I don't know how English councils work, in Scotland many of our councils have just set their budgets which means that little bits of unspent money on other budgets suddenly becomes available. A big pot of unspent budget at this time of year is often that allocated to road gritting, which this year has been significantly underspent because our cold spells have been so short (in some years, of course, that budget pot may run out before the end of winter if there's a really prolonged spell of extreme cold and/or multiple periods of heavy snow), and because that doesn't even need to be transferred to a different department some pot hole filling is a natural thing to spend that on. What councils find difficult to find is a regular budget to spend on road maintenance, so we get a lot of patch and mend with the equivalent of loose change but very little work over the summer completely replacing large sections of road surface that keep the roads pot hole free for several years.
I could definitely buy that as the reason for the recent works here.
It’s a running joke round here that you always get loads of roadworks happening in February/March because if the department don’t spend all their funding for this financial year then they won’t get allocated as much in the next one. I guess it feels different this year because they were actually necessary roadworks.
We all know there isn't the money, because if there was money in council budgets then councils would be spending it on fixing more pot holes
Loads of potholes round here have recently been fixed, even though many of them only opened up when we had that really cold spell back in January.
I’d never thought my council was one of the rich ones before.
Heavily dependent on the local social care budget I suspect - and in addition to the budgetary reasons Alan notes I suspect they timetable their repairs for spring (once there's less risk of adverse weather)
Doubt it. It's as Alan said, we're getting towards the end of the financial year and any money not spent on gritting (we had a mild winter here) can be reallocated to running repairs. If it's not spent by the end of the year the roads department are likely to get (even) less money next year.
It would be far more efficient to resurface roads before they're so badly damaged the holes start appearing, but nobody does routine maintenance now...
Our Reform county council has been given loads of money by the East Midlands mayor to fix pot holes but claim it isn’t enough. They are also trialling a machine from JCB that they claim will sort everything out. The previous Tory administration, who also didn't appear to do much about fixing the problem, say it won't as they looked at the idea and it wasn't up to scratch. Whether or not the fact that the owner of JCB supports Reform has anything to do with the council getting the machine I couldn't possibly comment on.
They need to be truthful about their use of the word membership. No one who pays is a member of Reform. They are subscribers. They have no say in how the party is run. No vote, the party runs on the word of Nigel. He alone has the power to say what the party stands for.
As a point of information, there has been some central government funding deployed towards potholes but across the board the dearth of funding goes back to the Premiership of Boris Johnson.
Councils had to make the decision as to whether to fill in potholes or fund essential social services.
Those Reform councillors who are now complaining that there are insufficient funds are only finding out the hard way what councillors from other parties and none have been wrestling with for some considerable time.
I think a lot of Reform councillors believed Farage when he said councils were wasting people's money. When they got into power they realised how false that was.
This story shows there is a certain amount of regret of voting them in round here Councillors row at Pothole Protest.
One would think that if you were hoping to be a councillor one would actually do some research. Farage openly lied. I won’t hear anyone say otherwise. He must have known he truth.
I think during last year's local government elections some people stood for Reform, sure that they were just paper candidates. One for a ward round here lasted ten days before he resigned. Our local Labour candidate had pointed out on Facebook how much actual work he'd be expected to do, and I'm sure that was behind his decision to cut his losses and bow out/
I think during last year's local government elections some people stood for Reform, sure that they were just paper candidates.
I think that the evidence for that is quite convincing. Reform did better last year than they expected, and ran into a whole load of problems as a result (this includes what appears to be inadequate vetting of paper candidates, presumably on the basis of who cares about people not elected?, and various elected candidates who were unable to take up their seats or stood down very quickly when they realised they'd got themselves a more than full time job on a relatively low salary). Presumably they've learnt and this year will be fielding candidates who have been properly vetted, including being informed of what would be required of them if elected, and in all but the most anti-Reform seats knowing that there's a chance of being elected (one of the issues with a new party is that they won't have data on where their support actually is, or even much of an idea of the demographics of their support, and when presenting themselves as a protest party support can be very ephemeral ... that means that they could do well in unexpected places, and do badly in others where they might expect to do well - especially if it's known they might do well and tactical voting gets organised - and almost any candidate could be elected even if in the end very few are).
