Democracy Delayed is Democracy Denied
LEAH LEVANE
It seems that many of our politicians thought that if elections were too inconvenient or expensive then they could just dispense with them. Thankfully this rather blasé approach to our democratic rights has been checked, and our local borough and county council elections will now go ahead in May after all.
It is true that there is a lot going on in local government – a new unitary authority is due to replace our current councils, after which a mayor will be elected with new powers over all of Sussex. But the county council elections that should have been held in May last year had already been postponed in order to take place alongside a mayoral election this year, and that mayoral election has now been postponed until 2028 at the earliest. There is a lot of work to do to make this local government reorganisation work, so who knows when, or whether, or if any of it will happen.
None of us got to vote on whether we wanted this local government reorganisation at all, so the attempt to deny us elections because of reorganisation simply added insult to injury.
Councillors need a mandate to carry out the work for which they are still responsible; things that matter a great deal to local people – housing, social care, education, roads and transport, regeneration, culture and our street cleaning and waste management – and they must still be held accountable through regular elections.
So how did our local councillors, backed by the government, justify the cancellation? According to a Hastings Borough Council statement: “The four group leaders at Hastings Borough Council – Green, Labour, Conservative and Hastings Independents Group – believe elections would present significant risks to the stability, continuity and capacity to deliver the local government reorganisation process, and also impose financial and administrative burdens when the council must be focused on a smooth transition to unitary arrangements.”
It does not sit well to hear an argument that we shouldn’t have elections because they might interrupt ‘continuity’, i.e. people might not re-elect the people who are already there. Perhaps it would be more ‘efficient’ for the government to select councillors: that would save time and expense.
When the county council elections were postponed last year, the then Green leader of Hastings Council, Julia Hilton, said: “Our fragile democracy can’t afford to ignore the people’s right to vote”. Why does this critique of a Tory-led council not equally apply to their own?
I suspect that one of the reasons many Hastings politicians requested postponement of these elections was the concern that Reform is doing well in the polls and at the recent by-election won the former Tory stronghold of Ashdown and Conquest. But by trying to duck an open electoral contest, Hastings’ councillors, with government backing, have ended up giving Reform a massive boost. Other than the Liberal Democrats – who are not represented on Hastings Council – Reform was the most prominent party campaigning for our right to vote in May, and so Reform has been able to present itself as the champions of the people, the insurgent outsiders who want to do things differently.
The Hastings People’s Party, of which I am a member, was set up recently to try to provide a left alternative to the Labour government because it was clear that the alternative on offer from Reform will be disastrous for our country and for this town. We have seen their incompetence in governing the councils they won last year, but we only have to look at the horror unfolding in America right now to see what is in store for us if Reform wins and creates an authoritarian regime hell-bent on blaming immigrants and benefit claimants for everything.
The way to defeat any party whose policies we disagree with is to confidently offer a meaningful alternative offering hope that things can and will get better when we target the real causes of poverty and austerity by stopping spending on war, reining in in the big corporations and making them pay their taxes – rather than targeting the disabled or the elderly or refugees and asylum seekers.
It’s not inevitable that people who are disillusioned and understandably angry, and who want to protest the system, will vote for Reform. When millions of people supported Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in 2017, they voted for a party that was promising for the first time in decades to confront the rich and powerful and empower the many. The popularity of these ideas terrified the establishment, and they threw everything at discrediting Jeremy Corbyn. But we can and must build that alternative again.
The arrogance of politicians who decided that cancelling elections was fine because they were ‘good’ people, acting for ‘good’ reasons, does a terrible disservice to everyone who wants to stand for election in order to speak up for the majority in this country, who are being constantly ignored and sidelined.
The far right is gaining traction in far too many countries, using repression and violence – and cancelling elections – to maintain what passes for ‘stability’ and order in an ever more unjust world. We urgently need more democratic involvement by more people; not just in elections, but in trade unions, tenants’ groups, direct action campaigns and more; not to protect the status quo but to shake things up, and to build something better.
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The real alternative is not a government where one wing tells everyone what to do, but where people are left alone by government to do as they wish, as long as it doesn’t directly impinge on the freedoms of others.
As long as people can’t get away from the current system, they are without a voice.