Tories cancel County elections and the Labour government agrees with them

County Council elections scheduled for May have been cancelled by the Labour Government Minister at the request of the minority ruling Tory group. Desperate to cling on to power despite no longer representing the opinions of most of the people of East Sussex, the Tories have used the Labour government’s threatened local government changes as an excuse to cancel the elections, which in an unguarded moment a senior Labour councillor in Hastings said “only the Liberal Democrats and Greens had anything to gain from the elections”.

The Labour government plans to do away with local government as we've known it for more than 100 years. Hastings Borough, Rother District and East Sussex County councils will disappear. There will be an elected mayor covering all of East and West Sussex and Brighton and Hove. Under this effective dictator will be three unitary authorities covering each of those areas. We can expect Hastings and Rye to be even more out on a limb than with the current county arrangement. Nothing is said of the future of Hastings, which would presumably have something like a parish council or town council with those powers like Rye, Battle and Bexhill.

These arrangements will presumably be worked out at the local level. Hastings Borough has established what they call a cross-party working group to discuss the agenda but this only includes parties represented on the borough council, typical of the Green Party’s democratic deficit which, other parties aside, might have included prominent civic groups within the borough.

This working group has pulled together three options, ignoring the 4th most obvious one. The Tories and Green Party favour one big East Sussex unitary, which is in line with Labour government thinking. Locally, the Labour Party has come up with a scheme for a coastal unitary and a rural one. Hastings Independents favour a federation of the existing districts taking on the role of the county.

If changes in local government structure are needed at this time, which Liberal Democrats doubt, and it should be noted that none of this was in the Labour manifesto at the general election, the forgotten alternative might be two unitary councils, one covering Hastings and Rother, the other, Eastbourne and Lewes, with Wealden divided between them, say Pevensey and parts about with Hastings and Rother, creating effectively a 1066 Country council. We are aware that this doesn’t come anywhere near providing the 500,000 population threshold insisted in Labour’s White Paper, but it is the only option that keeps the ‘local’ in local government and is a case to be argued. All of the other serious proposals take power and decision-making away from Hastings and Rye towards Eastbourne and Lewes.

What is really needed is proper funding for local government as it exists of which the government’s White Paper says little or nothing and Labour made it quite clear at the general election that this was not their priority. Despite this, Labour is willing to pump money (which they otherwise say we don’t have) into a costly reorganisation process for which they have no mandate and nobody else wants.  

This is not devolution, which is what the Labour government calls it with their typical Orwellian doublespeak, it is the centralisation of power into fewer hands remote from local communities. Experience of elected mayors in London and elsewhere tells us that they are dictators and the so-called scrutiny bodies underneath them, the proposed unitary councils, are meaningless talking shops with no real influence. Liberal Democrats are of course, the main challenges to the Tories to win the mayoralty, it is up to you, the voters, to make sure this happens to ensure that we have a mayor that represents all of our communities and has an open dialogue with us.