An elected Mayor would not produce better Democracy (2)

In any future contest for a directly elected Mayor in Birmingham (should we be unwise enough to go down that path) the candidates put forward by the political parties will have been pre-selected by political activists. In fact the field could be further pre-processed by threats made by one of the major parties to threatening any of their MPs wishing to stand - a bad example of machine politics and highly undemocratic. This would certainly affect the contest in Birmingham.

This is all hardly an improvement on the present situation where the Leader of the Council is first selected by those political activists in the majority party who have become councillors. These councillors of course have at least put themselves before the public in order to get where they are, whereas your general activist (some of whom have, for want of a better word, some rather startling opinions that would find little support from the public) has not.

There is then a further hurdle in that the proposed leader has to be approved by the Council as a whole, though this will almost always be a formality given the electoral mathematics.

Admittedly in the case of a directly elected Mayoral system there is the opportunity for independents to stand. But such candidates will not represent a cross section of the general public. But having your name on a ballot paper and giving the electorate a real choice are not the same thing. A serious candidate will have to have plenty of money and be prepared to spend it to set up their own organisation to campaign. How many rich businessmen do you want to choose between?

But I don't think there will be that many of them - campaigning and telling employees what to do are quite different things. It is likely that there may be other candidates, some with interesting views worth a hearing, but they will be unable to get these across due to media favouritism - as we have seen in the deeply uninspiring London campaign.

And there is no power of 'recall' for an elected Mayor. Why on earth not? If we're copying what they do in the US, let's have recall as well. You are stuck with them even if the choice turns out to be clearly unwise or even disastrous for the city. In contrast, an ill-performing Leader of the Council can be got rid of at any point by a vote of no confidence. More than this, you are stuck with the system too, as the government says it won't allow another referendum any time soon - there would have to be an Act of Parliament, and do not bet on it being given time.

So does this all seem like a massive improvement in the quality of local democracy and respect for the democratic process? Clearly not, and along with the myriad other adverse consequences of changing to an elected Mayoral system it is surely the right choice to vote 'NO' in the referendum on May 3rd.