Friday open thread: local politics
May. 5th, 2023 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12It'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!
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!
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 02:34 am (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 06:25 am (UTC)And Cottesloe is a really nice beach! I swam there, the one time in my life I was in Perth.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-06 11:19 am (UTC)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.