As many of you know, I'm active in the Scottish Greens, and we're looking towards the council elections next year (even while putting effort into campaigning for the Parliamentary elections in less than 2 months), and facing the prospect that as a party that's surging in popularity that we no longer really know what wards will be good for us, or rather know where we should be able to get a councillor elected but also that there's a significant number of wards where just the surge in support could put a candidate over the line without even actively campaigning there. That means we need three groups of candidates - those we hope should be elected and there will be active campaigning, paper candidates who we will need to advise that we think they could be elected even without campaigning, and paper candidates who we would be very surprised are elected. We also have an issue that Reform probably don't care about, that of trying to increase diversity of elected representatives which means we need to look at that second group of candidates to try and have as diverse a group as possible (that's much easier with the smaller first group, just from the point of view of number of people) - not helped, of course, by not being able to use any formal gender balancing process as that's possibly illegal following the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act last year.
My husband was having an on-line discussion with a friend about Reform's policies and thought he' better actually see what they say. I find them all rather alarming not least because of the lack of actual detail. https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-section
My husband was having an on-line discussion with a friend about Reform's policies and thought he' better actually see what they say. I find them all rather alarming not least because of the lack of actual detail. https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-section
Those policies aren’t relevant to the elections in May 2026, which are for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, local councils in England and Mayoral elections.
The Reform Party policies are at the central government level, which to some degree explains their poor performance in local governments in England. That and a lack of experience and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I can’t believe my home county of Lancashire has a Reform dominated council. Labour used to be shoe in. Just goes to show what Starmer has done.
I don’t understand why turkeys vote for Christmas but there we go
I can’t believe my home county of Lancashire has a Reform dominated council. Labour used to be shoe in. Just goes to show what Starmer has done.
I don’t understand why turkeys vote for Christmas but there we go
Lancashire had been tory for a while, and hadn't been solidly Labour since 2009. There are a lot of right wing small towns, villages and suburbs in Lancashire. I'm not sure Starmer can be blamed for this one entirely.
I can’t believe my home county of Lancashire has a Reform dominated council. Labour used to be shoe in. Just goes to show what Starmer has done.
I don’t understand why turkeys vote for Christmas but there we go
Lancashire had been tory for a while, and hadn't been solidly Labour since 2009.
Since when the average age will have drifted up, and the over 65+ bracket has probably grown faster than other areas of the country.
Couple in the fact that retirement is an isolating experience for many, and people with little scope for increasing their income tend to be very risk averse.
I can’t believe my home county of Lancashire has a Reform dominated council. Labour used to be shoe in. Just goes to show what Starmer has done.
I don’t understand why turkeys vote for Christmas but there we go
What exactly do you mean by "what Starmer has done"?
OK. Preston where I am from was a shoe in for Labour. Lancashire CC used to dominated by Labour. There are many towns that would vote Labour if a cow was representing them. From what I understand from my connections Starmer has not endeared himself or his party to them and a change was wanted.
OK. Preston where I am from was a shoe in for Labour. Lancashire CC used to dominated by Labour. There are many towns that would vote Labour if a cow was representing them. From what I understand from my connections Starmer has not endeared himself or his party to them and a change was wanted.
The results for Lancashire make interesting reading: https://council.lancashire.gov.uk/mgElectionResults.aspx?ID=43&V=1&RPID=44330441
I lived in Lancashire for a fair while (including a year in Preston) so I know the area fairly well. What Reform appears to have succeeded in doing was pulling together the "tory shires" with the old east lancs racist tendency who voted BNP a couple of decades back. You can also see the impact of independents in areas with a large Muslim population (I suspect some protest votes around the genocide in Gaza).
