Rayner Postpones Local Elections for 5.5 Million People in Blow to Farage
Angela Rayner has cancelled local elections this year for 5.5 million people amid growing outrage over steep council tax hikes in a move condemned by Reform leader Nigel Farage as his party gains in the polls. The Telegraph has more.
Just weeks before the planned polling day, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that elections in nine areas, including Surrey, Norfolk, Suffolk and Thurrock, would be postponed to allow for a reorganisation of local authorities.
The average tax Band D bill is set to rise by 5% in these areas.
It comes as Ms Rayner pushes through a wholesale reorganisation of local authorities, with district councils scrapped and merged into counties to produce new unitary councils.
The Deputy Prime Minister said this meant that in many cases there would be no point in voters electing a county council when another one would have to be held a year later for its new unitary guise.
Reform had been expected to surge in the local elections after the recently-formed party topped opinion polls. The move will deny it the opportunity to build support and funding across much of the south.
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, criticised the “cowardice of the political class” over the move. In a hastily-arranged press conference, he said: “I thought only dictators cancelled elections.”
He said the decision had been taken with the “connivance of a now terrified Labour Party… and Conservative-led councils who of course want to keep the money rolling for at least another couple of years”.
He added: “The reorganisation of local government is going to take up to three years to complete, and given that the term for a county councillor is four years, there is absolutely no justification for cancelling the elections for five and a half million people other than the cowardice of the existing political class.”
Ms Rayner said elections, due this May, would be delayed by a year in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey – all Conservative county councils – in the Isle of Wight, which is run by independents, and in Thurrock, which is controlled by Labour.
She told the Commons: “The Government’s starting point is for all elections to go ahead unless there is a strong justification for postponement, and the bar is high – and rightly so.
“I am only agreeing to half of the requests that were made. After careful consideration, I’ve only agreed to postpone elections in places where this is central to our manifesto promise to deliver devolution.
“We’re not in the business of holding elections to bodies that won’t exist and where we don’t know what will replace them. This would be an expensive and irresponsible waste of taxpayers’ money, and any party calling for these elections to go ahead must explain how this waste would be justifiable.”
Worth reading in full.
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Oops, another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact.
Elections permanently cancelled?
Emergency declared? (climate, penguin pox, raging croc flu)
Is there an mRNA for the coming ’emergency’?
Not only a rise but also severe cuts in services like reducing bin collections down to every two weeks which is disgusting and has obviously disgusting implications. You have to stand against it or it will just grow and grow far outpacing wage growth. Rent strikes, council tax strikes etc can be very effective. They can lock a few people up but they can’t lock thousands up.
I’ve heard suggestions of 4 week bin collections
Bring on the rats because pretty soon they will be the only protein we have left.
Our nin collections are three weekly and have been for years.
What will be the excuse to cancel the General Election, my dog ate the Ballot papers.
Oooo no, that’s a conspiracy theory too far, MadWolf303
Which one, cancelling the election or the Dog bit !!!!!
Don’t be silly, that’s just a conspiracy theory…oh?
I had no idea I lived in a country where local elections were held at the discretion of the government in power.
I’m assuming general elections can’t be cancelled just because the ruling government thinks there’s no point, but at this stage nothing would surprise me too much.
State of Emergency: details to be announced in due course.
A good source for info about expenditure of local councils is the Local Government Information Unit. Most money goes on housing and adult and child social care. This should not be what council tax should be used for. Most incoming money, for councils, comes from council tax. Councils are responsible for housing everyone incl. those from overseas. The govt has decided upon mass immigration, not us. And it is due to dreadful adult and children’s social care govt policies that these two areas are in such disarray too. And costs are going up, of course. No wonder there is nothing left for the services which our council taxes are meant to be providing us with.
They can rearrange the boundaries as much as they like but it won’t change the overall downward spiral.
.”..the bar is high – and rightly so.
I am only agreeing to half of the requests that were made,” said Ms Nobrayner.
Pity the bar for avoiding capital gains tax on sale of second council houses was much lower – and wrongly so.
Utter twerpess.
Not to mention committing electoral fraud by registering at two addresses which should get you barred for life from public office.
Well Rupert Lowe received the predictable evasive garbage in response when he asked a straightforward question to Rayner. Yes, suddenly cost is an issue, though not when you’ve got bottomless pockets when it comes to foreigners, abroad or at home;
”I just asked Angela Rayner on behalf of my very ticked off constituents for a FULL guarantee that these cancelled elections will definitely go ahead in 2026.
I did not receive that…”
https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/1887148402531545225
Hmm, priorities;
”Local councils in Britain have spent £141 million since 2022 on yoga, circus skills classes, playstations, driving lessons, DJ lessons, and tickets to football matches for illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers (Telegraph).
That’s 470,000 winter fuel payments for pensioners.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/04/councils-spend-taxpayer-money-playstations-asylum-seekers/
I didn’t know this about Mr Lowe, though;
”This is impressive.
