This local election has national significance

There’s now less than a week left until Election Day. Hundreds of Crawley residents have already returned their postal votes and parties are gearing up for their efforts to get the vote out. So, what is at stake?

Throughout all the years where the media suggested we would lose control of the council, I motivated Labour activists to keep going by pointing to the fact that under Labour the council had fought hard to preserve services, managing to avoid any frontline service cuts (with the exception of the Pandemic Budget) in contrast to the eight years of cuts the Tories had inflicted upon the town, half of which before the Coalition came to power. I highlighted the fact that there were hundreds of Bedroom Tax victims we were saving from eviction, who would lose their homes the day the Tories came to power. I raised our record as one of the few councils in the UK to have actually delivered a net increase in council housing, and that every family housed were lives transformed.

Things are different now. While the loss of a single council seat to the Conservatives would still put the council back into the chaos of No Overall Control, the change in the polls even since last May, never mind compared to 2019, suggests that’s unlikely to happen. Indeed, it would seem that every seat in Crawley is now a potential target and we have spent a year working hard in neighbourhoods which haven’t delivered a Labour councillor in several decades.

Be in no doubt though, these elections really do matter, not simply due to their impact on local services, but because what happens this year matters for what will happen next nationally. For Conservative supporters, it’s the chance to make it clear that they aren’t happy with the direction of their party and the need for change if they are to have a realistic shot at the next General Elections.

For the rest of us, it’s about working towards the change the country needs. These elections may well be the last before the General Election. A big win this year is an important part of preparing the ground to remove the Tories whenever the election is next called.

The simple fact of the matter is that councils were already the most efficient part of the public sector even before Austerity, or at least that’s what David Cameron said as Leader of the Opposition. Since then we’ve faced the harshest cuts. If we want councils capable of delivering for our community, a vital step is ending the cuts which have left Crawley with a third of the funding we had before the Tories took power. To achieve the change we want locally, national change is a fundamental requirement. We need your vote on Thursday to make that happen.