Of size, and governance, revisited

Back in 2007 — almost twenty years ago — I wrote a rant about the extraordinary size of 'local' government regions in Scotland. Today, I'm doing it again. I'm doing it again because our Scottish National Party government, whose ineptitude and incompetence knows no bounds, are now proposing that existing councils could be merged. So let's compare the sizes of local government divisions across the EU, and add Scotland and our near-neighbour nations, Iceland and Norway.

Note that I've sorted this data by number of inhabitants. Note also, however, that I haven't added England. England is, uniquely, even worse than Scotland. But do we really aspire to be more like England?

Data for this table is principally from page 7 of European Local Government Report 2025 with data for Iceland, Norway and Scotland added from Wikipedia.

So, the average number of inhabitants of a municipality in the EU is 22,455. With the addition of Iceland and Norway, it comes down to 21,678. So the average Scottish local authority has more than six times the population of the average EU local authority. It has more than one hundred times the population of the average local authority in Czechia. Czechia is not really an outlier; France, with its thirty five thousand local authorities (yes, a thousand times as many as Scotland) is not far behind them on average population.

Our catastrophically low level of local democracy means we have a very small proportion of our population with experience of elected office, which means, in turn, that we have a very small pool of talent from which to draw our parliamentary candidates; and thus explains our woefully lacklustre political class. And you can understand why a mediocre first minister might wish to keep the talent pool small, but that is hardly a way to build a nation which can face the challenges of independence.

Democracy is not an 'nice to have', not an optional thing. It is a defining characteristic of a polity. And it's a characteristic on which Scotland does not presently score well. It would be a betrayal of everything the independence movement stands for to further erode it.