If voting in local elections changes anything... ...The Only Way Is Essex

WHILE all eyes were focused on the proHamas headbanger elected in Leeds and the ghastly sectarianism sweeping some of our town and cities, a quieter revolution was taking place elsewhere.

Not a single member of any mainstream party was elected to Castle Point Borough Council, in Essex, as independents swept the board. Tory, Labour and Green candidates were crushed. The Lib Dems didn’t bother contesting a single seat, presumably because they knew they would suffer a similar fate.

Castle Point, covering Canvey Island, Hadleigh and Benfleet in the south of the county, is now controlled by councillors from two independent parties.

The People’s Independent Party was set up to oppose the building of 5,000 new homes in the Green Belt. As for the Canvey Island Independent Party, the clue’s in the name. It wants a return to full autonomy for the island in the Thames Estuary, which was removed during the disastrous, bureaucratic reorganisation of local government 40 years ago.

They may sound a bit like the modern incarnation of Monty Python’s Judean People’s Front and the rival People’s Front of Judea, but they are united in their loathing for the once dominant Conservatives — and Labour, Lib Dems and Greens, come to that. The Tories didn’t help their cause when 13 of their candidates were disqualified because of a ‘human error’ on their nomination papers.

(Sounds as if Reggie Perrin’s hapless brother-in-law Jimmy is running the local Conservative Association. ‘Bit of a cock-up on the candidates’ front, Reggie.’)

But even if the papers had been filled in properly, the Tories would still have been wiped out. Where they did stand, their candidates lost by margins of two and three to one. Labour fared even worse.

THE sole Green candidate was humiliated, too. Maybe if he’d promised that Canvey would be free ‘ from the river to the sea’ he’d have garnered more support from the local Passport To Pimlico tendency.

This is the first time independents have had total control of a borough council without having to form a coalition with one of the main parties.

Their manifestos concentrated on local issues, such as protecting green spaces, opening police stations 24 hours a day and putting more coppers on the streets, cutting council waste and councillors’s allowances, and creating more play areas for children.

Refreshingly absent was any mention of national politics, foreign wars, asylum seekers, green grandstanding, trans rights or the rampant wokery which now infests every Town Hall from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

As the League Of Gentlemen might have put it: This was a local election for local people.

While the mainstream parties treated the local elections as a dress rehearsal for the General Election, the Castle Point independents put the pressing needs of their own people first.

What’s profoundly depressing is that anyone should think this is in any way out of the ordinary.

Local government elections should be about emptying the bins, mending the streets, tending the parks, and all those other apparently mundane, bread-and butter concerns which are absolutely essential to the quality of our everyday lives.

They should not be about Rwanda, or Gaza, or party politics, come to that. Back in the dim and distant, independent and ratepayers’ councillors played a much greater part in the running of our councils, large and small.

Some of us are old enough to remember life before Grocer Heath’s corporatist local government reform in the early 1970s, which forced well-run, historic boroughs to merge and form unwieldy supercouncils, remote from voters. The bins got emptied once a week, the buses ran on time and the streets were clean.

It’s been a downward spiral ever since. As Town Hall bureaucracy has burgeoned, services have shrivelled and, in some cases, disappeared completely. The butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who saw sitting on the local council as their civic duty have been replaced by a careerist, politically correct, politically partisan class.

The rot really set in when councillors became eligible for attendance allowances and expense accounts. When I started covering local government in the 1970s, the council leader was an engine driver who devoted his spare time to municipal matters and never claimed a penny.

I used to give him a lift to meetings in the office van.

After Mrs Thatcher’s second victory, all manner of agitprop Leftists were convinced Labour would never win another General Election and so moved into local government to mount their resistance. Red Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council was the template, until Mrs T abolished it in a fit of pique.

Today, the spirit of Red Ken lives on in the shape of Mayor Genghis Khan, the two- bob chancer re-elected in London as head of the reconstituted (by Labour) Great London Authority by just 17 per cent of the electorate.

Despite a knife crime epidemic and an increasingly filthy and boarded-up city, Khan prefers self-promotion, woke gimmickry, slagging off Donald Trump, and blaming everything wrong on Brexit rather than actually doing the job he’s paid for. Khan, like Andy Burnham in Manchester, appears to view his mayoralty as a mere stepping stone to greater things on the national stage. Sadly, the same goes for far too many politicians who put themselves forward for local office. They all seem to have their sights set on becoming MPs and, in their dreams, ministers. Everything is about them, not the people they are supposed to represent.

(Take that ridiculous Elphicke woman crossing the floor of the House this week. A classic case of: Look at ME!!)

Once elected, they pursue national, not local obsessions, such as forcing Net Zero madness down our throats in the form of wrecking once- efficient refuse and recycling regimes and imposing low traffic neighbourhoods — all backed by ever more punitive fines and surcharges.

Meanwhile, potholes proliferate, pavements go unrepaired and the police withdraw from the streets, all blamed on ‘austerity’.

At the same time, council taxes go through the roof and there’s no shortage of money for hiring superfluous ‘diversity’ enforcers and installing ludicrous, unworkable app-based parking machines, driving customers away from shopping centres and forcing small, often family, businesses into bankruptcy.

This isn’t a party political point. The Tories are just as bad as Labour once they get their feet under the Town Hall table.

AND look at the shocking state of Brighton during the Greens’ long rule. It’s no wonder local democracy is in such a parlous state.

To paraphase the old Bonzo Dog song: No matter who you vote for, the council always gets in.

Yet the Boys In The Bubble and the mainstream media continue to cover the local elections as if their only relevance is as a pointer to what will happen nationally.

All the commentary around the Tories holding Harlow council centred on what it meant for Keir Starmer’s chances of becoming Prime Minister, not what it meant for the people of Harlow.

Elsewhere, coverage fixated on the new sectarianism exposed by the Islamist surge in Leeds and beyond. As if that’s going to revive our crumbling High Streets make the buses run on time.

So we should congratulate the independent councillors of Castle Point for getting their priorities right. And congratulate their voters for closing their ears to the noise of national politics and remembering what their local council is really there for.

Canvey’s proudest son was the late, great axeman Wilko Johnson, guitarist with Essex pub rockers Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury’s Blockheads, and best known as executioner Ser Ilyn Payne in Game Of Thrones. With one blow he could sever Canvey from the mainland once again.

So let’s hope that Canvey Island succeeds in seceding amicably from Castle Point. If that ever happens, it’ll be Milk And Alcohol all round. A return to the pre1974 council boundaries and proper local democracy is long overdue. If devolution is good enough for Scotland and Wales, why not Canvey?

The Only Way Is Essex.