Three years ago, the people of Bristol were offered a choice: stick with elected mayors, or switch to a committee system. They opted for the latter in a city-wide referendum, and the change was implemented last year. Now, the government has overruled them, declaring that “councils run on the committee system must switch [or switch back, in Bristol’s case] to elected mayors.”
Bristol City Council is currently run by a coalition of Greens and Lib Dems. Both parties have condemned this decision as undemocratic but the minority Labour group has predictably welcomed it. Bizarrely, their argument is that it will stop the council wasting taxpayers’ money on constant changes to the system!
The London parties have never fully appreciated that different places have different needs. With Labour, this is exacerbated by their primarily urban base, particularly noticeable in Wessex. The political map of Wessex has long been a sea of yellow and blue, dotted with red in cities and large towns like Bristol, Reading, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Southampton.
Little wonder that they are so keen on mayors (from the Old French maire, the head of a city government), even in rural areas.
The Wessex Regionalists, on the other hand, have never been keen on a “one size fits all” model of government. It’s why we have always resisted calls for the party to have an official policy on how the rest of England outside Wessex should be organised (though this does not preclude us from working with other devolutionist movements on areas of common interest) – and why we would never overrule the democratically expressed will of the people at a sub-regional level.
Wessex Regionalists 