Faith in Brighton and Hove City Council’s ruling councillors appears to have plummeted to an all-time low.
A residents’ petition of no confidence in the council, which attracted more than 4,400 signatures, was presented to the recent meeting of the full council.
So why has public trust in the council collapsed to such a level where residents are organising petitions of no confidence?
A statement of fact: after the local election in 2019 the Labour administration entered into a secret agreement with the supposedly major opposition party – the Greens – to jointly agree the way forward for the council’s policies.
After a few months the Labour administration endured a series of mishaps which resulted in their becoming the major opposition party with the Green Party assuming the administration role.
This was only right and proper – what was, however, not right and proper was for the secret agreement to continue.
The leader of the Green administration was asked to confirm publicly the contents of the agreement which he failed to do.
The contents were leaked and published online by Brighton and Hove News, thus letting the public into the secret pact between the Green and Labour parties.
The Conservative group and the independent councillors were not a party to the agreement and had until then not been able to comment upon its content.
Our democracy, which is so dear to all of us, must be defended at all costs. This democracy, which we assume is normal, is not reflected in many parts of the world – indeed we are all aware of many countries where elections are either for a single party or where the ruling party overrides the election result.
We have to ask ourselves why do we have an election – and the answer is thankfully very simple. To enable electors to support the candidate and party which best represent their views and interests.
In May 2019 we in the city had our election with residents having a choice to vote for candidates from the major parties as well as independents.
If you supported the Green Party you voted Green, if you thought the Labour Party was best, you voted Labour, etc, etc.
The result was as we know a narrow victory for Labour which, somehow, within a short time turned into a narrow defeat.
With the signing of the secret agreement, however, nothing really changed. The result was that the two thirds of the electorate who voted against the party in administration – first Labour and now the Greens – have found that their votes have been totally ignored.
Such an agreement is totally out of order. It has been left to the Conservative Party together with the independent councillors to form the active opposition – a paid role. First the Green Party and now the Labour Party has failed to fulfil their opposition duties.
It is a nonsense in the public’s eyes that the Labour Party is now supposedly the official opposition.
This lack of opposition has resulted in some issues being forced through without proper consultation and public involvement – the Old Shoreham Road temporary cycle lane being a good example.
I am acutely aware that all members of the council are true democrats at heart. They should recognise that the Green and Labour Groups bear joint culpability for the performance of – and the public’s loss of confidence in – Brighton and Hove City Council.
Garry Peltzer Dunn is a Conservative councillor for Wish Ward on Brighton and Hove City Council and led Hove Borough Council from 1987 to 1991.
Vote Labour you get the Greens.
Vote Green you get Labour.
Brighton and Hove deserves a new start.
Let both parties pack up their bicycles and move away please.
It is time for adults to run the city.
Nice impartial news story….
Well said Cllr Peltzer Dunn. Many of us Labour supporters face a tough decision in 2023 but I do not want a Green Administration and if voting Red means I get Green then for the first time I won’t vote Labour. This coalition with the Greens does not work for a vast majority of Labour supporters as Cllr Dunn says the OSR cycle lane is the obvious example. Can you imagine Kier Starmer staying silent if the Tories were fiddling the figures over an issue? And yet the silence from Labour over the FOI figures for the OSR is both embarrassing and a wilful neglect of their democratic duty.
A vote for one party shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a vote against another. I vote on policies and people not parties. I have occasionally voted Green and Labour in my ward in the same election. I’m sick of party tribalism and opposition for opposition’s sake.
If Tory councillors or former councillors want better outcomes in our city maybe they could write to their colleagues in Westminster and ask them to reverse the savage ‘austerity’ cuts that have devastated services and hurt people in our city, especially in low income areas.
Exactly. Well said Ian Chambers.
My grandparents voted Labour,they got labour, my parents the same, now i am so confused on who to vote for who am i going to get and not know about it, my vote is precious to me, no one has a right to abuse it, Brighton has been let down by this we deserve truth and trust.
I disagree completely with the Tory councillor. For years many of us have been wanting much more cooperation between the parties where policies overlap as many do between the Greens and the Labour party. This means our elected representatives are thinking more about the city and less about tribal politics. I didn’t notice the Tories being hesitant to form a coalition with the LibDems in 2010 so they could form a government even though, in reality, their politics hardly coincided
And look at what that coalition did to the LibDems, (their vote still never recovered). Labour could suffer a similar reaction if they don’t stop this coalition with the Greens
Difference with the Tory-LibDem coalition, Labour was still the opposition and held the government to account. In addition the LibDems were free to disagree (as they did when they supported Brexit) and the details of the coalition were public knowledge.
