism. All very important, of course, but hardly something local councils have a great say over.

Which brings us back to potholes. As I bounced and pounded my way along a Sussex road last week, I had to guess which puddle ahead of me was one inch deep and which three inches. Did I face a bump or a smashed tyre? The RAC reckons there are now six potholes per mile. Three-quarters of Britons who drive on the continent find Britain’s road surfaces the worst in Europe. Meanwhile, pothole damage to cars has almost doubled in three years and councils have paid out millions in damage claims.

The cause is blatant. Spending on filling potholes plummeted during the austerity decade after 2010. There was a 40% cut in central grants to English local councils, leading to annual budgets being slashed by a quarter in real terms under the Cameron government. They tried to save money where they hoped it might not show in the short term: just a few more puddles in the road. Austerity would relax and they could catch up.

It did not relax and they could not catch up. What happened next was typical of British politics. In December 2024, the new Labour government blamed the Tories and effectively nationalised the potholes. Keir Starmer launched a “Christmas boost” of £1.6bn to fill no fewer than 7m holes – as if he was going to do it himself.

However, the bureaucrats took charge and each pothole was subject to severe “detailed performance metrics”. No such discipline was visited on the government’s own HS2, which was squandering £7bn a year, unaudited by Whitehall. The Treasury even anticipated it might save £125m from its original Christmas bonanza by fining local authorities for not meeting their pothole quotas. The contempt for local democracy was total.

That a European country’s central government should consider itself responsible for every hole in every road in its largest constituent nation was a reduction to absurdity of Britain’s obsessive centralisation. The crisis was caused by the government’s savage squeezing of local spending. This was reflected in the closing of libraries, police stations, youth clubs, nurseries – and the opening of potholes.

Then, when the political pips squeaked, central government could muscle in and try to take credit. But the problem was rooted in the starving of resources to discretionary local services, which remain at roughly two-thirds of where they were 15 years ago. Even Starmer could not personally fill in 7m holes.

In 2006, when Tony Blair invited all his newly elected mayors, including London’s Ken Livingstone, to Downing Street, he asked them what had proved their most burning issue. Most had previously been party politicians who went into elections on national manifestos. Direct election found them with quite different and strictly local issues. These began with the state of their streets, with litter, graffiti, petty crime and antisocial behaviour. People cared about what they had to deal with every day.

Blair himself was convinced that he should delegate power to a new form of local control below the town hall. He wanted every neighbourhood to have a parish council, free to raise local funds if need be. He even produced an excellent white paper. But nothing happened. The centralists won as usual.

At the last election, Starmer copied Blair. He pledged “to deepen democracy … by devolving power to communities”. Like Blair he did nothing of the sort. He became another centraliser, and merely proved that centralisation does not work, even with potholes. He is paying the price, as may my car.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist