Political View: Will we go from a democracy to a dictatorship?

With the break in columns, it’s our first chance to express our sadness at the loss of Councillor Nick Thulbourn just before Christmas. He was always respectful and insightful in the chamber. A loss to the city and to the chamber.

And now we are straight into the business of 2026. We are days away from an extraordinary cabinet meeting to ‘discuss’ whether the Labour-led administration will ask the Government to cancel this year’s elections.

Councillors aren’t employees where their contract can be extended if it suits the manager at the time, Councillors are elected by the public. Which Councillor has the right to serve for 5 years when they are only elected for 4 years?

And let’s not forget the deputy leader of the Labour cabinet is an elected Conservative. Not just once, twice! This is one member who could extend his term unelected by a year. When elections were postponed during Covid, this was due to a major pandemic and there is no such reason to postpone/cancel now. Only the public should decide who serves them, not decided by the Labour-led cabinet.

As a Conservative group, we have been thankful to have had elections where we have been supported, we have also had tougher elections too, but here’s the thing - it’s always the public who decide. I don’t buy the argument that the local government reorganisation will take up too much time - we are waiting for the government to tell us what reorganisation is happening, and then we have to all dance to their tune and get on with it.

It won’t affect holding elections, and yes, whilst we will have to do it again in 2027, all 60 Councillors can put their case to the public for being voted in again, and this will include the 20 Councillors who would win in 2026…. Which explains why the Labour administration want to cancel the elections! Despite saying how wonderful everything is under their administration, they are seemingly too afraid to let the public be the judge.

Our group will fight this all the way, and reading the room, we believe the public are very supportive of seeing their right to vote. Labour's likely decision puts us at risk of being a dictatorship rather than a democracy

To address some noise, I will say that our group always support any investigation into council decisions whether financial or otherwise or if it concerns the conduct of members and officers, just as we did when in administration ourselves. We should all remember that politicians are a small cog in the decision-making process and no politician is empowered at council level to make their own decisions or use council funds without proper sign off. Everything must go through the right governance and through our team of senior officers.

We are lucky to have a system that has a political council leader, but also a chief executive, a monitoring officer, a 151 (Finance) officer, who all have a huge part to play in advising on key decisions within the council. This protects the public and politicians too. When bad decisions are made like the administration trying to close the industrial hub, betraying the public on Werrington fields, or removing all the school crossing patrols, politicians make decisions which are backed and enabled by the officers around them. Our part to play as members is to be the challenge and the scrutiny, a role our group take seriously.

Now let’s hope you get to vote in 2026, I’m sure we will have more to say on this next week…