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Bradford Mayoral Referendum – May 3rd
Alongside the City Council elections on May 3rd this year there will be a referendum to decide if Bradford should have an elected Mayor. This should not be confused with a Ceremonial Civic Lord Mayor, who wears a Lord Mayors chain and civic regalia. This post will still exist in addition to an elected Mayor with executive powers. The new elected Mayor might better be described as a President of Bradford, with a cabinet team, reducing the remainder of our Councillors to nothing more than a large scrutiny committee.
Retiring Liberal Democrat Councillor John Cole said in a letter to the Telegraph and Argus:
SIR – Would Bradford benefit by having an elected mayor? Personally, I do not think so.
Liberals generally are keen to advance the idea of “participatory democracy”, meaning that we have “active citizens” who take an interest in their communities.
Ideal political systems push decision-making down to the lowest possible level so that local communities, possibly in the form of a parish council, can decide for themselves.
This might be described as “bottom-up” politics and is supported by the localism agenda, which seeks to engage residents more than just at election time.
The position of an elected mayor would concentrate power at the top. It is a “top-down” system which invites the general public to vote once every four years and thereafter to “leave it to the top man (or woman)” . It is a charter for people to opt out rather than in.
I realise that many people currently feel turned off by politics, and I can understand why. But we must not give up on the ideal of the active citizen and participatory democracy.
In the referendum I will be voting against an elected mayor.
Michael Meadow croft, a Leeds City Councillor for fifteen years, a West Yorkshire Met County Councillor for six years and the Liberal MP for Leeds West from 1981 to 1987, recently wrote this piece for the The Guardian Newspaper:
RATTLING CHAMBERLAIN’S GHOST
Michael Meadowcroft
Was it a keen sense of irony or a lack of awareness of local history that took Michael Heseltine and, local Government Minister, Greg Clark to Birmingham on the first step of their campaign for elected mayors? Birmingham – the city of Joe Chamberlain, probably the greatest municipal innovator of the Victorian era, who achieved all his reforms under the present structure of local government.
Chamberlain was elected as Mayor of Birmingham in 1873, just three years after first being elected as a Councillor. He set in train the formation of a municipal gas undertaking, got the council to take over the water company, redeveloped the city centre, began slum clearance and, via the School Board, ensured secular education in the board schools. All this was accomplished during three successive annual terms as Mayor under the same system we have today.
In Leeds the larger than life Charles Wilson, who ran the Council for twenty years, and who was happy to claim “I am Leeds,” would have fallen about with laughter at the idea that he could only do what he did for the City if he had been an elected Mayor. Similarly, the Rev Charles Jenkinson’s name became a byword for slum clearance and a massive house building programme in the City – included the celebrated Quarry Hill flats with 938 apartments of varying sizes. He achieved this in three brief years as housing committee chair without even being leader of the Council.
The London example is oft quoted with the purported benefits of being able to vote directly for Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson. But does anyone suggest that Ken Livingstone was any less powerful when he was the “mere” leader of the Greater London Council? Indeed, so effective was he that Mrs Thatcher felt the urgent need to abolish the whole Council!
Of course, if the Conservatives are to extol the example of London then they should also explain that there is also a Greater London Authority elected at the same time as the Mayor, deliberately providing the necessary “legislature” as a counterbalance to an elected “executive.” This is very different to imposing an elected Mayor on the present structure.
Frankly, elected mayors are a sleight of hand designed to hide the steady erosion of local government powers that has happened over the past sixty years. It is the lack of powers that inhibits many good candidates from coming forward. And why should anyone run for election as a Councillor with no chance of exercising any executive office? In Leeds housing problems were always seventy per cent of my caseload but the City Council no longer runs the housing service. It is a nonsense.
If electors in northern cities need one word to put them off voting for elected Mayors, then let’s try “Doncaster”. The existence of the elected office there has been a disaster, with dreadful relationships with chief officers, huge problems in appointing a cabinet and permanent strife with many elected Councillors. The example is not one to follow.
On May 3rd vote NO to wasting millions of pounds.