Why the sheer nastiness in this local election campaign?

SOME of you may have the idea that all journalists are cynical. That it goes with the territory.
But I can tell you from a lifetime’s experience that most journalists start out as idealists. They just see a lot of stuff that very quickly knocks the idealism out of them!
They probably experience more of the unpleasant side of life than the average citizen – other than emergency service workers, social services or the military, of course.
Now, I set out on the current election campaign to encourage a more independent, non-party political city council in Salisbury full of idealism, believe it or not.
While there are individual councillors from all parties doing their genuine best for our community and motivated only by a desire to serve the public, I thought we all deserved better than to be led by a divided Conservative group mired in bitterness, dictated to by their own Trowbridge elite.
I thought people like us deserved more of a say in what happens around here, well before it actually happens. They deserved to be asked their opinions and have someone listen and take notice. They deserved to feel involved, as if they wouldn’t be ignored once their votes were counted.
They deserved openness and transparency about the long-term plans being hatched for our city by those who control the purse-strings, most of whom have nothing to do with Salisbury. 
Some might think those were admirable aims, and I have pursued them honestly and openly.
But some people with their eyes on a bigger prize have chosen to take a more negative tack. 
I have been appalled by the mud-slinging and sheer nastiness aimed at some non-Conservatives. The desperation to hang on to every shred of power at all costs.
It doesn’t upset or surprise me – I’ve been around too long for that - but it does sadden me and make me fear for the future of our lovely Salisbury, when all that some people care about is controlling everything between here and Westminster.

What Salisbury means to me

THIS is an extract from something I wrote several years ago now, when life suddenly changed unexpectedly. We were unsure about whether we’d have to move, and we decided we needed some time out, somewhere sunny, before making any big decisions.
I started a blog about that trip, Home Sweet Motorhome, by trying to encapsulate how I felt about the city I might be leaving behind.
And I just thought I’d share it here now, as it still sums up what I feel is precious about Salisbury and why I’d like to do my bit as an independent councillor. Here goes:

“I find myself standing, staring out of the bedroom window in the dying afternoon over the water meadows to Salisbury Cathedral silhouetted beyond. A thin layer of mist has already risen from the river and sits suspended above the heads of the sheep, otherworldly against the darkening sky. I love this place. 
“How fortunate we have been to have this glorious backdrop to our daily lives, changing with every passing cloud.
“This is, after all, the town – it calls itself a city but it’s on a much more human scale   – where we chose to base our lives with our young children. A place I plumped for in preference to Bath because, as a colleague of my husband’s put it when I sought his advice, ‘Bath is all fur coat and no knickers, but Salisbury is real.’
“I wanted for our boys something I never felt for the London suburb where I grew up – I wanted them to have roots. 
“When people later in life asked them where they came from, I wanted them to know the answer in their hearts. Somewhere that gave them a standard against which they could compare everything they encountered as they set off to explore the world. 
“Not too big, not too small, a self-contained community with some of the finest architecture in the country, with a wonderful cultural heritage.”

And I’ve never regretted it.

Why I'm standing as an independent candidate for our city council

FOR years, as a columnist and blogger, I’ve been banging on about how disastrous Wiltshire Council has been for Salisbury.
How the switch to a unitary authority, and our city’s demotion to a humble parish, has left us at the mercy of a political clique miles away in Trowbridge.
Whether it’s sky-high parking charges, ill-advised cycle lanes and bans on cars, massive green belt housing developments feeding into our ring road jams, a lost police station, a disastrous University Technical College, unease over what’s happening to our City Hall, our library, our art gallery …. the list goes on, and I’m sure you could all add to it.
The feuding among the ruling Conservative group at the Guildhall has done nothing to help and much to hinder this degradation. 
Recent city council meetings, conducted online, about the doomed Low Traffic Zone and the housing sites proposed in the Local Plan review, were verging on chaotic.
And all the main parties have had trouble putting up a full complement of candidates for the local elections in May - largely, I think, because people are disillusioned and ask: “What’s the point?”
Now I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, and try to do something to help our community by standing as an independent candidate for the city council in Harnham.
Along with a few other hardy (or perhaps foolhardy!) souls, I want to contribute a sense of common purpose, optimism and unity to a body that, while woefully inadequate in terms of its powers, is all we’ve got. And fight for what’s best for Salisbury. For people, not party politics.
Having been roped in several months ago as an administrator of the hugely popular SOS – Save Our Salisbury group on Facebook, I’ve seen that there is a real appetite for change. It’s just that so many  people don’t engage with the current system, and it’s hard to persuade them to do so when it patently doesn’t work for them.
However, out of this project has emerged a small band of campaigners who think it’s still worth having a go at making things better. We’re not a party. We don’t have a manifesto. We call ourselves Understanding Salisbury (or ‘us’ for short) Independents.
Please do consider supporting us at the May local elections.
You get three votes in each ward. So even if you usually vote for one of the big parties and don’t want to change, you can still use your other votes for us. It would be a shame to waste any of them.
Give us a chance to make things better and we’ll do our level best to listen to you, and not to let you down.