THE GENERAL ELECTION - BAD FOR LOCAL DEMOCRACY!

Having a General Election on the same day as the next Local Elections usually provides a tremendous boost for all the political party candidates standing for the council. For most voters, local matters tend to be relegated to second place because of the national issues receiving huge media coverage - and all the political parties are allowed (at tax-payers expense) to deliver a leaflet through the Post Office to every home. 

This means that local Labour councillors, regardless of their own individual ability or lack of any acheivement, will be able to distract the voters attention from genuine local concerns by focusing on the national campaign. 

Opposition candidates from each of the political parties who are standing for election to the local council - including all those who usually stand in name only and who do very little or no campaigning - will have at least a national party policy leaflet distributed in his or her ward via their own parliamentary candidates. 

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidates (each one provided with a British Road Atlas to find their selected Tameside constituency) would just hope to gather as many votes as possible. 

More and more, the local elections are being held on the same day as other polls. The 2010 Local Elections were on the same day as the last General Election; in 2011 they were held on the same day as the nationally-held AV Voting Referendum; this year, they were held together with the European Elections; next year they are to take place, once again, along with the General Election; in 2016 they will be on the same day as the Police Commissioner Elections and so on.

We are already in an era when - because of the system of electing councillors in thirds - it is difficult for the electorate to hold individual local politicians to account for the decisions they take during their time in office. 

Our so-called free local press - under ownership of those associated with the party in power - fails in its primary duty of scrutinizing and critically reporting (when it is most needed in the public interest) on those council decisions.

And now we find our local politicians being increasingly cushioned by other elections which - through the national media coverage - seem designed to distract the voter from local affairs?   

The day-to-day lives of people are dominated by the decisions of their locally elected councillors and there are more politicians involved in local government than there are at any other level. Local politics IS perhaps the most important instrument of government and surely it is about time it was treated as such by having local elections held separately from any other?

To those who would put forward the argument that having all these elections held separately would just increase the cost to the tax-payer, I would say that having just one election for all the councillors at the same time - every three or four years - would be much cheaper than the current system of having an election every year for only one third of them. And the opportunity that it would also give the electors to change the local party in power through a single election would be much more democratic too!

Carl Simmons

Denton South Independent
13th August 2014