Of course you

want to be a

councillor!

If someone opened a booth selling tickets to Hell, we would lay a bet that sooner rather than later a queue would form.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that despite all the infernal aspects of being a councillor, there still appear to be some who want to do the job.
Tomorrow, there’s yet another meeting for anyone interested in standing for the local council elections in May.
One has already been organised by the Independent members, and a second by the BBI – and as neither has mentioned attendance figures, we can assume that they were not great.
Wednesday’s event starts at 6 pm on in the Committee Room in Worst Street and is being arranged by the Returning Officer – Chief Executive Richard Harbord - and has nothing to do with any of the political parties.
Being elected gives you the chance to spend long and often anti-social hours doing tedious tasks like setting budgets, in exchange in Boston for a pitiful allowance and the chance between now and May at least to be lorded over by a bunch of wiseacres who think they know all the answers.
Once there was a time when local councillors really did run the borough, but in Boston, many of the more interesting and socially important responsibilities such as housing, and leisure have been hived off to other organisations.
Now, the work of a district council mostly covers building and development control, council tax collection and housing benefits, elections, waste collection and recycling, food safety, health and safety, car parks, public conveniences, economic development, grants to voluntary organisations and parks.
Exciting, eh?
There’s lots of gossip about how the parties are planning their election campaigns.
The BBI will be losing several members but appears to be recruiting enough to fill the gaps. We hear that at least a couple of BBI members wanted to defect to the Tories, but hope that the Conservatives will have more sense than to welcome them aboard.
The Tories are fielding a full compliment of candidates, which we fear will also include a number of former councillors or candidates. We don’t regard this as a good move in some cases, as there are enough voters with long memories to associate names with the previous authority which – whilst not Tory led, was Tory dominated - and which in many ways was as bad as the council it was defeated by in 2007.
Nothing much at all has been heard from Labour or the Liberal Democrats, and we suspect that any candidates put forward will have a tough time of things.
The Better Boston Group heads for the election in disarray, with at least two of its four members not seeking re-election. Unless it recruits new candidates, it scarcely seems worth standing under a party banner on 5th May.
Do not, by the way, assume that we see the result as a shoo-in for the Conservatives. We have already said that we do not, and our comments are underlined by no lesser an expert than Tim Montgomerie, a joint editor of Conservative Home.
Writing in Sunday’s Telegraph newspaper, he says that May’s vote will be the first big test of the coalition’s popularity,.
“It’s unlikely to be pretty,” he wrote. “On the Tory side, 5,000 councillors are walking into heavy gunfire. With the Tories defending vast gains from 2007, a fifth are expected to fall, and Lib Dem losses may be proportionately greater. The bloodiness of the nose will depend upon whether voters blame cutbacks in local government – which are taking place ahead of those in the rest of the public sector – on councils or central government.”
In an ideal world, Boston borough councillors should be drawn from all sections of the local community – as BBI councillor Ramonde Newell points out in a letter to the Boston Standard.
Where, he asks, are the councillors “on minimum wage; or shop workers; or 24-45 years of age; or with young children?”
The answer is that all these groups have more pressing demands on their time – and until councillors’ allowances are increased to around £20,000 a year ... which would start a riot … few if any from this group are likely to offer their services.
One observer told Boston Eye: My big concern is that we have been unable to unearth other true Independents, Labour and Lib Dems have not shown any signs of activity so far, the consequence of all this of course is that the Conservatives might gain a very large majority against weak opposition. “
We’re not so sure.
The way things are going, we can see the BBI continuing in office with a substantial number of councillors – but perhaps not a majority.
Abraham Lincoln may well have been wrong when he said “you can’t fool all the people all the time."

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