David Cameron’s vision of strong elected personalities leading cities across England [Ed – aren’t those called councillors?] has been rejected by nearly all those cities who held mayoral referendums on Thursday.
With all the city referendums now counted, Bristol is the only new city to support the switch to having a directly elected mayor. However, the Doncaster electorate overwhelming voted (62% in favour) to keep their elected mayor.
Turnout was underwhelming, between 24-35%. Apathy rules.
Perhaps a matter of people liking elected mayors once they have one, but being hard to convince that the change (and expense) is worth it?
Still, makes you wonder who could be elected as the ‘Boris’ of Belfast, Derry, Lisburn, Newry … or Ballymena!
Alan Meban. Tweets as @alaninbelfast. Blogs about cinema and theatre over at Alan in Belfast. A freelancer who writes about, reports from, live-tweets and live-streams civic, academic and political events and conferences. He delivers social media training/coaching; produces podcasts and radio programmes; is a FactCheckNI director; a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland; and a member of the Corrymeela Community.
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