It seems that Reform are set to win a majority in the Senedd here in Wales. I really hope not. They are not a good fit for Wales (as far as I am concerned they are not a good fit for anywhere). It seems they want to force Welsh schools to fly the Union Flag. They appear to want to make Wales part of England again. Throwing away all the work done to gain some political independence.
Their attempts at local government have been failure after failure.
We shall see I guess
I live in Newport and our constituency looks likely to have two Plaid Cymru, two Reform, one Labour and another which could be Reform, Labour or Green, depending on how people vote.
The “Closed Proportional Vote” system using the D’hondt formula ought to ensure seats are allocated proportionally and there are six members elected for each constituency.
It looks to me that a party needs to get very nearly half of the votes to get a majority of the members in the constituency, but the exact numbers depend on how votes are split amongst the parties.
Essentially: vote for parties opposing Reform that as many other people are voting for!
It seems that Reform are set to win a majority in the Senedd here in Wales. I really hope not. They are not a good fit for Wales (as far as I am concerned they are not a good fit for anywhere). It seems they want to force Welsh schools to fly the Union Flag. They appear to want to make Wales part of England again. Throwing away all the work done to gain some political independence.
Their attempts at local government have been failure after failure.
We shall see I guess
What positions of Reform might be winning favour with Welsh voters then? The usual anti-immigration and other populist stuff?
It seems that Reform are set to win a majority in the Senedd here in Wales. I really hope not. They are not a good fit for Wales (as far as I am concerned they are not a good fit for anywhere). It seems they want to force Welsh schools to fly the Union Flag. They appear to want to make Wales part of England again. Throwing away all the work done to gain some political independence.
Their attempts at local government have been failure after failure.
We shall see I guess
What positions of Reform might be winning favour with Welsh voters then? The usual anti-immigration and other populist stuff?
As with Brexit there will also be some impact from English people resident in Wales.
It seems that Reform are set to win a majority in the Senedd here in Wales. I really hope not. They are not a good fit for Wales (as far as I am concerned they are not a good fit for anywhere). It seems they want to force Welsh schools to fly the Union Flag. They appear to want to make Wales part of England again. Throwing away all the work done to gain some political independence.
Their attempts at local government have been failure after failure.
We shall see I guess
What positions of Reform might be winning favour with Welsh voters then? The usual anti-immigration and other populist stuff?
There’s the opposition to the 20mph speed limit on most urban roads, despite the fact that it saves lives and prevents injuries, cutting council tax while improving services and NHS reform, claiming that Welsh NHS trusts perform poorly, which happens when health services have to serve poorer areas, and most of Wales is skint and unhealthy.
There’s no explicit “Boats for Votes”, but Asylum Hotels and Nation of Sanctuary policy are vehemently opposed.
Yeah. One of the more insidious forces in democratic politics. Admittedly, it does occassionally benefit the left, but still with the same disconnect between voter desire and party policies.
It seems that Reform are set to win a majority in the Senedd here in Wales. I really hope not. They are not a good fit for Wales (as far as I am concerned they are not a good fit for anywhere). It seems they want to force Welsh schools to fly the Union Flag. They appear to want to make Wales part of England again. Throwing away all the work done to gain some political independence.
Their attempts at local government have been failure after failure.
We shall see I guess
What positions of Reform might be winning favour with Welsh voters then? The usual anti-immigration and other populist stuff?
There’s the opposition to the 20mph speed limit on most urban roads, despite the fact that it saves lives and prevents injuries, cutting council tax while improving services and NHS reform, claiming that Welsh NHS trusts perform poorly, which happens when health services have to serve poorer areas, and most of Wales is skint and unhealthy.
There’s no explicit “Boats for Votes”, but Asylum Hotels and Nation of Sanctuary policy are vehemently opposed.
Interesting. Thanks.
And I assume "Boats for Votes" refers directly to the right-wing claim the left encourages immigration in exchange for getting votes in immigrant communities?
And I assume "Boats for Votes" refers directly to the right-wing claim the left encourages immigration in exchange for getting votes in immigrant communities?
