Friday open thread: local politics

[dolorosa_12]

It's local elections here in England (and yes, I do specifically mean England, rather than saying 'England' and meaning 'Britain' or 'the UK'). Apart from being generally pleased as the resounding rejection of the Conservatives (it's always nice to wake up to a headline like ’Tories heading for another drubbing in the local elections'), I just generally find local elections kind of delightful: the issues seem low-stakes (bin collections, planning applications, problems with street parking), but they're also things that have a massive effect on people's day-to-day lives.

A lot of it feels like pure NIMBY-ism. I live in a part of the country filled with picturesque little villages, whose residents tend to be people who work in Cambridge but couldn't have afforded to buy a large house with a garden there and therefore moved to a village where that kind of lifestyle is affordable. Every so often Matthias and I visit these places for the day, and almost invariably there is some kind of local campaign against building a recycling plant, train line, 5G mast, etc in the area. While I am somewhat sympathetic (I wouldn't want to live over the road from a rubbish tip either), I also feel these sorts of things are a risk if you live anywhere near wide open spaces (our rubbish and recycling needs to go somewhere, after all), and complaining about it is similar to complaining about the noise if you live in the entertainment quarter of a huge city.

But of course, these kinds of individual local issues can be really powerful and galvanising, and local elections can be won or lost on single issues like this. So my question today is this: what is the single weirdest local issue (it doesn't have to be something serious, it could be something that looks inherently ridiculous from the outside) that became the hot-button, deciding factor in local politics in your area? (Or, if not in your area, something that happened elsewhere that you happen to know about.)

I don't really have a good answer for this — pretty much everywhere I've lived and voted, the local issues are just the usual boring stuff like planning applications, lack of access to services like GPs or dentists, or stuff to do with transport. But I'm sure there are some potentially good answers that others will come up with!

Comments

[lilysea]

Don't councils in Britain also provide

- subsidised housing for low income people

- practical support for Disabled/Elderly people

- medical care?

I remember reading that there was a point about 10 years ago where some councils were providing PrEP to prevent people catching HIV, and other councils weren't... (I think this has been fixed now)

[el_staplador]

That's county councils (these elections were for the district councils).

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, as el_staplador says, it depends on the specific council, as we have several, responsible for different things. In general, people tend to get very worked up about things like bins, traffic congestion, planning permission, public transport etc, even if the council in question is not responsible for those things (for example, in Cambridge, the council is trying to indroduce a congestion charge, which is very unpopular with a segment of the population, and those voters were blaming the political parties responsible here (in Ely, a totally different town, but from where a lot of people commute into work in Cambridge), even though the council here is not responsible for the congestion charge). It's a bit of a mess.

[lilysea]

Most ludicrous Council Story Ever

Around 1996/1997/1998 Cottesloe council (rich Western Australian council) wrote to Transperth (public transport bus/train operator)

asking that Transperth stop people who didn't live in Cottesloe from being able to get off at Cottesloe train station

as they didn't want people from Balga (low income suburb) coming to Cottesloe to do burglaries

Context: Cottesloe has a very nice beach that people from all over Perth come to swim at

Transperth told them to sod off.

Then the Mayor of Balga wrote to Cottesloe council asking for a formal apology.

Cottesloe issued a formal apology, but it was a very much "we don't mean this apology, my Mum made me apologise" sort of apology

[dolorosa_12]

That is just outrageous! I’m astonished at the brazenness of it all.

And Cottesloe is a really nice beach! I swam there, the one time in my life I was in Perth.

[lilysea]

After they'd been told Transperth wouldn't stop non-Cottesloe residents from getting off at Cottesloe train station

Cottesloe council spent $$$,$$$ on moving the footpaths so that they were next to the road instead of next to people's letterboxes on the theory that burglars wouldn't be bothered walking the extra 5 metres from the new footpath location to people's houses to burgle them.

[lilysea]

So, between 27 January 1996 - 14 March 1997

three young women were kidnapped and murdered from Claremont (rich suburb with a pub and a nightclub)

and they put CCTV cameras in on the streets to try to catch the guy.

