Thursday 11 August 2011
Political Fantasy
Someone told me recently that they had been have a conversation with a Brent Liberal Democrat councillor in which he assumed that the Liberal Democrats would be back in power in Brent in 2014. In politics all things are possible, but something will have to change dramatically from the current opinion poll ratings. Having sold themselves as the leftwing alternative to Labour and then embraced the radical right agenda of the present Con Dem government, the Liberal Democrats have seen there support halved. Unless things change dramatically, they will be fortunate to have any seats at all after May 2014.
3 comments:
Cllr Powney you are so deluded - I think you will find yourself plain old Mr Powney at the next council elections, that is if your party even select you.
You have done so much harm to Brent Labour.
I was a Labour Voter.
Well I think you're confusing opinion polls for Central Government and for Local Government. While certainly the unexpected and un-Lib-Dem actions of the Lib Dem parliamentary party are going to have an effect on there local Brent colleagues, the difference is that in Brent we have a Labour Executive that is behaving in a manner that is more Conservative than the Conservatives and so it creates a difficult prospect for voters.
In Brent the Lib Dems kind of gave us a preview of what would happen to the country if they got in power when they did their famous about turn on the Ark Academy issue (just like Clegg about turned on tuition fees), yet people still voted for the Brent Lib Dems in the following election.
The reality is that at the moment the Lib Dems are the second biggest party in the council and the only one that has a chance of taking the Council from Labour.
The difficult problem voters have is that it's not clear that either the Lib Dems or Labour will act in the interests of Brent and its people. So we're left with the sad prospect of having to vote in the least-worst party rather than what we'd like to do is vote in the best party.
@Anonymous: whist I don't agree with a lot of Cllr Powney's views, one cannot deny that he is a capable councillor who seems to put in a lot of time and effort into his job. Perhaps if some of the opposition councillors put in a comparable amount of effort we might have a more meaningful democratic process
I think the real issue is that if Brent Labour doesn't want to bomb at the next election it needs to get rid of Cllr John when her term as leader comes up for renewal and replace her with someone completely different. She may have a lot of expereience but she may have to be the 'fall girl' to save the local party. It was never going to be an easy term for whomever won control of the council, but under her leadership, and the plain wrong over centralisation that the Labour executive has embarked on, traditional Labour voters are very unhappy and are not sure where to turn. A change at the top could help draw a line under this mess.
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