It’s 2025! Were you aware or were you still sleeping in from the holiday? We are nine days in to the New Year and we’ve been slacking off enjoying some time off. Even the Mailbag has been quiet, so quiet in fact that from a reader suggestion, we gave the day off retrospectively to the E-Mail Urchin for the day there was no mail at all. He has it too good we feel, whilst us intellectuals in the team do the heavy lifting. We rebuffed the offer of a reader giving him a sock to release him from his responsibility. We can confirm he is quite happy here, and the quality of the gruel has improved considerably.
So what’s in store for 2025. Well we have heard on the grapevine that the County Council are definitely going ahead with the County elections. This despite devolution plans outlined by the Labour Government with the aim for all regions with ‘Two tier’ authorities to merge into unitary authorities. This would mean Tamworth Borough Council ceasing to exist and its functions being merged into a larger more powerful Staffordshire unitary authority (they already exist, look at Stoke on Trent). It also means our current system of having 30 elected Councillors will be abolished, leaving us with around 10 to cover all fo Tamworth. Apparently this will give more opportunities to towns like Tamworth, we personally think it removes Tamworths’ voice, at the very least making it have to shout to be heard amongst other towns representatives to get even the basics done. We already know how hard it is for the County to deal with everything road related in our town, expect your basic services and everything that Tamworth Council does to go the same way and decisions being further removed from the people they impact. Of course, we’re meant to think of this as a good thing and a huge cost saver. In the opinion of this humble blog, it isn’t and it won’t be.
Some authorities such as Warwickshire are jumping in with both feet to be one of the first. It seems Tamworth isn’t yet, but it looks like it won’t have a choice. Labour have said they want to complete this carnage by the end of their term in Government. They can’t entirely be blamed for this since the Tories have been banging on about this too. Unfortunately stuff like this is usually done to suit the political class and not the people, and if both parties had it on their agenda you can be sure it’s definitely not going to work well for us plebs.
So 2024 could have been the last time you voted for Tamworth Borough Councillors, and you might not have even realised it. The current crop of 30 will be no longer and most will unlikely try to grab the seats up for grabs in a unitary. It will essentially be like a full time job, and since many of our local Councillors already have full time jobs, they’re not likely to give them up. Usually, only a special kind of person wants to be a full time politician (which is often the root of most of our problems with them).
Let’s not forget that if Tamworth Council is abolished, everything it owns such as the Castle and the Assembly rooms suddenly becomes the property of the new unitary authority, and the decisions surrounding them are moved to Stafford. From what we’ve been told, the Tories left a fair bit of cash in the bank that would have been spent in the town, suddenly won’t be ours anymore. Of course it is likely the current Labour administration will squander it before then anyway. The deeper you look into devolution, the more you realise the outcomes are the opposite of what they’re trying to sell you…