I don’t think right wing claims that the left (insofar as the Starmer government can be termed “left”) means that, more that the government is soft and incompetent regarding immigration. In any case, I don’t think that has much traction amongst immigrants living in Britain who are looking at recent arrivals as a threat to their own status.
As for the government being ineffective regarding arrivals on small boats the numbers are pretty stable and most are from places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria etc, ie, war zones which many would have good reason to leave: I don’t think accusations of incompetence stick there as previous post-Brexit governments had similar numbers: nowadays we have a growing number in the processing pipeline.
Changing the subject from "Boats for Votes" election leaflets for an English local election vote, it is striking that the Reform leaflet set out like a PowerPoint points their national policy. No information about the candidate. Nearest to anything locally relevant was their pledge to increase police on the street. Took childish delight in posting back leaflet without a stamp.
And I assume "Boats for Votes" refers directly to the right-wing claim the left encourages immigration in exchange for getting votes in immigrant communities?
I don’t think right wing claims that the left (insofar as the Starmer government can be termed “left”) means that, more that the government is soft and incompetent regarding immigration. In any case, I don’t think that has much traction amongst immigrants living in Britain who are looking at recent arrivals as a threat to their own status.
As for the government being ineffective regarding arrivals on small boats the numbers are pretty stable and most are from places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria etc, ie, war zones which many would have good reason to leave: I don’t think accusations of incompetence stick there as previous post-Brexit governments had similar numbers: nowadays we have a growing number in the processing pipeline.
The right absolutely do claim that "the left" encourages immigration. They claim that it's intentional, with the aim of replacing white Christians, who the left hates and vote Right, with brown Muslims, who the left loves and who vote Left. Seriously.
Yes, it came under English control and later became part of the United Kingdom, but not on an 'equal' level as it were.
It was a 'Principality.'
The term 'home nations' has only tended to come into vogue since Devolution.
Wales came under English law unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland. I think you are right though that Reform would try to dismantle Devolution.
@Alan Cresswell - a lot of Reform councillors, like councillors from other political parties or none, won't be receiving a 'salary' of any kind. If they are town or parish councillors they'll be unpaid volunteers.
And I assume "Boats for Votes" refers directly to the right-wing claim the left encourages immigration in exchange for getting votes in immigrant communities?
I don’t think right wing claims that the left (insofar as the Starmer government can be termed “left”) means that, more that the government is soft and incompetent regarding immigration. In any case, I don’t think that has much traction amongst immigrants living in Britain who are looking at recent arrivals as a threat to their own status.
As for the government being ineffective regarding arrivals on small boats the numbers are pretty stable and most are from places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria etc, ie, war zones which many would have good reason to leave: I don’t think accusations of incompetence stick there as previous post-Brexit governments had similar numbers: nowadays we have a growing number in the processing pipeline.
The right absolutely do claim that "the left" encourages immigration. They claim that it's intentional, with the aim of replacing white Christians, who the left hates and vote Right, with brown Muslims, who the left loves and who vote Left. Seriously.
Until shown a more plausible interpretation, that's indeed how I would read the phrase "Boats for Votes". It's an age-old attack on minoritarian political parties, in Canada going back to the Reformists of the early 19th Century and continuing on today against the Liberals.
That his said Country or Dominion of Wales shall be, stand and continue for ever from henceforth incorporated, united and annexed to and with this his Realm of England;
Annexed and under the control of ... yes, I am aware of the Act of Union.
It's the old 'When was Wales?' thing.
But it's pretty clear that whilst not independent, and Wales isn't independent now under Devolution of course, the Principality was regarded as a distinctive region to some extent.
Hence the Council for Wales and the Marches and Parliament's suspicion of Wales as a 'dark' and ungodly place during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth. An Act For The Propogation Of The Gospel In Wales and so on.
There was a long-standing contention as to whether Monmouthshire should be regarded as a Welsh or English County after 1536.
