Bob Piper – Without even a hint of irony David Cameron is going to announce today the Conservatives plan to give more power to local authorities… by instructing them to have directly elected Mayors.
UPDATE: The Birmingham Post says that Cameron will say there needs to be a referendum for local mayors. If that’s the case, what’s new? That’s the current policy of the government. Or am I missing something?
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The difference with Labour as I understand it is that the Conservatives will definitely order councils including Coventry and Birmingham to hold a referendum, while Labour currently only requires a referendum if local residents get up a petition demanding one.
It seems to me that the Conservative policy is more likely to result in cities having a directly-elected mayor. Whether that’s a good thing is a point of view, obviously.
There’s far more to the Tory proposals, including the end of RDAs as we know them.
Stoke-on-Trent wanted a Mayor, got one and then got rid of one using the voting process.
democracy4stoke.co.uk
goes some way to explaining why.
The confusion and division caused by this system has cause hatred in this City.
>The confusion and division caused by this system has cause hatred in this City.
OTOH Mansfield is into its second term of Independent Mayor and Council.
Essentially I support local autonomy.
I wonder if the difference between Labour and Tory policies can be found in Cameron’s suggestion that the large cities will have elected Mayors unless the public “specifically reject them” in a referendum.
That smacks of counting the abstentions as voters in favour, in very much the same way Thatcher imposed the Housing Action Trusts on tenants in the 1980′s.
I think the view has been that the Mayoral system has been a direct route from Government to action via the Mayor and that local Ward Councillors became insignificant.
The voters who wanted the Mayoral system were the first to spot that their views went unheard, as their Councillors became immasculated, and the voters reacted accordingly to correct the situation.
Stoke-on-Trent is considered a political nightmare but only by those who see their dreams challenged and sometimes defeated from grassroots, bottom-up, people on the ground where they live. They regain power and therefore feel that someone now has to listen.
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