Bedford has had a directly elected mayor since a referendum twenty-four years ago. The current one is Tom Wootton, Conservative, in post since 2023. Labour’s motion was to let residents decide if the model should go and a leader-and-cabinet take its place, the way Luton and Central Bedfordshire already do. Councillors were told the poll would cost about £375,000 across twenty-eight wards, plus officer time. Sixteen voted for it. Twenty-four voted against. Four Conservatives abstained, which is the civic equivalent of leaving the room to take a call that never comes.
The mayor’s point was simple. He had not seen Bedford marching through the streets demanding a ballot. A petition existed. It had 171 verified signatures. The statutory threshold to force a referendum is 6,940, which is five per cent of the electorate. That is not a rounding error. That is the difference between a Facebook group and a mandate. Independent councillor Doug McMurdo called the timing ill-thought-out. We cannot afford it, he said, which is the most Bedford sentence available when the alternative is a very expensive conversation about a chain.
I have some sympathy with reviewing the furniture. Models of local government should not be sacred just because they are old. I have less sympathy with spending the best part of four hundred thousand pounds to discover what a petition of 171 already told you. If the public really wanted the mayor gone, they would have found the other 6,769 names. They found the energy for a lot of other arguments this year. They did not find this one.
If you are founding a breakaway parish with a ceremonial chain of your own, Amazon will sell you a mayor’s chain. It will not cost £375,000. It will not require a monitoring officer. It will look slightly more official than a clipboard.
Britain is very good at this. We will pay almost anything for a consultation except the bit where we notice nobody asked for one. Remember that the next time a councillor says the public deserve a say. Sometimes the public already said it, quietly, by not signing.
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