My point is that although Wales was formally united politically with England in 1536, and had been dominated by England for centuries before that, it didn't cease to exist as a notional entity.
That doesn't mean it retained its autonomy but it was seen as somewhere with its own language and customs and the degree to which those were tolerated or otherwise varied.
The idea of Scotland didn't disappear after the Scottish Parliament was dissolved and direct rule set up from Westminster despite attempts to refer to Scots as 'North Britons.'
Scotland was united to England politically but it was never 'part' of England conceptually in the way that Essex or Suffolk or Somerset were.
That's what I'm trying to say. However clumsily.
The point though is that a Reform government would try to undo the levels of Devolution that exist in Scotland and Wales.
@Alan Cresswell - a lot of Reform councillors, like councillors from other political parties or none, won't be receiving a 'salary' of any kind. If they are town or parish councillors they'll be unpaid volunteers.
I was unaware that councillors in the benighted countries south of the Wall are unpaid. Here they get paid, albeit on a basic salary of only £26k, plus expenses. I assumed that was fairly universal, it's unreasonable to expect people to serve without renumeration, it leaves council seats only accessible to people with independent incomes or jobs which will accept them taking a cut in hours to serve the people of their ward.
They do get allowances - and I think the leader is effectively full time and their special responsibility allowance effectively amounts to a salary. Presumably these figures vary by area though.
£26k would be a substantial sum for a Borough councillor's allowance south of the border.
The only elected councillors who would be on that kind of money and upwards would be leaders of councils or those with extra responsibilities of some form.
Here's where First Past The Post could turn out to be bad for the right wing of politics. I can easily imagine the situation where a significant number of seats in a General Election go to a party that polls barely 35% of the vote in a constituency. Imagine the howls of anguish in the Daily Mail if 25% vote Reform, 25% vote Conservative but 29% vote Green and they win the seat. The potential for tactical voting could skyrocket.
Are we about to a dramatic about turn on the Right and a plea for Proportional Representation?
Let me make a prediction. If (heaven forbid) Reform form the next Government, there will be no action on electoral reform.
This is where I'm still angry with the Lib Dems. When they went into a coalition with the Tories, their "bargaining" for electoral reform was half-hearted and deeply pathetic .
I think Reform has been advocating PR for a while.
They have been, though like basically their entire policy platform they seem to have little depth in their call for PR. It seems like a headline without an article, I've seen the call many times but very little about why they want PR and how they would see Parliament working with PR (it'll totally destroy two party politics, it will mean the vast majority of governments will be based on less than 50% of MPs with some form of cross-party cooperation - who will Reform consider working with? How does their actions in Councils where they share power reflect their principles on PR and the cooperation that will need?)
I'm not quite sure what to make of the Lib Dems when taking both MPs and councillors into account. My local (new intake) LD MP is very good, and certainly in terms of national policy they're consistently better than Labour on many issues (although right now that bar is truly subterranean). But the local council has been majority-LD for years and is rubbish (and not in terms of things that are down to the effects of austerity but just plain ineptitude). Around here the Greens were consistently pushing Labour into fourth place well before the recent Green surge.
At the risk of oversimplification, in my experience some of the best and most hard-working councillors have been Lib Dems. I don’t just say that because I've been a Lib Dem councillor myself ...
But - and here's the rub - they can become less effective for whatever reason when they gain a majority. Whether that's complacency or some other reason I don't know. I tend to think Lib Dems are better when they have something to fight for but we can be too busy trying to be nice to be as effective as we ought.
Lib Dems are passionate about Proportional Representation but why this didn't translate into a fire in the belly urgency when in coalition, I have no idea.
Comments
Loads of potholes round here have recently been fixed, even though many of them only opened up when we had that really cold spell back in January.
I’d never thought my council was one of the rich ones before.
It’s a running joke round here that you always get loads of roadworks happening in February/March because if the department don’t spend all their funding for this financial year then they won’t get allocated as much in the next one. I guess it feels different this year because they were actually necessary roadworks.
