Local Elections

Oh, the irony. The Conservatives and their Reform offshoot – the political equivalent of a pub bore who’s had one too many – are out in force, howling that Labour is some sort of Orwellian nightmare for delaying local elections due to local government reorganisation. Dictatorial, they cry! A shocking assault on democracy! The sort of thing you’d expect from, well, them.

You see, when the Tories were merrily wrecking local government with their reorganisations – slashing budgets while simultaneously fiddling with boundaries – they delayed local elections without a second thought. 

• Northamptonshire, for example, where they drove the county council off a financial cliff, saw elections postponed for a year while they cobbled together two new unitary authorities out of the smouldering wreckage. 
• Cumbria, North Yorkshire, Somerset – all had elections pushed back in 2022 to accommodate reorganisation. But back then, it wasn’t an attack on democracy, was it? Oh no. It was “sensible governance.”
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• And let’s not forget Cornwall, Durham, and Northumberland in 2009. Labour delayed local elections to bring in unitary councils, and the Tories barely blinked. 

Why? Because it suited them at the time. It always does. The second it doesn’t – when Labour is the one making the changes – they start screeching about tyranny. As if democracy is a sacred thing to a party that illegally prorogued Parliament, stitched up constituency boundaries in their favour, and spent 14 years avoiding scrutiny like a vampire dodging daylight.

Meanwhile, Reform – a party with 5 MPs, no actual power and an extraordinary amount of airtime – is jumping on the bandwagon, wailing about the “dictatorship” of a government that was just elected with a massive mandate. This is, let’s not forget, the same lot who think democracy is a bit of a nuisance when it gets in the way of their Brexit fantasies, and who openly flirt with the idea of binning human rights when it’s inconvenient.

It’s textbook Tory-Reform hypocrisy. If elections are delayed on their watch, it’s ‘administrative necessity’. When Labour does it for the same reasons, it’s a sinister plot to destroy democracy. And let’s be honest – the only thing that truly terrifies them about elections is that, for the foreseeable future, they’re going to lose every single one.