Is England a democracy, if local elections can be delayed two yearsZ

@FreddieUK Brighton is disappearing. That’s pretty big!

@peterlee I thought that was a city in its own right? I'll have to look at that.

@FreddieUK Ideas tossed around;

One mayor plus : one council
One mayor plus : two councils
One mayor plus; three councils.

Any combination you like really.

In the two council model Brighton gets absorbed into West Sussex.

Whatever happens ‘it will work closely’ with ….

I’ve lost the plot.

@TheOneyouwerewarnedabout did you see Nigel fake crying outside the iranian embassy lol

@FreddieUK I can only comment generally on local councillors that come under fire in my local towns from time to time.
Politics attracts an abnormal amount of bad eggs.

But I’m paying over £300 a month to people I have no say in. I have no worries about the police and fire service. Nor the amount I pay them.

Concerns about social services seems to be pretty common across the country.


I’m glad things are going well in your part of the country.

@peterlee I agree nothing is perfect.

It never was - some bits better, some bits worse.

It never can be - we can only hope for improvements where possible.

I don't think corruption is very widespread but property-speculators are given too much leeway by the planning laws, and they are no longer even bound to ensure proper building quality.


I believe the schools should never have been given to commercial contractors even though they still must teach at least a national minimum range of subjects to minimum national standards, but the original LEA system should have been retained.


The problem with the welfare areas is that they in a grim way the victims of their own successes; but I for one would hope we never descend to some "heritage foundation"-esque level of sink-or-swim. Even the much-criticised Victorians had some charity, though you had to be able to afford to be ill, and their dreadful workhouses were based on a cruel notion that desperate poverty was some sort of choice.


The state of the roads was well put recently by a friend who owns his home in probably an ex-Council House estate, in Yeovil. Having navigated the Landrover test-course to reach his home, he told me of a local radio news report that some "survey" praised the high standard of Somerset County Council's roads. My friend said the programme was deluged with e-posts and 'phone calls of "not round here", "what roads have they seen?" and "if ours are good I'd hate to drive on theirs" nature.


Councils up and down the land have been starved of central (general-taxpayer) funding for years by governments of both parties, but if the nation is short of money I place most of the blame on one thing -

- The "inward investment" myth, with its parallel sales of both the logically-State industries and utilities and of privately-owned companies abroad.

Started by a Conservative government but continued with great gusto by succeeding Labour as well as Tory ones; this policy neither sees nor cares about the obvious, inevitable results. The losses of encouragement, control, intellectual-property, service quality and especially, operating-profits. Even if the overseas stock-markets, sovereign wealth funds and assorted spivs pay the company taxes due (if we are lucky), the profits are not available to be spent by their beneficiaries in this country.

@ArishMell


Only too much about my local government. It's a corrupt old boy society where one hand washes the other, all at the expense of the taxpayers.

I doubt that it is much different anywhere else, perhaps worse in some places.

@MasterLee Could be worse, could be Trumpistan.