You can’t cut 49% from council support and expect everything to keep humming. It wasn’t as though when Cameron and Clegg rode their big blue and yellow bulldozers into power that councillors were saying “Hi guys, we have loads of slack, so plough down local services, they don’t matter and we can take it.” All…
The local political scene in St Albans is competitive, with a District Council hanging on to a thin Tory majority, and the minority split between Labour and the Lib Dems. We also have two Green Councillors, and UKIP are fielding a candidate in every Ward. There is everything to play for as we move into…
A few months ago, I attended a ‘stand for councillor’ evening at the offices of North Norfolk District Council. It was open to ‘anyone interested in becoming a candidate and would like to find out more about what being a councillor involves’. As a member of the local Labour Party, I will indeed be a…
Despite the idyllic postcard look and feel to Powys, if you scratch the surface there is real poverty and deprivation – sometimes disguised by our rolling hillsides. The Independent-run council has happily allowed more than 1000 of its workers to scrape by on poverty pay for years, but since Labour increased its numbers in the…
The conference fringe is as varied and diverse as the issues that face coast and country communities. This year with the Scottish vote the question of who decides what emerges in most fringe event discussions, be that the value of community pubs, the choice of the second runway or how to deliver new housing. Two reoccurring…
