Lutfur Rahman is the latest example in a long line of crooks and chancers

Tower Hamlets is a warning. Local politics will be open to abuse so long as mayors can run their councils unopposed

Local government has long been the weakest link in the country’s democratic infrastructure. The verdict that Lutfur Rahman, the one-time mayor of Tower Hamlets, was guilty of corrupt and illegal practices represents only the latest episode in a long line of crooks and chancers, of whom T Dan Smith, the corrupt leader of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1960s, was the flashiest and most audacious.

Too often local council leaders become national figures for all the wrong reasons, either purely political or personal – Shirley Porter, in Westminster, for alleged gerrymandering, and Derek Hatton in Liverpool, for sacking his own workers, their redundancy notices delivered by a fleet of taxis.

Mr Rahman’s disqualification is unprecedented for a directly elected mayor, though some others, not least Ken Livingstone in London, have had their share of (much less serious) scrapes. Mr Livingstone may now regret defending Mr Rahman against what he called “smears” when the initial investigation began last year. The verdict vindicates the journalists who first raised doubts about Mr Rahman – and were dubbed “Islamophobic” for their troubles, as were many of those, including political opponents, who stood against him.

In any case, local democracy is certainly not receiving the attention it deserves. On 7 May, people will also be voting in contests covering all 36 metropolitan boroughs, 194 districts, 49 of the unitary authorities, and for various directly elected mayors.

In most of these elections, much more than Westminster this time round, the results are a foregone conclusion. One of the more regrettable consequences of the decline of the Liberal Democrats was their disappearance in council chambers where they were usually the only opposition to an overwhelmingly Labour or Conservative administration.

Outside Scotland and Wales, where the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru are now making local politics more competitive, Ukip and the Greens are still a minor, though sometimes significant, force. (Not always an effective one, as the chaotic Green-run Brighton and Hove administration and tweets from the madder Ukip councillors prove.)

So far too many councils are virtual one-party states. Take the local authorities covering the constituencies of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. In the Tory West Oxfordshire, the Conservatives have a grip on 40 of the 49 seats; in Doncaster, Labour holds 50 of the 63 places on the council. In the Miliband family’s home borough of Islington, Labour represents 47 of the 48 wards.

Where such one-party dominance is coupled with a powerful directly elected mayor, as was sometimes the case in Tower Hamlets, democracy cannot flourish. By contrast, the London mayoralty works so well because the Mayor’s actual powers are very limited, his ability to raise funds confined to public transport and congestion charging, and he spends comparatively little. Despite the big personalities of Mr Livingstone and Boris Johnson, real power is actually dispersed through the 32 London boroughs. But the mayors in other cities have far too much power and budget for comfort.

The solution is to introduce proportional representation in local councils, which would encourage councillors to work together, blur tribal distinctions and help politics to mature generally. In “hung” councils this has become the norm, and there is no evidence that these are worse run than their one-party state counterparts. The second stage is to end the experiment of directly elected mayors, outside the special case of London.

In many cases they lack legitimacy. In cities such as Leicester the electors were not even offered a referendum to say whether they wanted this radical constitutional innovation in the first place. In Hartlepool, the voters signalled their disaffection by voting in a man in a monkey suit, who served three terms in all before the directly elected mayoralty was abolished by referendum three years ago.

As part of the “Northern Powerhouse” scheme, the Government and local authorities of Lancashire seem determined to create a mayor of the “Greater Manchester Combined Authority” by 2017. That promises the worst of all worlds: a one-party regional government in an unaccountable mega-council. With so much focus on devolution for Scotland, and coalitions at Westminster, local democracy seems set to continue on its path of benign neglect.