Every month Rupert Lowe, Reform MP, gives his MP salary away. This month, he gave it to a charity which takes care of the victims of rape gangs.”
https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1886818871291650360
That’s shocking but I’m unsurprised. Govt outsources housing, adult and children’s social care onto councils but councils are often complicitly woke.
And then the councils outsource it again… each step taking a cut… should be a ban on councils outsourcing core services like bins, street cleaning, social care etc
When all else fails, suspend democracy!
Student union SWP playbook edition 1957 edited by the KGB rule# 1.
Then dissolve the People and elect a new one.
That’s a Brecht quote from a poem about the east German uprising in mid-June 1953. Original and English translation are available here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung
Brecht also wrote the text for the national anthem of the GDR which got outlawed there when the leadership of the GDR abandoned the idea of a unified German state in favour of making sure they could keep theirs.
The incriminated text was
Auferstanden aus Ruinen und der Zukunft zugewandt
Woll’n wir dir in Frieden dienen, Deutschland einig Vaterland!
Arisen from ruins and facing the future now
We’ll serve you in peace, Germany, indivisible fatherland!
No taxation without ‘voted for’ representation!
Don’t pay the council tax.
Biden’s Democrat Election Playbook 101.
Steal elections or cancel them.
Banana Republic time.
This is the consequence for our daydreaming establishment in ignoring and suppressing the greatest political crime of all time.
The last local government reorganisation took 8 years from inception, through Crown commissions, consultation etc before implementation and was not great for local democracy then. Ranting and her fellow students have come out with this after a matter of months, possibly weeks, of consideration given that they arrived in government without any real plans. How does taking away our district councils and giving it all to the remote county councils help? Currently my local council office is 4 miles up the road on the assumption that anyone is at work there. After the Tory scum dreamt up a 4000 home garden ‘village’ the size of the main town, they were kicked out of control as the local people took over and in my area we have 2 residents and an independent as councillors. The county councillor is still a Tory. Interesting that it is SE Tory county councils that want to skip the elections to avoid a hammering by Reform no doubt.
Where I live we have a town council that doesn’t do much other than promote the town and manage events, the market, then we have a district council that does rubbish and parks and planning and a county council that does the rest. It doesn’t seem very efficient and the division of roles seems a bit arbitrary. I initially thought they would just get rid of one tier but it seems that the councils are meant to form new unitary authorities of a more uniform size but then they would band together to have regional mayors. I cannot fathom why this exercise is seen as a priority, other than politicians love to fiddle with things and to be seen to be doing something.
Chavvy, single mother at an early age (so indicates how good her forward planning and desire for welfare is) woman in charge of major issues in our nation. Oh, how far this country has fallen. Our people seem to have gotten the government their IQs deserve?
Because what female wouldn’t wish to be a single mother? Surely it’s preferable and much easier to go it alone and have no partner in the picture, sharing the parental responsibilities….? I don’t agree with Rayner’s politics, but then I’m a ”Play the ball not the man” type of person, unlike yourself, because any excuse to have a go and castigate somebody of the opposite sex purely because they are the opposite sex, such is your ingrained hatred of women, right? Something that’s seldom scrutinized is the *why* teenage girls or women might find themselves single mothers in the first place. Because that then might mean you would have to acknowledge the fact that teen boys and men are absconding and ditching their responsibilities in bringing up a child that they’ve fathered. But nobody, and especially not men like you, are pointing the finger of blame in that direction, are they? After all, how difficult is it to wear a condom if you’re not ready take on the massive, life-changing responsibility of becoming a parent? Or do you absolve him of this basic requirement as well? She might be a shit politician but she also had a shit upbringing, (… Read more »
Labour and the CONservatives can run but they can’t hide.
I can see several reasons why postponement of elections is not a good idea.
The political landscape has shifted in a lot of places, so the councillors currently in place are not likely to represent the people.
These councillors are now deciding on these super councils??? Is that what we want?
Furthermore there are several councils in severe debt whilst others have balanced the books? Who picks up the debt?
And how long will it be before these super councils are in place??
Don’t these ideas have to go through Parliament first ! A General Election will also be deferred if this Carry’s on . We as a nation are really having the SH1T kicked out of us !
If these postponed elections are going to take place next year, I wonder what Labour will have done to convince the electorate they can be trusted with anything by then? My cynical side suggests that Labour will still be lagging in the polls this time next year and, somewhat mysteriously, the reorganisation will have taken longer than expected, so there will be a further delay to the elections.
In Germany the ruling elites tried to ban AfD for being “a threat to democracy”. Will Starmer try the same trick banning Reform for being “a threat to democracy”?
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Expect even more support for Reform UK.
I can’t understand how there are 24% of respondents saying they would vote Labour. Are so many people stupid enough not to see how Starmer and his bunch of incompetents or communists are working on destroying our country, once the world leader in free speech and personal freedom? The so-called Labour Party once supporter of the workers is now their enemy and its about time their traditional supporters realised it.