The Artist – Charlie Uzzel-Edwards
Well, I voted. I then wrote about it several times. My views on compulsory voting (with musings on enfranchisement and the Chartists) tend to take me off message).
So do my thoughts on Police Commissioners and why we don’t need such as elected law enforcement personnel and no win-no fee lawyers. I deleted them.
So, I will treat this as third time lucky and try to stick to the results. The Green party seems to be doing well. Reform is doing even better. To me that means that people are more concerned with illegal immigration than they are with climate change.
OK, fourth time, as the third time was a bit dull.
The local Green candidate won. We also got an extra Green councillor in Peterborough, meaning we now have six. . So far, so good. There are 8 Peterborough First councillors and 9 Independents, plus Conservative, Reform, Labour and LibDem. It is a very fragmented council and nobody has overall control. At one time, according to newspaper article last year 25% of sitting councillors had been elected for a party that was different to the one they were currently claiming to be in. That often happens where you have Greens, Independents and someone in a party with a town name and “First” after it.
Nationally the Greens did quite well, despite the fact we are supposedly anti-semitic and Reform did even better because they are riding a wave of populism.
And that is a summary of politics in England today – the big winner is a party led by a man who accepted a £5,000,000 gift from a businessman who wants nothing in return, is a friend of Donald Trump and has, several times, been caught out for using anti-semitic and racist language.
In Wales Reform is going to be the second biggest party but in Scotland they did not prosper. The Greens won two seats in each country, which is a start.
Counting is still proceeding.
However, despite the shifts in power I don’t expect much will change, because they never do, The political climate will probably become less compassionate towards refugees, and to those with immigrant backgrounds, parties which promise a lot in opposition often fail to life up to the rhetoric when they come into contact with reality.
