In December 2024, when the Labour government published its English devolution white paper, Angela Rayner, then still Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, introduced its plans.
She said the government would “change our politics, so that decisions are made with communities, not done to them”, adding: “That’s what it means to take back control, and that’s what we will deliver.”
The white paper heralded the creation of new regional strategic authorities but said much less about the new unitary local authorities slated to sit underneath them with which the government intends to replace the 63 district and county councils in the country’s 21 remaining two-tier areas.
A letter sent the same day by Jim McMahon, then local government minister, to the leaders of the remaining two-tier area councils did little more than outline the next steps in the local government reorganisation process which would lead to their abolition.
What his letter did say was that the government would be willing to postpone the May 2025 local elections for twelve months, but only where doing so would expedite the creation of the new system at both strategic and unitary levels at the same time.
It did not say, however, that the government would postpone or cancel elections in 2026, either in such priority “fast-track” areas or elsewhere.
James McInnes, then Conservative leader of Devon County Council, applied to join the fast-track programme despite Devon falling short of the eligibility criteria set out in the white paper. He also asked the government to postpone the May 2025 Devon County Council elections, which would have meant the extension of his term of office by twelve months.
The leaders of Devon’s eight district councils, including Phil Bialyk, Labour leader of Exeter City Council, published a joint statement opposing the county council’s plans.
Did Angela Raynor hear the cries for help from her Exeter party colleague? On 5 February she announced that Devon would not be included in the fast-track programme and the May 2025 Devon County Council elections would go ahead as planned.
In the event the Conservatives suffered a rout, losing 33 of 40 seats, Labour was wiped out completely and the Liberal Democrats took control of County Hall despite a Reform UK surge.
Local authority structure in England, December 2024. Source: House of Commons Library.
Disagreements between Devon’s eleven councils defined the county’s initial response to the minister’s request that they deliver outline local government reorganisation plans in March, and the differences between them remained unresolved by the November deadline for final submissions.
Devon ended up sending five conflicting proposals to Whitehall, topping the chart for the country’s most divided local government area alongside Lancashire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Kent.
By then Steve Reed had replaced Angela Rayner as Secretary of State after a property tax scandal led to her resignation and Jim McMahon had gone too, to be replaced by Alison McGovern as local government minister.
At the Labour Party conference, held a few weeks after his appointment, Steve Reed – who had taken to sporting red MAGA-style baseball caps emblazoned with “Build, baby, build” – promised there would be “no sudden twists and turns in policy” following the reshuffle prompted by Angela Rayner’s resignation.
At his first appearance in front of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in November he emphatically confirmed that the May 2026 local elections would go ahead in all the areas involved in local government reorganisation.
But on 18 December, the last day before Parliament’s Christmas recess, Alison McGovern told the House of Commons that the government would cancel the local elections scheduled for May 2026 to any council which voiced “genuine concerns” about its “capacity to deliver local government reorganisation alongside elections”.
She wrote to the leaders and CEOs of the 63 affected councils the same day to repeat the government’s offer. Her letter made clear that the government’s criterion for elections cancellation was council capacity – she used the word “capacity” seven times in her Commons statement and five times in her letter – to hold elections at the same time as preparing for reorganisation.
She also said that the government still intended to hold shadow elections in May 2027 to the new unitary authorities that would take over in April 2028.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government then confirmed the next day that the scheduled May 2027 council elections would be replaced by the shadow elections – so any council which cancelled its elections in May 2026 would not hold any more before its dissolution in 2028.
Both minister and ministry also made clear that whatever individual councils wanted they would get. Those who wanted to hold elections in May 2026 would do so, and those who did not would not.
Letter from local government minister Alison McGovern to council leaders. Source: MHCLG.
The Electoral Commission’s response was immediate and unambiguous. CEO Vijay Rangarajan said: “Scheduled elections should as a rule go ahead as planned, and only be postponed in exceptional circumstances.”
He added: “As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long-planned elections. Extending existing mandates risks affecting the legitimacy of local decision-making and damaging public confidence.
“There is a clear conflict of interest in asking existing councils to decide how long it will be before they are answerable to voters. Voters must have a say on those that represent them at local government.”
Within a few days several councils on the list had confirmed that their May 2026 elections would go ahead as planned, including Plymouth City Council, where Labour has such a large majority it could lose all the seats it is contesting in May without losing control.
