In just over a years’ time, we’ll finally have our local election and a new directly elected mayor.
Labour have identified their three prospective candidates to represent Labour in the mayoral election. Councillors Charlie Rooney, Dave Budd and Tracey Harvey. All three are on Mallons payroll as ‘Executive’ councillors and understood to be key players in the group of Labour councillors who broke party rules to support Mallon into the role of mayor, then ‘control’ him for the last decade. And for those that don’t believe that this happened, here’s the Evening Gazette article from 2002 where Labour party member Oliver Johnson claims that South Middlesbrough Party Chair Chris Snowdon supported Mallon, along with a number of others, against party rules and the official Labour candidate.
Mallon denied it at the time but, given cllr Bernie Taylors written admission that Mallon does what Labour tells him, we can now take it that Johnsons prophecy came to fruition.
Anyway, regardless of anything else, we won’t be re-electing Mallon and, if Middlesbrough wants to break the cycle of abuse perpetuated on the town by Labour over the last three decades, they’ll have elected Andy Preston. After all, why would the people of Middlesbrough elect a Labour mayor, when Labour didn’t want them to be able to have the right to elect their own mayor?
I have one hope for ‘if and when’ Andy Preston becomes our first TRULY independent mayor. Reduce the executive to just six councillors. Then allocate those executive roles proportionately among the wider council. So, if Labour maintain their 2:1 majority on the council, they’ll get a maximum of four executive roles.
Furthermore, in the mayors shoes, I’d tell Middlesbrough Labour Group to decide among themselves who gets those four executive roles, and the chunk of money attached to each one.
Given the recent brouhah of Membergate, the involvement of MP Andy McDonald in stitching up those councillors involved and the need to keep all of Labours skeletons, both historic and the many more amassed during the Labour / Mallon ‘coalition’ years firmly hidden from the voting public, it would be like throwing four prime steaks into a pit of 20+ hungry lions. Middlesbrough Labour Group would implode as members turn on each other to keep their noses in the trough.
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