Tag: local

Honestly, is there anything more boring?

We’re struggling to think of anything. County Council elections have none of the obvious glamour of the national contest, the stakes are lower and – let’s face it – nobody knows what they do (quick, make a list of five things that your county council is responsible for! No Googling! See?).

Click here to go straight to the bit about Radlett, the Watling electoral division and Caroline Clapper, our councillor.

Who are the candidates we can vote for here in Radlett?

But, this time around, there is expected to be some drama. Drama, of course, provided by yellow-corduroy man of the people Nigel Farage: principle bringer of chaos in British politics for almost twenty years. So we won’t just ignore this contest as we usually do (seriously, we’ve been previewing elections here for over ten years and we’ve never done a county council election).

So here’s a short overview of the contest, starting with the national picture and then zooming in to Hertfordshire and to the Watling division in which we live.

What are we voting for?

Elections are taking place in 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities and one metropolitan district (also the people of the Isles of Scilly are voting – but they have their own, very odd system). Nine councils currently busy with ‘unitarisation‘ programmes have been allowed to put their elections back a year. Here in Radlett (in the Watling electoral division – they’re not called ‘wards’ in county elections) we’re voting to send one county councillor to Hertford to represent us: nothing else. We’re not voting for borough or parish councillors (and there’s no unitary mayor in our area so that’s not relevant). More about all that below.

Reform rampant?

Of the 25 county and unitary councils holding elections, 16 have a Conservative majority and, of the six where there is no overall majority, three have Conservative leaders and three Liberal Democrats. Labour controls only one. Consequently, although the headlines on 2 May will probably be all about Reform’s surge, the actual electoral damage will be suffered almost exclusively by the Conservatives. Nigel Farage is still going around disingenuously predicting 200 seats for his party but the polling tells another story. This fancy MRP poll, conducted by Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph, suggests 697 seats for Reform, which is more than then expect for the Tories. Ouch.

The postponement of elections in nine areas may or may not have the side benefit of letting incumbent parties in those authorities off the hook with regard to the swing to Reform – but it’s quite possible they’ve just deferred the inevitable and that electorates will punish them when the elections do happen. The Electoral Calculus poll supports this idea and puts Reform comfortably ahead of the Tories in the councils where elections have been postponed. The government and the authorities who’ve opted for postponement claim only the most innocent, bureaucratic motives but, let’s face it, electors are pissed off that they’re not getting their chance to vote this year and are unlikely to have forgetten in a year’s time.

Looking further ahead – to the next general election – liberal, anti-polarisation think tank More In Common, using a similar MRP statistical method, suggests essentially a three-way tie between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, with Reform narrowly winning. Dramatically, in their projection, in 285 Parliamentary seats the winner would secure less than a third of the vote – finally demolishing the protective wall provided for the main parties by the first-past-the-post system. Double ouch.

And here?

In Hertfordshire, after the last local elections in 2021, things looked like this:

In the four years since that vote the kind of drift that you see between elections has caused four councillors (one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and one Labour) to drop their party affiliation and become independents. One Tory switched to Reform last month and will cheekily be standing for that party next week. Another complicating factor for the Tories here is that almost a third of their councillors are standing down this time around, including some cabinet members.

Obviously, a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake but it’s worth noting that the Tories in the county currently have fewer seats than at any time since 2001 (there have been boundary changes since then but they’re not significant). Likewise Labour, which in 1993 actually took 30 council seats in Hertfordshire (three more than the Tories at that election) has been reduced in recent years to a pretty pathetic six councillors. With Liberal Democrats and Greens also expecting a surge at this election, both major parties are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been in Hertfordshire.

Watling along

We don’t know much about where our readers come from. Our web hosting company gives us some confusing data that suggests that about a third of you are in China (if you are one of our Chinese readers, please leave a comment. We’d honestly love to know what you’re doing here).

But, in the meantime, we’re going to assume you live and vote in the Watling electoral division in Hertfordshire. It’s a pretty big area, stretching all the way from the London border in Edgware to the edge of St Albans and taking in the whole of Radlett, Aldenham, Letchmore Heath, Elstree and a chunk of Borehamwood (we’re also excited in a childish way to note that Watling has its own airport).

