Another U turn, Council elections this time.

[Imdunfer]

Love him or hate him Farage has gone to court to force the government to give people the democratic votes they are legally entitled to.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c70ne31d884o

Labour are so going to be stuffed in these elections, how long will Starmer last?

Fact is that although most of the Councils with postponed elections were Labour the number of ward seats affected was heavily weighted to the Conservatives.

Reason is that Labour Councils were relatively small Districts and possibly some were places where only a proportion of seats are elected each year.

There are four Shire Counties held by the Tories and where the whole Council is up for re-election. All four are susceptible to Reform.

Which may be why Badenoch's people were not challenging the postponements.

I don’t think Labour are going to do any worse or better with this change. They’re now defending 2,500 seats as opposed to the 2,300 they would have been defending.

My understanding (although I’m happy to be corrected here) is that the areas with the boundary changes will then have more elections next year because the ones now being done this year won’t be correct for the new areas. I always vote in local elections, and am in an area that is due to change, and I really don’t care that I’m now getting a vote this year that will be redundant in a year’s time. I’ll still vote, and I’ll vote next year.

It's disturbing when governments do things that are downright illegal though, isn't it?

£100,000 legal fees to be paid to Reform now as well, what waste of money.

Still in doubt whether the Chagos deal is legal, too. Both because of a pre existing treaty forbidding it and because of lack of consultation with the Chagossians, who mostly live in the UK.

Yeah, great isn’t it? Reform have won the right to waste £63mlllion of taxpayer money. How much social care would that have paid for, how many libraries could be kept open, how many potholes fixed?

Enjoy your pyrrhic victory.

The Tories did this a couple of times for restructuring. No one shouted about it because it wasn’t reported on or made a massive fuss of.

Yes, this time it was taking too long, but Labour in general are held to way higher standards and they are hounded by the press at every opportunity. I’ve no doubt that this is partly why they are so hated.

Of course not, voting is important.

Op this is more a defeat than a u turn imo

My victory?

I think you're making some huge assumptions about my politics there.

I am for democracy and for our government of whatever flavour not doing things without realising that they are illegal.

Whoever does it.

Equally all for democracy - which is why this was a dick move by Reform. And people who agree with it/think this is the end of Starmer annd all that other RW divisionary nonsense are behaving like dicks too.

whst are you on about “my victory??” - it’s a pyrrhic victory for reform as this is going to cost them in the long term as council taxes will have to be raised, hitch they promised not to do. The money for tuning two sets of elections in close proximity to one’s another (8months) comes from local budgets, so not only are the electorate paying twice (needlessly) there is less money all round to be sort on things for the common good. Even if election funds are ring-fenced, that money still comes from one pot. It’s short sighted and a waste of time and money. Typical of Reform.

Voting is democracy. Elections cost money, we still have them for good reason.

It's by no means clear that anything 'downright illegal' was proposed.

The Times and FT both suggest a process issue where ministers gave the impression they were open to postponement when there's meant to be a set of steps taken.

Not clear cut they'd have lost in court but chances of Reform success but with case dragging on too late for elections to be held on 7 May. Better to cut losses now.

Trouble is that every time the Government, as they should, change course everybody yells U TURN.

If only there was a senior lawyer in the cabinet that could have spent a few moments considering the matter ;)

I think the scale and length of the postponements is - excluding COVID when they were all delayed - why this delay was problematic. The last local elections to be delayed, excluding COVID, only led to postponements in around 6 councils. Which ended up being cancelations when the authorities were simply abolished. There was prcedent for the COVID delays if you look back to Foot & Mouth in the early '00s (Blair presumably)

The Government was using cost as a key reason for delay, and it's a dangerous approach to say that democracy is too expensive - a point the Electoral Commission was never going to agree with. The Government is, after all, there at the behest of and for the benefit of the people, not the other way round :)

I think they are up to a U turn every 6 weeks now ;)

Reform have not done this out of a love for democracy. A broken clock is right twice a day.

I agree with having elections not delaying, especially as if a council is to be merged or replaced, you should choose who will run the council to the end. You want people who will be co-operative and not wasteful.

Social media is a cruel mistress...

To be fair, there have been quite a few!

Got to agree with that tweet?(?). When are we going to get a government who can actually govern. The tail is wagging the dog with the current one. The dog had more heads than Cerberus in the last.

That’s a drop in the ocean compared with the £63 million it will cost to rerun the elections for the new authorities just a year later.

£63m seems cheap for democracy. Saying democracy is too expensive isn't ever going to fly... And I don't expect anyone in local government believes they will have reorganised in the claimed time frame anyway!! Some of the councils have already had elections delayed once already, under the same guise. It won't take much delay for some people to have been denied democracy for nearer 3 years than 2. Is that acceptable?

I'm happy enough. The more Reform councils there are at this point, the more they will show themselves up for who they are.
And they will be nowhere in three years time at the general election.

Reform seem very keen on democracy seeing as they have an unelected leader (CEO) and ‘shadow’ ( 🤣 ) home Sec in Zia Yusuf, and Farage has said in the past he doesn’t want elected officials, he wants business people running government, like Trump, despite one of his SP’s for Brexit was that the EU was full of ‘unelected bureaucrats’ hmmm 🤨

He isn’t doing it out of morality or because he gives a shit about democracy. He’s doing it for political capital and to fool their thick as shit followers.

I really feel for the people working in the election teams in these councils. Elections are a massive project. They will have had plans in place, stood them down when the decision was made to not have them, and now they need to stand them up again. And they probably found out about the u-turn on the news like all the rest of us.

This is my theory / hope!

Regardless of Reform, who I have no time for, attaching a price to democracy and then saying it’s too expense seems to me to be a slippery slope and one that plenty of people have a problem with. And also a position that, on the balance or probability, would have very likely have been ruled as unlawful. Now that would have played straight into Trump’s hands - another leader for whom I have no time :)

Given that the legal process hadn't been started but had been well publicised it was surely a foolish council that just assumed that there would have been no elections. I know that my old council carried on as if they were going ahead...which was the only sensible thing to do. Those that didn't were, IMO, foolish if not negligent in their responsbilities.

Labour caused it though!

No one forced the councils to apply to postpone the elections in the first place. The council leaders took the risk and it didn't work out for them.