Think carefully before voting yourself into a nightmayor
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David or Ed Miliband's first major electoral test as Leader of the Opposition will be with a candidate who signed up entire families of sham "paper" members to help with his selection, who has close links to Islamic fundamentalist groups, who is massively backed by powerful local business interests and who, for all the above reasons, was three times barred from standing by the Labour Party itself.
Lutfur Rahman only achieved selection as Labour's candidate to become the first directly elected mayor of the London borough of Tower Hamlets by taking the party to court. If he wins the election next month and in Tower Hamlets, the Labour candidate usually does Mr Rahman will effectively gain sole and untrammelled power over a council with a £1 billion budget.
Mr Rahman, however, is only the scariest fruit of a deeply dangerous seed. Having all-powerful, directly elected mayors sounds like a great wheeze. But, especially in smaller authorities,
it is simply an open door for sectional, commercial or fringe political interests, if they are sufficiently well-organised, to hijack the entire government of an area.
At the open primary to choose the Tory mayoral candidate in Bedford, huge numbers of Asians turned up to vote for the Asian candidate, who was duly selected (though he narrowly lost the actual election to the Lib Dems). In Doncaster, on a low turnout, a fringe nationalist party called the English Democrats managed to take the mayoralty. Their mayor, Peter Davies, has become something of a local joke and his council has now been taken over by government commissioners.
Traditional council leaders have to maintain the confidence of their councillors Mr Rahman used to be the leader in Tower Hamlets, but was replaced six months ago by his colleagues after evidence of his links to Islamic fundamentalism came to light. Directly elected mayors, however, are directly elected dictators, with almost complete financial autonomy and no meaningful checks or balances between the four-yearly elections. They can afford to treat their opponents with contempt the mayor of Lewisham, Sir Steve Bullock, describes his as
" idiots".
One mayor, Stoke's Mark Meredith, was arrested for corruption. He strongly protests his innocence, and was never charged but resigned from the post, and the mayoral system in the city was later scrapped. Even in London, with the only mayor that has really captured the public imagination, the office has been dogged by cronyism scandals.
Directly elected mayors may have been designed to increase turnout and bring new people into politics (the dread name of Sir Richard Branson is often uttered). But, in practice, the system has seldom done either. The mayors are overwhelmingly local politicians and their electoral mandates can be absurdly slim. Nicholas Bye, mayor of Torbay, was voted in by less than seven per cent of the electorate under a system even he described as a "total failure".
In 25 of the 37 places that have held referendums on moving to a mayoralty, the move has been rejected. And in at least three of those that have changed over, Lewisham included, there are local campaigns to scrap the mayor and go back to a conventional council leader.
Yet the system almost nobody wants is being pushed harder than ever by the new Government. Even Labour gave us a vote on it. But the Coalition agreement states that it "will create" elected mayors in 12 English cities, subject to "confirmatory" referendums which sounds a bit like change first, ask the voters afterwards. If you live in one of those places or anywhere else which opts to change look closely at the record of this reform, and do all you can to avoid the nightmayor.
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Think carefully before voting yourself into a nightmayor - Telegraph
Yuck. Local politics in the UK. It attracts precisely the sort of douchebags that go into national politics, but minus the intelligence.
I think it's probably done at the wrong level for the most part. In France far more powers are devolved to smaller units, which means that it's possible for people in rural communes to keep an eye on everything that their conseil gιnιral does (indeed, outside of the hunting season this is often their main source of entertainment). In larger towns it works slightly differently, you have a larger percentage of civil servants (who mostly don't come from the area or have shady local business interests) and quite often someone from national politics who just wants to have been elected to something so that he can put it on his cv. In any case, you don't end up with a situation like in the UK, where pretty much every council is milke dry by a cabal of red-faced taxi-drivers, freemasons and Bangladeshis.
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