With the Green-Labour coalition it was kept secret and any deals agreed were not revealed.
For instance the total weedkiller ban was introduced without reference to Committee or affected councillors.
It seems Labour are now mere dummies being operated by the Green ventriloquist masters.
Just look at yesterday’s climate emergency press release – Nancy Platts sounds like she is being operated by Phelim’s foot and obviously doesn’t understand what she is saying.
Same happens in the ETS (Transport) committee where Chair Green Amy Heley operates Opposition lead Labour Gary Wilkinson who agrees with everything Deputy Chair and Sustrans employee and Green Councillor Jamie Lloyd tells them.
Mind your I’m not sure Phelim knows much about science, businesses, or the environment either and doesn’t seem to know what carbon emissions are.
Open democracy, with councillors accountable to the electorate, in the city is dead.
None of this is true!
Labour and Greens worked together ( no conspiracy !!) To see what areas of their manifestos they had in common….
Left leaning parties have philosophies of cooperation, and a deep commitment to public services … so they decided to work together on area of the manifestos they have in common
Conservatives have philosophies of destroying public services ,blaming individuals, destruction of NHS and social care, so they are doing anything they can to disclaim the left. Its happening nationally to an even greater degree
So how could the conservatives work with other parties on the NHS and public services ,when they totally disagree with these institutions? They want us all to buy private care , and destroy the welfare state
From a white privileged Lecturer in Social Science
Given the repetetive major cuts in local government funding by the Tory governments of the past 10 years and their increasingly obvious negative social, welfare, educational and cultural consequences it is difficult to respond meaningfully to the Tory advertorial above. Restore the funding and stop pretending the consequences of these cuts are anything other than Tory driven.
I’m a Labour voter, I dispise the greens. Yet here we are with this shambles.
I think sometimes it’s worth remembering that local party’s are not really akin to their national counterparts. Next election guess who I’m not voting for again. Bad move on local labour’s part but then again I guess it’s still full of the corbyn crusaders. Real shame.
Red or Green are always preferable to Blue. Boris the butcher (126,000 Covid deaths and counting) and his corrupt, incompetent crew are a disgrace to this Country and to politics in general. Anyone voting for this greedy, narcissistic brood has blood on their hands.
And this is where national politics fails local politics. I cannot stand Boris he is an awful man BUT voting Tory locally has no bearing on that, (I can still vote Peter Kyle). Voting Tory here much as it pains me will stop the damaging Green/ Red coalition and then Labour locally might sort themselves out.
So much humbug in this piece you could open a sweetshop. All this pretended concern for representation and people’s votes, and yet the Conservatives are the only party adamantly opposed to making seats match votes. The present system suits them because they can sneak in against a divided opposition.
This why the Tories get rattled when their opponents work together. So more of that, please, and do it nationwide.
The other factor in this is their impotent rage about being a declining force locally. Ten years ago or so they ran the council (I remember the un-gritted pavements and loads of people in hospital with fractures) – thankfully they are now a long way from doing that.
A pity that neither the piece, nor the comments above identify Cllr Peltzer-Dunn’s noble role in the leadership of the cross-party + local residents powerful ‘Allies for Democracy’ campaign which successfully trounced New Labour’s inexcusable referendum for an Elected Mayor dictatorship!
So successfully, in fact, that however the figures are looked at the proposal was so resoundingly defeated that we must hope it never returns to waste our time and taxpayers money!
Very sadly however is that Councillor Peltzer-Dunn does not seem to get anywhere near the awful truth that, by a wide variety of well-honed artifice, it has become largely the reality that it’s a small clique of Council Officers, in the Town Hall (whose salaries are paid from our taxes!), who de facto ‘control’ our City!
Some of the more apparent ways they do this is by submitting incomplete and inadequate Reports to Committees for decision (with the lightly-veiled threat that time is now pressing, and/or that so much had been spent on officers working-up the proposals that it’d be wasteful for the Committee to reject them!).
Then there’s other officer tactics, such as simply not doing what a Committee has ordered to be done (as in the current Rise contract debacle)!