Devon County Council leader Julian Brazil, who had already said the government’s willingness to cancel local elections was “incredibly dangerous”, added: “Plymouth councillors have done the right thing. In this context it would be a disgrace if Exeter residents were deprived of the chance to choose who represents them.”
PR-man turned Exeter misinformation maven and MP Steve Race, who had accused the county council of “proposing to end 2,000 years of Exeter’s self-governance” a few weeks earlier, was uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.
Report by Exeter City Council CEO Bindu Arjoon to 13 January council meeting
Exeter City Council, meanwhile, had nothing to say at all, having shut down for a fortnight’s holiday. By the time it resurfaced in January, 24 other councils had said they would not cancel their elections in May.
The following day it announced it would “consider” elections cancellation at its meeting the following week, generating a torrent of public and political criticism. It also published a report by city council chief executive Bindu Arjoon to accompany the meeting.
The report made two “recommendations” – that the council should simply “note” Alison McGovern’s letter and that council leader Phil Bialyk should reply to the minister, as requested, by 15 January after hearing “the views of members”.
It did not provide for a council decision of any kind on the issue, as it emphasised in its final line: “There is no recommendation for a decision in this report”.
It did, however, provide three “reasons for the recommendation”. But these did not support the chief executive’s “recommendations”. Instead they made a case in favour of cancellation.
One (with our emphasis on the weasel words they contain) was: “There is a risk that the government consultation on LGR proposals may coincide with the pre-election period. This would potentially limit the council’s ability to engage with communities about the LGR process.”
Another was: “Local councillors elected in May 2026 would serve for only two years before their role was abolished and the new authorities are established.”
The third was: “Postponing the local election in 2026 would release staff diverted to run and support the elections process and, in particular, financial resources which could be applied to focus on the work required to prepare for the transition to new unitary councils.”
The report added: “This includes, for example, work on governance, service design, budgets, workforce changes and data and technology as set out in section 4.4 of this report”, although it also said, further down, that the money could simply be returned to the council’s coffers instead.
Local elections delivery resources and costs table in Bindu Arjoon report to 13 January council meeting
These “reasons” are followed by a table summarising “the costs and resources required to deliver a local election”.
This shows that while Exeter’s May 2026 elections might have cost around £265,000 to deliver, almost all the costs involved would have been for services provided not by council officers but by external venues, temporary staff, logistics contractors, printers and the postal service.
So what this section of the report shows is that running local elections actually limits the council’s in-house capacity – the criterion for cancellation specified by the minister and repeated by the council monitoring officer in the report – to the tune of half a dozen council employees, none of whom are senior directors, for a few weeks each year.
The list of anticipated reorganisation tasks that follows – apparently intended to exaggerate their extent – fails to mention either that their substantive progression depends on the government’s decision on what form Devon’s new unitaries will take, which is months away, or that the staff of all eleven existing Devon councils will bear the brunt of the work when it comes.
The aggrandising report instead reads as if Exeter City Council expects to deliver local government reorganisation across all of Devon – yet also admits that a meeting with MHCLG in which “expectations will be clarified” has not yet taken place.
It only touches on the adverse impact of cancelling the elections on local democracy once, when it says: “Postponing elections could result in residents feeling disenfranchised by not being able to vote”.
Rather than seeing this as a decisive reason not to cancel, the report instead considers it a “risk” which it says, incoherently, “should be mitigated by clear communication to residents outlining if that is the view to be expressed to government, the reasons for the postponement and identified savings to be repurposed [sic].”
The chief executive simply does not seem to grasp that Exeter’s electors won’t only be “feeling” disenfranchised when they cannot vote in May – they will actually be disenfranchised.
May 2025 Riverside leisure centre local elections count. Almost everyone present is either a candidate, a canvasser or casual staff.
When the city council convened on Tuesday 13 January, no-one present could have been in any doubt about the meeting’s real purpose. Yet Labour council members had remarkably little to say about the report’s flimsy claims – although Ruth Williams said she found it “completely balanced and fair”.
They were strikingly mute on the report’s claim that elections taking place in May could somehow prevent the council participating in public consultation on local government reorganisation. As Kevin Mitchell pointed out, the guidance on council communications during election campaign periods makes clear that the council would be able to participate – unless, of course, it intended to use public money and resources to manipulate public opinion on the matter.
James Cookson then apparently offered his election last May for a one-year term in Topsham – which took place six months after the government had announced the council would be dissolved – as evidence that holding elections for terms of “only” two years are not worth the bother. Perhaps he had his own performance in mind as proof? Yvonne Atkinson, also apparently speaking for herself, said it had taken her two years to “get to grips with being a councillor”.