Heavily dependent on the local social care budget I suspect - and in addition to the budgetary reasons Alan notes I suspect they timetable their repairs for spring (once there's less risk of adverse weather)
It would be far more efficient to resurface roads before they're so badly damaged the holes start appearing, but nobody does routine maintenance now...
https://theconversation.com/late-deciders-higher-turnout-what-the-gorton-and-denton-byelection-taught-us-about-voters-277268
About how Reform are coming unstuck in by-elections as voters mobilise successfully against them (and dont see Labour as the opposition they want)
It seems to be especially women voters who are doing this.
Councils had to make the decision as to whether to fill in potholes or fund essential social services.
Those Reform councillors who are now complaining that there are insufficient funds are only finding out the hard way what councillors from other parties and none have been wrestling with for some considerable time.
How to get a quart from a pint pot.
This story shows there is a certain amount of regret of voting them in round here Councillors row at Pothole Protest.
As many of you know, I'm active in the Scottish Greens, and we're looking towards the council elections next year (even while putting effort into campaigning for the Parliamentary elections in less than 2 months), and facing the prospect that as a party that's surging in popularity that we no longer really know what wards will be good for us, or rather know where we should be able to get a councillor elected but also that there's a significant number of wards where just the surge in support could put a candidate over the line without even actively campaigning there. That means we need three groups of candidates - those we hope should be elected and there will be active campaigning, paper candidates who we will need to advise that we think they could be elected even without campaigning, and paper candidates who we would be very surprised are elected. We also have an issue that Reform probably don't care about, that of trying to increase diversity of elected representatives which means we need to look at that second group of candidates to try and have as diverse a group as possible (that's much easier with the smaller first group, just from the point of view of number of people) - not helped, of course, by not being able to use any formal gender balancing process as that's possibly illegal following the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act last year.
https://www.reformparty.uk/policies#policies-section
Those policies aren’t relevant to the elections in May 2026, which are for the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd, local councils in England and Mayoral elections.
The Reform Party policies are at the central government level, which to some degree explains their poor performance in local governments in England. That and a lack of experience and the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I don’t understand why turkeys vote for Christmas but there we go
Lancashire had been tory for a while, and hadn't been solidly Labour since 2009. There are a lot of right wing small towns, villages and suburbs in Lancashire. I'm not sure Starmer can be blamed for this one entirely.
Since when the average age will have drifted up, and the over 65+ bracket has probably grown faster than other areas of the country.
Couple in the fact that retirement is an isolating experience for many, and people with little scope for increasing their income tend to be very risk averse.
What exactly do you mean by "what Starmer has done"?
The results for Lancashire make interesting reading:
https://council.lancashire.gov.uk/mgElectionResults.aspx?ID=43&V=1&RPID=44330441
I lived in Lancashire for a fair while (including a year in Preston) so I know the area fairly well. What Reform appears to have succeeded in doing was pulling together the "tory shires" with the old east lancs racist tendency who voted BNP a couple of decades back. You can also see the impact of independents in areas with a large Muslim population (I suspect some protest votes around the genocide in Gaza).
Their attempts at local government have been failure after failure.
We shall see I guess
The “Closed Proportional Vote” system using the D’hondt formula ought to ensure seats are allocated proportionally and there are six members elected for each constituency.
It looks to me that a party needs to get very nearly half of the votes to get a majority of the members in the constituency, but the exact numbers depend on how votes are split amongst the parties.
Essentially: vote for parties opposing Reform that as many other people are voting for!
What positions of Reform might be winning favour with Welsh voters then? The usual anti-immigration and other populist stuff?
As with Brexit there will also be some impact from English people resident in Wales.
There’s the opposition to the 20mph speed limit on most urban roads, despite the fact that it saves lives and prevents injuries, cutting council tax while improving services and NHS reform, claiming that Welsh NHS trusts perform poorly, which happens when health services have to serve poorer areas, and most of Wales is skint and unhealthy.
There’s no explicit “Boats for Votes”, but Asylum Hotels and Nation of Sanctuary policy are vehemently opposed.
