Can someone who is good with politics shed some light please? My mum has been told Barnsley aren't allowed to vote on may 1st. Is this right or a load of rubbish?
“Aren’t allowed” isn’t really the right way of putting it; there just isn’t an election in Barnsley. May first is just a tranche of local elections. They aren’t nationwide - in fact there aren’t actually that many. There are votes for: Fourteen county councils eight unitary councils one metropolitan borough council Isle of Scilly So no, she can’t vote, as there isn’t an election in Barnsley.
No. There won't be an election here. There also won't be anywhere near as many elections as planned after labour and tories colluded to cancel many. East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey all cancelled. Interestingly areas where reform are doing best.
Stretching of the truth there a tad. There’s an election in Donny and the neo nazis will take control of the council comfortably. Labour ‘cancelling’ elections is an interesting stance too - it’s easy to assume that given the only council that is held by them that is still being contested is Doncaster - the rest are all Tory with the exception of a few that are no overall control and I don’t suspect they will do too well on a lot of them. Opinion polls suggest the Tories might lose hundreds of councillors with the majority going to Reform. Though given the majority of the elections postponed are in east Anglia and the south east, they are hardly in Labour strongholds. They had little to lose there. They also haven’t really cancelled them, they’re delayed for a year to tie them in with the majority of other council elections. A decent proportion are also areas covered by both a county council and a district council, something which is rightly to be streamlined and eradicated - and something which Labour said they’d do in their general election manifesto (they get plenty of flak for not doing things they pledged and here are getting flak for doing what they pledged) - the net result being that if they’d bothered to have the elections, the votes would be to elect councillors on to bodies that won’t exist in the next twelve months. If they hadn’t postponed them there would have been criticism of doing them only to abolish some of the authorities and have to do it again. Donny has a mayoral election as well as the council elections too - the incumbent Labour candidate, Ros Jones, may hold on to the role by default, as the right wing vote will be split due to the Tory, Nick Fletcher, being a mouthy presence that is ‘known’ - he was an mp until the last election and likes to walk round town pointing out all the dirty homeless and foreign folk; and the fact Reform have chosen to put up a bizarre candidate, a kid barely out of his twenties who hasn’t gone down well - though is still likely favourite. If they’d stuck to their word and put a ‘high profile’ candidate up, they would have won it at a canter. They might still. Plenty of support for Reform around Donny. I suspect the same to be true everywhere. It won’t end well.
We've a couple in North Yorkshire, for a newly formed Harrogate Town Council and Scarborough Town Council.
Thanks everyone, I'm not good with politics, I don't understand any of it. Curiosity got the better of me when my mum mentioned what someone had said
Barnsley has 3 councillors in each ward (21 wards, making 63 councillors altogether) that serve 4 year terms each. Each year for three years one of the councillor seats in each ward is up for election. In the fourth year there is no election. This year is the year of no elections. There is currently a consultation ongoing about changing to an ‘all out’ system. This would mean that all three seats in each ward are contested at the same time, with an election once every four years, rather than on a rolling programme. The consultation closes on the 2nd of May. https://www.barnsley.gov.uk/consultations/consultation-on-barnsley-whole-council-all-out-elections/
In each electoral district. Everyone gets to vote for the three councillors in their ward over the four year period. I’ll edit it as it’s a thread about not knowing about politics and I don’t want to confuse people.
Local Elections... Barnsley votes to elect 1 Councillor per year for 3 years, then not the 4th year. This year Barnsley were never going to vote In 2026 Barnsley will see ALL 63 Councillors up for re-election, therefore putting a cross at side of 3 names.