Then there’s the ‘Soft Power’ tactic of excessively flattering newly-arrived Councillors, and providing them with many kinds of little tit-bits, such as insider gossip and invites to conferences and seminars etc not readily available to other Councillors – all with the usually-successful aim of ‘capturing’ that Councillor’s allegiance to the Town Hall line (often to then gain support for officer’s money-wasting ‘Vanity Projects’, designed to boost an officer’s CV to facilitate a move to a better-paid job in a larger council!).
A greater sadness related to the above scenario is that Councillor Peltzer-Dunn is a highly-intelligent professional person (a RICS Chartered Surveyor), with many previous years of valuable experience as an Elected Member of the former Hove Borough Council.
And the relevance of that fact is that Hove Borough was probably among the best-run Council’s in England.
For the principal reason that it’s senior officers were qualified professionals, who worked to the high standards of their various Chartered Institutions (thus with little or no bowing to satisfy any party-political interference).
In those halcyon days it was easy to say that:
‘The only problems in Hove are a few major ones’, whilst the general day-to-day services for Hove residents were of a high standard, and economical too!
So prudent indeed that, at merger-time with Brighton on 1 April 1997, Hove residents paid no Council Tax for that year, due to the financial reserves accrued by their prudent and professional Borough officers (who were then paid-off with massive ‘Golden Goodbyes’ – apparently because New Labour feared they’d be too professional to toe any party-political line, so Labour recruited compliant alternatives, from London New Labour strongholds, such as Lewisham Council etc.
And oh yes, the few ‘Major Problems’ of HBC?
Well, perhaps the inexcusable political (Conservative) interfering by the Sainsbury family with the Hangleton Link project.
Whereby it still ends at Old Shoreham Road, instead of continuing in a shallow culvert, under what was once all Borough-owned land, to join the A259 coast road at Shoreham Harbour. And the project ended up costing Hove taxpayers more than budgeted!
And an earlier ‘Major Problem’ was HBC’s failure to protect the magnificent Edwardian villas at the west side of Grand Avenue – whereby we now have banal blocks of (expensive!) multi-storey flats that will probably continue to blight the Conservation Area neighbourhood for decades to come!
And how to fix our current Brighton & Hove City Council?
Simply for Councillors, of all parties, to recognise that the Town Hall officers are paid (by taxpayers!) to serve and not to rule.
And then for Councillors to shut-down the 40 or so cosy little secret ‘Members Working Parties’, and to conduct such activity openly in a much smaller number of the kind of Sub-committees we used to have for detailed work.
And now the ‘Work’ word has fallen there seems to be a clear need for Councillors to work 2 to 3 times harder in public to actually run our City Council in an efficient non party-political way (whereby Town Hall officers correctly do what our elected representatives have decided needs to be done), and which will mean more Committee meetings needing to be held to really get to grips with the business of the day, and to do so in good time.
And if some of our current Councillors do not feel able to carry-out such an onerous democratic duty (for which they get paid from £14k pa upwards) perhaps its time for them to vacate their seats in favour of more capable candidates?
We can but hope, and vote!
I think that party politics is lazy politics, and has no part in local politics. Momentum took over labour here so actually what you got was more akin to communism, under the guise of center-left labour.
Vote independent. Consider standing for council as an independent. That way you live or die on your own record and not that of a political party at Westminster.
I voted Green and was fully aware (because i read the election leaflets) of their intention to work collaboratively with all councillors where possible. The left of Labour and the Greens are close in their policies which is obvious to anyone bothering to read them. Even the Tory government (and the whole majority in parliament) voted to declare a climate emergency. When councils actually take action on their locally declared climate emergency and plan to become carbon neutral this should be applauded. The Tories and Labour moderates drag their heels or lie through their teeth when it comes to climate action – it’s not the 1970’s anymore! We know what needs to be done so Gary Peltzer, Peter Kyle etc should stop obstructing and damaging future generations of brightonians.
The problem here is that the ‘election leaflets’ were in no great detail. A 2030 carbon neutral pledge by both the Labour and the Greens meant what? How was it to be achieved? The devil is in the detail, (in fact one of the few details Labour did pledge Park and Ride has totally dropped off the radar), the electorate will not be fooled again.
An article written by a tory. Never, ever, ever trust a tory.
Says a Red Fascist, always.
And you would trust a labour? That’s a laugh for a start. Not that the Greens are any more trustworthy.