Mayors will shake-up local political scene

From: N Bywater, Airedale Terrace, Morley.

IN recent letters, people that are against having an elected mayor have cited the elected Mayor of Doncaster as a poor example. But they should remember why they wanted an elected Mayor in the first place.

The people of Doncaster voted to introduce elected mayors in 2001, partly in response to the “Donnygate” scandal whereby of 21 Labour councillors were convicted of fraud and the jailing of one councillor and a property developer.

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The local Labour Party, which still dominates the council, has never accepted the legitimacy of the office and has attempted to undermine it almost from the start, according to a 2010 Audit Commission report.

Peter Davies of the English Democrats was elected in 2009 and he has done his best to fix the broken electoral system in Doncaster, but there is still much work left to do.

I personally think that an elected Mayor will be good for Leeds. He or she will be able to make plans and organise things for the benefit of the whole of Leeds, not just the small ideas of local councillors.

The elected Mayor of Leicester, Sir Peter Soulsby, claimed success on his 100 pledges, from potholes, street drinking to a review of Leicester’s schools’ admissions process. What pledge would you like from an elected mayor?

From: Phil Hanson, Beechmount Close, Baildon, Shipley.

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AT a time when the dinner ladies and bin men are being squeezed in order to make the councils’ books balance, is it not time to make some cuts to the pay of the senior earners at our councils?

With many council directors earning between a healthy £100k and £230k, surely as a show of unity these fat cats with lavish pension contributions (very tax efficient) should be taking a cut for a couple of years.

We have cities in this country that are a shambles, take Bradford as an example, dirty, developments in suspended animation, a national embarrassment and yet we have the same kind of salaries being paid for rubbish performance.

It is high time that cities like Bradford had an executive and council capable of moving this place from being the national joke to being what used to be a proud and successful city for the majority.

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George Galloway? Mickey Mouse would have been an improvement on evidence of the last 30 years!

From: Martin Smith, Main Street, Elvington.

AS David Rhodes rightly questions the confused identities of both Labour and Conservative parties (Yorkshire Post, April 28),it does indeed beg the question “what exactly are we voting for?”

It seems, in the decades since the Thatcher era, governments have once again settled for managing the decline of a once great nation, exacerbated by our continued debilitating membership of the EU and the enshrining of the ECHR into British Law.

As Barrie Frost suggests (April 28), we need no lectures or interference as champions of human right – indeed were it not for this country’s heroic resistance to Nazi tyranny,it is likely that there would be no human rights in Europe.

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Instead we have the farcical situation where we are unable to deport dangerous terrorists posing a real threat to UK citizens.

The conclusion has to be that the first step to national recovery and vitality is to throw off the yoke of the ECHR, withdraw from the EU and follow Norway’s example of simply being a significant trading partner.

As a previous supporter of the Conservative Party, I am forced to conclude that currently only UKIP offers such policies.

From: Paul Emsley, Hellifield, North Yorkshire.

MPs have always had displayed the common ailment of selective amnesia, but Yvette Cooper has shown herself to be suffering particularly badly over her recent displays in the House of Commons, against the ability of the current Home Secretary and the UK Government to get rid of unwanted persons.

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As she has had pointed out to her on a number of occasions, the last Labour government failed to export Abu Qatada in eight years – after they signed up the United Kingdom to the agreement in the European Union of the HRA, in the first place. We should also remember that the Prime Minister and his wife at the time were both lawyers and they could see a fair amount of lucrative ECHR court business coming this way as a result of the European Convention – paid for by the poor European electorate.