Letter: Our Local Election Result Highlights a Conundrum for Tories

Published on: 21 Aug, 2019
Updated on: 21 Aug, 2019

The Economist article.

From Gordon Bridger

hon alderman and former Mayor of Guildford

Many of your readers, not regular readers of The Economist, will be interested to know that on page 23 of the most recent edition there is an article on Guildford and the newly formed Residents for Guildford & Villages (R4GV) Party and its possible national consequences.

R4GV emerged from nowhere to take 15 seats and for the first time in Guildford’s long political history to reduce the Conservative Party to a rump of only nine members.

The article claims this is of national significance as similar results have occurred elsewhere, leaving the Conservative Party in a “catch-22” situation, “the party must build houses to attract new voters, but cannot do so without annoying their current backers.”

Housing development and an incompetent Local Plan have been correctly identified as major factors in the defeat. Development is not a high priority in a community with 89% of land in the green belt. (In recent national surveys Guildford emerges as, London apart, the wealthiest community in Britain, the second-best educated, after Edinburgh, and the least deprived).

However, just as important in this social revolution was the rejection of national politics into what should really be local issues, and that residents interests should be the prime consideration in local politics.

In Britain, local elections have become a proxy vote for national parties. Anyone standing as an Independent had a lonely, often derided, role to play. The emergence of a really effective residents’ party is a significant change worthy of national interest. Traditionally, the only effective opposition in Guildford were the Liberals, and then the Liberal Democrats, but they were seen as an ineffective and being a national party did not pick up the normal protest vote, locally.

The government policy of loading local authorities with new social responsibilities, cutting their support (paid for by local business rates) and then restricting tax increases to a ludicrous £5 a year (Band D) and controlling them with almost Soviet-style financial restrictions has not helped local Conservative parties.

In my view, maybe half of the electorate’s motivation when voting for Independents was that they were fed up with national politics.

That this was seen as a threat to the traditional position of local parties became clear when the Liberal Democrats at Millmead had to turn to the Conservatives to take control of the borough council and only agreed to one R4GV councillor on the Executive.