Yeah. One of the more insidious forces in democratic politics. Admittedly, it does occassionally benefit the left, but still with the same disconnect between voter desire and party policies.
Interesting. Thanks.
And I assume "Boats for Votes" refers directly to the right-wing claim the left encourages immigration in exchange for getting votes in immigrant communities?
I don’t think right wing claims that the left (insofar as the Starmer government can be termed “left”) means that, more that the government is soft and incompetent regarding immigration. In any case, I don’t think that has much traction amongst immigrants living in Britain who are looking at recent arrivals as a threat to their own status.
As for the government being ineffective regarding arrivals on small boats the numbers are pretty stable and most are from places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria etc, ie, war zones which many would have good reason to leave: I don’t think accusations of incompetence stick there as previous post-Brexit governments had similar numbers: nowadays we have a growing number in the processing pipeline.
The right absolutely do claim that "the left" encourages immigration. They claim that it's intentional, with the aim of replacing white Christians, who the left hates and vote Right, with brown Muslims, who the left loves and who vote Left. Seriously.
It's never been Hampshire, Sussex or Yorkshire.
Yes, it came under English control and later became part of the United Kingdom, but not on an 'equal' level as it were.
It was a 'Principality.'
The term 'home nations' has only tended to come into vogue since Devolution.
Wales came under English law unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland. I think you are right though that Reform would try to dismantle Devolution.
@Alan Cresswell - a lot of Reform councillors, like councillors from other political parties or none, won't be receiving a 'salary' of any kind. If they are town or parish councillors they'll be unpaid volunteers.
Until shown a more plausible interpretation, that's indeed how I would read the phrase "Boats for Votes". It's an age-old attack on minoritarian political parties, in Canada going back to the Reformists of the early 19th Century and continuing on today against the Liberals.
That his said Country or Dominion of Wales shall be, stand and continue for ever from henceforth incorporated, united and annexed to and with this his Realm of England;
Henry VIII would appear to disagree with you.
It's the old 'When was Wales?' thing.
But it's pretty clear that whilst not independent, and Wales isn't independent now under Devolution of course, the Principality was regarded as a distinctive region to some extent.
Hence the Council for Wales and the Marches and Parliament's suspicion of Wales as a 'dark' and ungodly place during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth. An Act For The Propogation Of The Gospel In Wales and so on.
There was a long-standing contention as to whether Monmouthshire should be regarded as a Welsh or English County after 1536.
My point is that although Wales was formally united politically with England in 1536, and had been dominated by England for centuries before that, it didn't cease to exist as a notional entity.
That doesn't mean it retained its autonomy but it was seen as somewhere with its own language and customs and the degree to which those were tolerated or otherwise varied.
The idea of Scotland didn't disappear after the Scottish Parliament was dissolved and direct rule set up from Westminster despite attempts to refer to Scots as 'North Britons.'
Scotland was united to England politically but it was never 'part' of England conceptually in the way that Essex or Suffolk or Somerset were.
That's what I'm trying to say. However clumsily.
The point though is that a Reform government would try to undo the levels of Devolution that exist in Scotland and Wales.
£26k would be a substantial sum for a Borough councillor's allowance south of the border.
The only elected councillors who would be on that kind of money and upwards would be leaders of councils or those with extra responsibilities of some form.
Are we about to a dramatic about turn on the Right and a plea for Proportional Representation?
This is where I'm still angry with the Lib Dems. When they went into a coalition with the Tories, their "bargaining" for electoral reform was half-hearted and deeply pathetic .
Why we still have FPTP is madness to me.
But - and here's the rub - they can become less effective for whatever reason when they gain a majority. Whether that's complacency or some other reason I don't know. I tend to think Lib Dems are better when they have something to fight for but we can be too busy trying to be nice to be as effective as we ought.
Lib Dems are passionate about Proportional Representation but why this didn't translate into a fire in the belly urgency when in coalition, I have no idea.