And so it begins...

Thank those of you who voted for me in the recent elections.

I guess there are all sorts of reasons why people can be triumphal about getting elected. First off its a huge vote of confidence and a compliment that people think you might be best placed to represent their views and interests. Then there's the temptation to be egotistical and indulge a sense that its an endorsement or suggestion that you might know better than your competitors, and that you've been given a mandate to try and improve things for everyone.

So in case anyone thinks I'm marching around with a puffed up chest feeling great about this public duty, let me puncture that bubble straight away. This REALLY is a job I wish I didn't have to do. And its not just because its voluntary and will involve hours and hours of unpaid work.

The parish council has been created not as a means of extending local democracy to you or your neighbours. It was created to raise tax and to palm off services onto volunteers within local communities - or see those services cut. Its first noticeable impact will be in making you to have an entirely new layer of bureaucracy, with all its attendant additional costs - which will be tacked onto our council tax.

The public consultations (such as they were!) clearly showed that the vast majority of people didn't want to be chucked into some new arbitrary parish and implied that they felt they already had adequate representation through their ward councilors.

The transparent motive for making Eastcott into a suburb of a vast parish isn't about devolving power into the community: its absolutely about a dual strategy of palming off council funded services onto already struggling local communities, and making another body (ie the parish council) become the new political fall-guy for future tax increases or for the cutting of local services.

And when I said the parish is vast, it really is. When most of us think of a parish council, we think of a dozen older folk sat around a table discussing a bit of verge cutting and the date for the village fete. CSS Parish, of which Eastcott is just one ward, is one of the largest parishes in the entire country. I'm told it has a geographic scale and population pretty much the same as Salisbury. That puts it into perspective, eh?

Cooking up a parish on this scale and for these reasons was a piece of cynical political sleight of hand of amazing audacity. I have *some* small sympathy for the conservative borough council who came up with this wheeze - as they aren't directly responsible for the central cuts to the borough subsidy which have forced the dual council tax increases and service cuts, but they could have had the honesty and integrity to face down their Westminster overlords as Sussex County Council famously did. They could have been honest enough to request via referendum to the electorate, the opportunity to put up council tax above the capped rate to try and balance the books.

But they didn't. And this politically expedient invention was their collective 'Baldrick's Cunning Plan' to throw responsibility and potential opprobrium back into the communities; communities who'd previously assumed that their councilors and politicians existed to serve. The ramifications for the future way in which we govern our urban communities in Swindon are huge and deeply troubling when one considers the predictable future outcomes.

Right from the start I said that if I stood for election to the parishes, I'd publicly call-out all the inherent flaws to this plan - and to hold those responsible to public account. I'll also make as much information available publicly via this blog as I can. I will fight to make sure that Eastcott gets it fair say and share of the limited pie - and work with both our elected borough ward and parish ward councilors (like Dave Woods and Stan Pajak) to get the best deal we can for our council tax.

So, its whilst its not an unmitigated pleasure to have been elected under such circumstances, its a responsibility and its an honour, one tempered by knowing that it will be an unpaid, almost certainly thankless job which will invite extreme criticism, regardless of what decisions are made: Parish councilors will be over a barrel right from the beginning, with very limited funds and the Hobson's choice of unpopularity of letting valued services fail,  putting people's council tax up even further, or dumping responsibility into their laps to do it themselves.

I hope, with your support and the community spirit of the area which I think is the best place to live in the whole town, we can make the very best of a situation not of our creation.