As people will know from the coverage in this paper, we are now in the swing of the local elections.
There are a range of candidates standing across the district, but sadly our community appears to have been shunned by the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.
This means the second largest group of candidates standing are the South Holland Independent Party (I’ll leave others to work out the conflict between those last two words) they have started to campaign on the basis of a false premise, they claim the Conservative Group who run the council apply a party whip and that they wouldn’t.
The reality has been for the last 20 years, the Conservatives haven’t had a whipped vote because that is not how we operate.
The only time a whip would have been applied would have been if anyone wanted to vote against the delivery of something in our local manifesto and the reason for that is simple, the local manifesto is our contract between the council and the community we serve, breaking it is not an option for anyone who wants to be a Conservative councillor.
Maybe the Independent group would operate differently? Maybe they think it’s fine to make a pledge to the community and then break it or maybe they won’t commit to doing anything in the first place?
Either way it’s not a platform that I would want to elect someone on, the scale of the challenges we face are such that a plan and a commitment to deliver, are a minimum prerequisite for anyone seeking to hold local office.
Gary Porter
Leader of South Holland District Council
