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.
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.
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