Wednesday 15 December 2010

Parish Council By-Elections?

Preposterous? Pythonesque? That'll be why we've never had them. Ever. We have filled by co-option casual vacancies for these unremunerated positions. Like everywhere else. And we have always deliberately maintained the political balance delivered at the previous election.

But with two casual vacancies (one now our MP, the other moved out of the area), and with our six thousand pound grant from the County Council about to be withdrawn, we are required to spend nearly seven thousand pounds, not far off twenty per cent of our entire budget, on holding two of them, mercifully on the same day or else the cost would have been doubled.

Someone has managed to find the ten signatures necessary to force this on us. Can you guess who? As much as tuition fees, a very big issue in a place like Lanchester, this should be kept in mind when they are looking for votes in these absurd contests.

2 comments:

  1. Will there be any other candidates? Every single Labour, Tory or Derwentside Independent activist in Lanchester is already on the Parish Council.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, I can think of ... anyway, we'll see. Or we could have co-opted someone good and non-partisan, as looked likely to happen. Several names were doing the rounds. But none of them would go through the rigmarole of fighting a by-election. Thank you, the Lib Dems, up to now very conspicuous by your absence from Lanchester.

    ReplyDelete