I now live in the North Northants unitary authority – don’t you love our logo of a massive pair of binoculars on a hill and a Red Kite too? I do! I used to live in the district council area of East Northants within the county council area of Northamptonshire but the district councils have been scrapped, and the Northamptonshire county council has been replaced by North Northants (where I live) and West Northants. All that was largely as a result of the Conservative Northamptonshire County Council going bust, twice.
I voted on Thursday in three elections: for councillors for NNorthants, for Raunds Town Council and for the Northamptonshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner.
I found myself voting Labour twice and Green once in the NNorthants election, for a LibDem as first choice, and Labour as my second choice, in the PCC election, and for the Independent (the only non-Conservative candidate, and someone in their twenties!) in my ward in the Town Council vote.
I’ll have to wait until Monday to discover how the PCC election went – the votes aren’t being counted until then. I can’t find a result for the Town Council election either. But the NNorthants Council results are in.
The new NNorthants Council is strongly dominated by Conservatives who occupy over three quarters of the seats. None of the three candidates (Green, Labour, Labour) for whom I voted was elected. Despite that, for the very first time, I now have Green councillors in my county/unitary authority council.
The national English picture won’t be perfectly clear for a while but Labour is losing council seats hand over fist and the LibDems aren’t doing well either, but a thin ray of sunshine is the stronger showing of the Greens.
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I think there are several rays of sunshine to be had. We need to look at these elections from a wider regional point of view. In England the Tories were never going to be got out in a single election and the higher they go the further they have to fall before too long.
In Scotland it looks like being a pretty solid and good result for the SNP and with support from the Greens, which as you say have done pretty well, we should see the Scottish Government fulfilling their promise in their manifesto to bring in the licensing of Driven Grouse Shooting. While not a ban, this should be a major step forward to halting the atrocities perpetrated on grouse moors by unscrupulous owners and gamekeepers.
In Wales the Tories have not done very well overall and with Labour still in power and with some lobbying in the coming months we may be able to secure the licensing of moorland shooting in Wales.
Overall in Scotland and Wales I think the climate is right for Wild Justice to be busy and hopefully achieving quite a bit for our wildlife.
In England let the Tories, most of whom hate nature, do there worst and we will do our best to fowl up all their anti wildlife actions.
So overall we should not be down hearted. Looking much wider than the immediate local situation, there are quite a few positives to be had for the future of our wildlife in Wales and Scotland.
There is virtually no DGS in Wales Alan although I would of course welcome any proper control of it if we cannot have a ban. Today driving to the shop for a paper in the next but one village ( our village shop died when they took its post office away) I passed the field where they rear our local commercial shoots Pheasants and RLPs the field is covered with the temporary sheds they put up to rear them, ******* expletive! Our local woods used for release of the Pheasants still stink from last year with the ground flora and soil surface trashed, when will this stop, not worth contacting our MP or Senedd members both Tories who follow completely the party line, no minds of their own apparently. Thank god ( not a believer but even so) for Scotland and Wales England seems to suffer from wilful blindness or something closer to stupidity when it comes to voting with the corruption and ineptitude party winning, perhaps we’d both be better off independent!
As an old Wellingburian (if there is such a word) I’ve wondered why 2 bankruptcies didn’t put the voters off the Tories (them being the party of business) but it didn’t . Is that because the bankruptcies didn’t affect the local populace much or are they planning to go for the treble..?
Having said that the new mayor of Liverpool (Labour) is a business advisor who has been personally bankrupt twice.
Perhaps it’s a trend.
Maybe party loyalties in some areas are so deeply ingrained that it doesn’t matter what anyone actually does.
Until we get proportional representation in some form for most of these elections we’ll probably never get much green representation (ditto Westminster of course).
And have you heard that tiring of democracy & balance, the tories are planning to stop the London Assembly elections and some other being by PR?
https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/mythbusting`
It seems that the party in charge of dealing with the Pandemic has done well: In England the Tories, in Wales Labour and in Scotland the SNP.