Quote of the day 4th December 2025 - and this is NOT an endorsement

The MP for Whitehaven and Workington, Labour's Josh MacAlister, was sent out today to justify Labour's decision to delay four Mayoral elections for two years.


As the Guido Fawkes website put it, at Labour Minister: We are Cancelling Mayoral Elections as 'We've Only Recently Become the Government' – Guido Fawkes

he came out with this "distinctly flimsy" line of defence to Sky News:

“To be fair, we have only recently become the government, this is a new set of devolution that we are bringing forward. We are speeding this up in a major way. The people who are saying this are the same people who not that many years ago were proroguing parliament. We will take no lectures from them.”


Every part of this statement is wrong. Let's fisk it, shall we?

“To be fair, we have only recently become the government"

* They've been in power for 17 months.

 "this is a new set of devolution that we are bringing forward."

* this set of devolution extends to more areas something extremely similar to what the Conservatives did in in the last three parliaments establishing metro/combined authority mayors with the first elections between 2017 and 2024.

"We are speeding this up in a major way."

* how on earth is deferring elections for two years 'speeding this up in a major way' ?

"The people who are saying this are the same people who not that many years ago were proroguing parliament. We will take no lectures from them.”

* the objection to deferring these elections extends well beyond those who supported proroguing parliament for a few weeks in 2019. 


Now there ARE special circumstances when deferring an election may be justified. I think it was right to defer many elections for a year because of the COVID pandemic. A few elections were deferred again the following year because of local government reorganisation.

I reluctantly accepted that at the time, and one of the reasons I accepted it was that there was a genuine cross-party consensus that it made sense and nobody thought the real motivation was to stitch them up. (Reform UK did not contest most of the elections concerned and none of the parties which were involved objected.)

There is no consensus today to defer these elections and no possible justification for a two-year delay. The Conservatives oppose these election delays.










As Kemi Badenoch said (and this quote is an endorsement:)

"This is the second time Labour have cancelled elections.

Democracy isn’t optional. We will oppose this every step of the way."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten years ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by th...
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more