Kevin Mitchell, however, who was first elected 23 years ago, pointed out that thirteen of the 39 city councillors elected in 2016 were elected for two-year terms, him among them. He added that it was “disrespectful” to suggest councillors couldn’t get anything done during a two-year term.
He could also have pointed out that six of the Labour councillors sitting opposite had also been elected for one- or two-year terms either in 2016 or since, and that none had subsequently protested their redundancy or insisted that they should not have stood in the first place.
The council’s Labour members were similarly short of things to say on the central question of its capacity to hold elections this year.
Matt Vizard said elections were a “huge undertaking”, that the issue was “essentially about capacity” and the decision “should be evidenced”. Liz Pole said it was a “matter of capacity”. Bob Foale said he thought a “postponement and not a cancellation” would save “experienced officers” and “experienced councillors” time and money.
But, each having apparently confirmed that they understood the government’s cancellation criterion, had nothing substantive to add on whether the city council actually met it.
In contrast, opposition councillors made a wide range of points about the council’s elections capacity, initially by pressing chief executive Bindu Arjoon.
When Michael Mitchell asked her whether any of the local government reorganisation work she had said was so burdensome had not been foreseen six months earlier, and was not already budgeted and planned for, she replied that the council would be told what needed to be done in the meeting with MHCLG that had not yet taken place.
When Tammy Palmer asked what proportion of the council’s staff would be involved in local government reorganisation, and whether the chief executive was concerned about the delivery of everyday council services as a result, the chief executive said that she couldn’t give a percentage – although she said some senior staff would be “involved” – and that the issues wasn’t so much staff numbers as it was “the intensity of the work”.
When Adrian Fullam asked if any of the work she had listed would not get done if the elections went ahead as planned, she admitted that the council would still be able to prepare for reorganisation at the same time as holding the polls.
Then Andy Ketchin asked how the council intended to address the capacity issues it claimed for this year’s city council elections during next year’s shadow unitary elections, when reorganisation work would be in full swing. All the chief executive could say was that the time between now and then would help the council to plan – as if this year’s elections were only scheduled last month.
Exeter City Council 13 February 2026 Guildhall meeting
The shredding continued during the debate which followed, as opposition councillors from across the political spectrum set about sounding the depths to which the council’s Labour members were willing to sink to deny their consciences in their determination to avoid electoral accountability.
Michael Mitchell wondered why the Labour government had refused the Conservative county council request to postpone the 2025 local elections but was now minded to approve the Labour city council request to cancel them in 2026 – without mentioning democracy once in the letter suggesting it do so.
He pointed out that the city council could have moved to holding elections for all its seats every four years long ago, as many other councils do, if holding a third of them in each of three years had been having a significant cost or capacity impact.
Diana Moore, Andy Ketchin, Lynn Wetenhall, Tess Read, James Banyard and Lucy Haigh all pointed out that the chief executive had confirmed that the council did, in fact, have the capacity to hold this year’s elections – and that there was no evidence at all that it did not.
Diana Moore added that none of the many local government reorganisation reports, proposal submission documents and transition plans that the council had already produced – which are so extensive that it has gathered them into a “document library” – or its dedicated risk register identified either a £265,000 funding gap or any delivery capacity concerns.
Peter Holland, who said he would end up serving a term of five years and eleven months if this year’s local elections were cancelled, called the claim that they would instead be postponed “nonsense”, adding that it was morally and ethically wrong to remove residents’ democratic right to vote outside war, emergency or a pandemic.
Adrian Fullam warned that elections, as the only method by which the public can directly hold politicians to account, are vital to democracy. He asked what excuse would be used next time if administrative inconvenience was sufficient to cancel them now.
Carol Bennett said that democracy is precious and must be protected from erosion. She also pointed out that cancelling this year’s elections would put the Devon transition to unitary authorities at risk as Exeter would no longer be able to participate with legitimate local representation.
Lucy Haigh added that holding the elections this year would mean the city’s voters would still have democratically-elected councillors to represent them should the local government reorganisation timetable be delayed for any reason.
Alison Sheridan said Labour simply did not want to lose power in Exeter after being wiped out in the county council elections last year, adding that it would be a breach of trust with Exeter’s residents if the city council elections did not go ahead this year.
Zoe Hughes said that the city’s residents would remember their disenfranchisement and the denial of their votes.
