BEFORE YOU VOTE, CONSIDER THIS…

Councils are responsible for providing local services and facilities. 

Your elected representatives, or councillors, are also supposed listen to your concerns and represent you at a local level. This system is known as local government.

Here in Tameside, your present council is responsible for all of the following areas:

·        

  Council housing

·         Education services

·         Electoral registration

·         Environmental health

·         Leisure and recreation facilities

·         Libraries

·         Local planning

·         Local transport

·         Parks and public places

·         Regulation of local business

·         Roads and footpaths

·         Social services

·         Waste and recycling                  

L                     
Look at the list above and give a mental mark out of ten how efficient you think our current councillors are at servicing, providing and maintaining those services.

Now consider that the vast majority of our current councillors have been administering these services for well over 35 years. Have they got better or worse?

Each councillor is elected for four years. However, Tameside council votes by thirds, this means that only a third of councillors are elected every year over a four year cycle (with no elections in the fourth year) this results in the fact that even if every councillor presently serving on the council is voted off in the upcoming election, the councils remaining two thirds will still rule the council!

True democracy is not just about ballot papers, it’s about inspiring people to take part in the democratic process.  The fact that the overwhelming majority of Tameside voters take no part whatsoever indicates not just a democratic deficit, but a disease at the heart of the ruling Labour council that acts as a barrier to their claims of representation.

People, please wake up!

Tameside’s current councillors don’t want you to vote!

Mass abstention encourages the current councillors to maintain the current state the borough is in – it serves these career councillors just fine, allowing them to claim a democratic mandate to keep on ruining our towns, whilst pursuing their own personal agendas.

To remove Tameside council from its existing political grip, it would take a minimum of 8 years!

This is not democracy!

Personally, I really don’t care which councillor or political party you vote for, but if we are to claim real democracy in Tameside, we must demand that the council changes the way we vote and that is that all of the councillors are elected every 4 years.

If they truly believed that the people of Tameside have voted them into office on merit, then they should have nothing to fear from a full council election every 4 years.