Photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images Local elections do not matter, and whoever you elect will act in the same sad way as their predecessors, under the same constraints that make local government an impotent arm of the centralised British state. Even councils that seemed to have done everything right are now failing. Barking and Dagenham was a crucible of Starmerism. After the British National Party temporarily became the local opposition in the mid-2000s following demographic change and widespread dismay with the Labour council, a young Morgan McSweeney cut his political teeth door-knocking with Labour activists to lost voters. By the mid-2010s, the council’s answer to that political shock was material. Inclusive growth: borrowing, building, partnering with developers at scale and, for a time, building more affordable housing than any London borough. And after a decade, child poverty in the council dropped from 43 per cent to 42 per cent .…