QUOTE (Exhausted @ Nov 6 2014, 01:00 PM)
Perhaps we should encourage Richard Garvie to have a go and field a rake of candidates from his party. At the very least it would give the current incumbents a dose of the collywobbles if nothing else.
What I would welcome is people taking it upon themselves to do the research and to inform themselves, then to ask the difficult questions to hold their local government to account - and to not be content with being fobbed off.
That's not happening. The people we elect are not in general doing it, either before they get elected, or afterwards. When I stood up at the town council and questioned its efficiency and spending none of the town councillors recognised my figures, not because they were wrong, but because they had never in their lives seen those figures. They had never been presented with the net service costs because the administration doesn't want councillors asking those questions, and they had never thought to work the costs out for themselves because we just don't elect people who are that dangerous. Councillors are in general so inured to the culture of deprecation and compliance that they can barely tolerate contact with their snivelling public unless we're pronating ourselves before their brass-buckled shoes, so a tax-paying member of the public questioning their efficiency like he was entitled to was no less offensive than if I'd mooned my fat hairy ****.
So whoever they are I'm not going to be impressed with any of the candidates because I hardly see anyone challenging their local government with robust informed questioning, and if I was going to be impressed with a candidate I'd need to see a track record of their detailed interest in their local government administration.