The difficulty for voters when considering Independent candidates is you cannot rely on a party manifesto as a guide to the stand that the candidate is likely to take on issues. This gives us a problem, too, because we have to try to tell you. That is what I use my web site for and why I leave all my old election material on the web for you to judge me by.
The outgoing council has had no dominant political group. The Conservatives had the largest number of members (12), followed by Independents (11, with two non-aligned, ie not joining the "Group of Independents") and the remaining 8 were Liberal Democrats.
This arrangement enabled us to distribute the chairmanships to those best suited to the jobs. To be entirely candid, the Lib Dems did less well out of that than they deserved, though, in my opinion, only by about one. By custom and practice, the largest group takes the chair of the Strategy & Resources Committee and the rest of the chairmanships have been held by Cons and Inds in this council. Most decisions have been made by consensus and there have been very few contested votes on important issues like strategic priorities and budgets.
This confirms my predicition that rural councils work best when there is a minimum of party political squabbling.
Just for the record, my membership of the local Conservative Association has lapsed and I am not minded (at present) to renew it because I disagree strongly with stand taken by the Party Leader, Mr Cameron, on the Global Warming issue, for reasons I have written about extensively elsewhere on this site.
Updated 2 Apr 07