The imminent May 2 elections are the most strategically important challenge in our own local town hall governance since the metropolitan borough of Sefton was set up 50 years ago.
Unless Conservatives hold on and win in Harington Ward, Labour will go unchallenged, and given the demise of formerly independent and accredited local media professional journalism, their connivances would also be virtually unmonitored or placed on widespread public record.
The perfect conditions for a paralysing political oppressiveness, which then threatens to fulfil the infamous howling warning from the 19th century historian Lord John Acton that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
It would give Labour the means to surreptitiously carry out their grudge-driven determination to weaken, undermine and eventually destroy the still much sought-after exclusivity for which Formby is rightly and proudly famous.
So be under no illusion of any supposed even-handedness: for Labour, the agenda for Formby amounts to a levelling DOWN to become just another Anytown in a concrete jungle of mediocrity. Part of a characterless conurbation, the feel of which is determined by the lowest common social and economic denominators.
Little wonder that Churchill, all of three generations ago, was able to confidently predict the aspirations and course of today’s socialism as being “like standing in a bucket and trying to lift yourself up by the handles.”