After a while with no new murders, the Police wanted to stop paying for the cameras. (Because it costs $$,$$$ to have someone review all the footage)

The council said that the council shouldn't have to pay for the cameras, it should be the police.

At which point, someone suggested that the reason that the Mayor of Claremont didn't want to pay for the cameras was because *the mayor* was the murderer (there was no evidence whatsoever of this at the time, and someone else has since been convicted[1])

At which point, the Mayor of Claremont sued for defamation

but I think the allegations cost him re-election

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claremont_serial_killings

[dolorosa_12]

Oh my God, that is a truly bizarre (and sad) story!

[lilysea]

Nedlands (rich suburb council)

Councillor: I never use the public library. My daughter goes to [fancy expensive private school] which has an excellent library, so SHE never uses the public library. Why should council rates pay for the public library?

Much arguments ensue

Eventually library funding is continued, but not until after much headaches

(Public libraries in Western Australia are funded by local councils, which means rich areas have nicer library buildings and nicer library collections)

[dolorosa_12]

Rich people are always like this about public libraries (their other favourite line is that no one needs a library any more since books are all available as ebooks now, forgetting the important fact that ebooks also cost money).

[chestnut_pod]

Oh, lord: The Great Pickleball Wars!

Pickleball is like if table tennis and badminton had a baby and that baby was a racket game played on repurposed tennis courts by elderly people of means, but less means than those slightly less elderly who play tennis. U.S. demographics being what they are, there are a surprising number of elderly people of means-but-not-enough-means-for-tennis who are absolutely wild for pickleball. The problem arises because public parks with tennis courts are limited, and the easiest way to serve the booming pickleball demographic is to convert those tennis courts into pickleball courts -- which renders them unusable for tennis. And let me tell you, Hell hath no fury like an elderly white tennis player of means scorned!!! One of my undergrad mentees worked at the mayor's office as an intern, and almost literally his entire job was to adjudicate public meetings where beleaguered parks department employees tried desperately to mediate between pickleball partisans and tennis stalwarts in their vicious white-clad fight for the rights to public racket space.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, this is amazing (and exactly the sort of thing I had in mind with this quest)! I’d never heard of pickleball, but I can visualise exactly the kinds of intense feuds this whole situation would cause. Your poor student!

[el_staplador]

Having thought that I'd be in London on Thursday, and not wishing to take my passport, I applied for a postal vote, only to forget to post it and end up working from home anyway. So I handed it in at a polling station on my way home from the midwife appointment. Well, it's one way of getting around the photo ID requirement...

[dolorosa_12]

Indeed. Allegedly the photo ID requirement has massively backfired on the Conservatives, but I still wonder how many people didn't have the requisite ID and just quietly decided that trying to sort this out would be too much hassle, and just didn't even attempt to vote.

[thawrecka]

There's a bunch of old signs on people's fences in my area that they're opposed to inappropriate development... but the development they considered inappropriate was turning an old hospital into an aged care facility and residential living units, but they're fine with gigantic luxury apartments with bad plumbing going up all over the suburb.

[dolorosa_12]

Yep, that sort of thing doesn't surprise me at all. Classic NIMBYism — they want all that kind of stuff (and their rubbish to be collected and dumped in landfill, and their energy to be green and provided by windfarms, and their phone and wifi signal to be good), but they don't want it (or rubbish tips, or windfarms, or 5G masts) near them.

[ermingarden]

Coming in super late with this one, but in 1986 Clint Eastwood was elected mayor of my hometown – and one of his major campaign promises was repealing a supposed ban on ice cream cones.

(There was never an ice cream ban; what there was was a city ordinance that all takeout food must be packaged, which ice cream cones obviously are not. The city council under Eastwood resolved the issue by passing an ordinance that made "eating establishments that primarily serve frozen desserts" a separate category.)

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, what a bizarre situation! It’s surprisingly common for weird things like this to happen due to poorly applied or weirdly enforced laws and regulations, and yours is a particularly extreme example.