Each council electoral division returns one candidate elected by the first-past-the-post system. Since 2009 Watling has been electing Conservative Caroline Clapper. And we mean really electing. Her vote share at the last election in 2021 was 75%. She polled six times more votes than her nearest rival, from Labour. This is the kind of impregnable voteshare that Conservatives enjoy all over the home counties, of course but you’ll notice one important absence from this table of results from the 2021 election: Reform UK. Is Caroline Clapper losing any sleep to a Reform challenge now that they’re on the ballot here in Watling? No she’s not. But is her party, at the county and the national level? Yes they are.

Clapper is a popular and effective councillor. She’s visible and involved and anyone who’s ever had cause to ask her to help with a local issue will confirm that she works hard and takes her job seriously. She’s a cabinet member with an interest in education and chairs the council’s Education, Libraries & Lifelong Learning Cabinet Panel. She’s also a Hertsmere councillor and was a member of the cabinet there until Labour took over in 2023. She’s been a parish councillor in the past too. She lives in Bushey and is married to Michael, a mortgage broker and former vape entrepreneur. They have three children.

Then there’s the money

Councillors in Britain are not typically paid for the job but do claim ‘allowances’ and they can be pretty generous, in fact a senior councillor’s allowances will usually add up to something resembling an ordinary wage. There’s nothing secret about this, of course, but we’ve always thought it ought to be better known that a councillor can essentially make a living from representing you locally. Should they actually be paid a wage for this pretty onerous job? We think you could make a pretty good argument for professionalising local politics – for turning it into an actual job. Is this likely to happen any time soon? No. So, in the meantime, councillors will continue to vote themselves generous allowances to make up for it.

Adding together Caroline Clapper’s allowances from Hertfordshire (£36,159 in 2024-25) and Hertsmere (£8022.28 – most recent published numbers are for the year 2023-24) brings her income to a pretty tidy total of £44,181.28, substantially more than the average wage in the UK and higher even than the average for relatively prosperous Hertfordshire (and this represents a drop in income for our county councillor – if her party had retained control of Hertsmere in 2023 – and Clapper her cabinet post – she’d have made more than £55,000 from here work as a councillor in the most recent year). But she is a busy woman and has other roles – she’s a non-executive director of council-owned Elstree Studios, for instance, where her Hertfordshire and Hertsmere colleague Morris Bright is chairman (for this she was paid £1,194 in the year to April 2024).

She’s an ambitious politician. She probably thinks she’s paid her local political dues and we suspect she won’t be stuck at this level for much longer. She stood for Parliament in 2024, coming fourth – behind Reform and the Workers Party of Britain – against Labour’s winner Liam Byrne in Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North.

A total of 14 parties have put up candidates in Hertfordshire and there are five standing in the Watling division: Caroline Clapper for the Tories, Gus Channer for Reform, Stuart Howard for the LibDems, Satvinder Singh Juss for Labour and Cheryl Stungo for the Greens. Clapper is by far the most experienced politician on that list. Her Reform opponent is a college teacher and a former Royal Engineer who apparently got into trouble with his employer for taking a sick day and then showing up to a Reform media event with Nigel Farage. Oops. This is his first election – we assume he’ll be wiser next time.

Although we’re pretty sure she’s expecting to be put under some pressure from the Reform insurgency next week we’re certain that Caroline Clapper will still be county councillor for the Watling division on Friday.

• What we do around here mainly is whinge about our Parliamentary representative Oliver Dowden. Bookmark this page for our coverage of your MP or follow this RSS feed.
• We’ve also recently developed an interest in an enormous proposed development in Hertsmere – the DC01UK data centre that will, it is claimed, be Europe’s largest and will be built in South Mimms, if the developers and Hertsmere Borough Council have their way. Bookmark this page for our various deep dives into the project.
• This post about the history of elections in Hertsmere is about as close to definitive as you’ll get – all the elections, all the results, all the candidates. We keep this freely-accessible spreadsheet of election results up-to-date too.