Saturday, April 23, 2022

Rutland County Council Tory group splits: Councillors cannot support national party "on moral grounds"

Three Conservative councillors on Rutland County Council - Gordon Brown, June Fox and Nick Begy - have left their party's group to form one of their own: Together4Rutland. The new group has also attracted Paul Ainsley, who was elected as a Conservative but more recently sat as an unaligned Independent.

The Together4Rutland website says:

In recent months, the three councillors have become increasingly concerned with the direction of travel of the Conservative group, and as backbenchers have felt marginalised, finding it harder to provide the support for the residents for whom they took up public service to help.

In addition, they cannot continue to support the national Conservative party on moral grounds, with Ministers and senior MPs having lost the respect of the public and failing to recognise the serious financial position of Rutland County Council caused by a lack of government funding compounded by additional burdens from new legislation.

The new Group feel that now is no time for party politics in local government in Rutland and wants the opportunity to openly question policy which impacts all residents and not just follow the Conservative party line.

At Rutland's 2019 all-out council elections, the Conservatives won 16 of the 27 seats. Today, thanks to by-election defeats and defections, they are down to 9.

As far as I can work out, the political balance of the council is now: Conservatives 9, Independent group 5, Liberal Democrats 4, Together4Rutland 4, Independents (unaligned) 2, Green 1, Labour1.

There is one vacancy, which will be filled by a by-election in Uppingham on 5 May. The Liberal Democrat candidate is Stephen Lambert.

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