Tess Read pointed out that it would be a terrible message for the council to send that the value of Exeter democracy is less than £2 for each of the city’s residents, and asked why not one of the council’s Labour members had said they wanted the elections to go ahead.
Exeter City Council Local Government Reorganisation risk register v3, October 2025.
Source: Exeter City Council via freedom of information request.
A couple of Labour councillors expressed defiance. James Cookson interrupted Tammy Palmer’s speech three times by shouting procedural objections only to be silenced each time by Lord Mayor Anne Jobson, in the chair, in turn.
Yvonne Atkinson, after telling the assembly that “democracy is a principle, but there are many forms of democracy”, exhorted the opposition to “listen to the Labour Party on democracy and stop trying to take the moral high-ground” which she accused them of doing by “making this a party political moral high-ground issue”.
Several other Labour councillors resorted to fabricating their own bizarre justifications for denying the city’s electors their right to vote.
Laura Wright imagined that Alison McGovern’s letter had said the elections cancellation criterion was whether the work entailed by local government reorganisation was “rare and exceptional”.
Marina Asvachin said that elections held while local government organisation was under way would be held “blind”, without voters knowing what would happen in 2028.
Martyn Snow said the elections should be cancelled because council members had been “elected as representatives to ensure we do the best for our residents and all the people of Exeter”.
Mollie Miller-Boam added that “elections are not about us, they are about those who elect us”.
Duncan Wood simply tried to focus on next May’s shadow unitary elections instead.
In some cases Labour council members seemed to suggest that their willingness to go along with the government’s invitation to cancel would be rewarded with approval of their local government reorganisation plans. Matt Vizard, Matthew Williams and Phil Bialyk all cited such a “prize”.
Phil Bialyk, who had told last July’s council meeting that he had no intention of asking to postpone democracy in 2026 – and not, as the meeting minutes recorded, that he had no intention of cancelling the May 2026 local elections – twice told January’s meeting that their cancellation would be remembered as no more than an historical “footnote”.
He even went so far as to pitch for his re-election as Exeter Labour Party leader – and so council leader – next year, saying that he stood by his record as council leader doing what he thought was “the right thing for the people of Exeter”.
Eight Labour councillors did not speak at all – Jane Begley, Deborah Darling, Jakir Hussain, Paul Knott, Josie Parkhouse, Susannah Patrick, Gemma Rolstone and Tony Wardle – but still did not demur from voting en bloc with their party whip. Bob Foale left before the vote took place.
Exeter City Council 2026-27 members allowances table
Brazenly, the next item on the agenda was a councillor pay rise for the 2026-27 electoral year, including an increase in the “special responsibility” allowances that some councillors receive on top of their standard stipends.
These allowances are supposed to reflect the additional efforts made by council executive committee members, the chairs and deputy chairs of its other committees and its “member champions”, as well as the Lord Mayor. But to the extent these positions are in the council leader’s gift they provide, in practice, a means for Phil Bialyk to demand obedience and reward loyalty.
Of the eight Labour councillors who will now keep their seats instead of standing for re-election in May, seven receive “special responsibility” allowances.
As a direct consequence of cancelling this year’s elections Bob Foale, Paul Knott, Matt Vizard, Josie Parkhouse, Duncan Wood, Marina Asvachin, Laura Wright and James Cookson will between them receive £145,924 next year. Money they would otherwise not have received had they lost their seats in May – or stood down, as two of them, Bob Foale and Josie Parkhouse, had said they would.
As their terms will now be extended by 23 months to Exeter City Council’s dissolution in April 2028, these Labour councillors will also expect to receive another £138,000 or so between them in the 2027-28 electoral year, assuming they all keep their “special responsibility” allowances.
Another seven Labour councillors who will also now not have to stand for re-election to the city council in May 2027 will also together receive £74,000 more than they would otherwise have done, had they lost their seats or stood down. They are Yvonne Atkinson, Susannah Patrick, Ruth Williams, Martyn Snow, Mollie Miller-Boam, Jane Begley and Matthew Williams.
Three of these seven also receive “special responsibility” allowances – Susannah Patrick, Ruth Williams and Mollie Miller-Boam.
Exeter City Council executive committee in May 2024. Naima Allcock (bottom right) later resigned as a councillor to be replaced on the committee by Susannah Patrick. She, as well as Matt Vizard, Ruth Williams, Duncan Wood, Bob Foale, Marina Asvachin and Laura Wright would have all faced the electorate this year or next but will now have their terms of office extended to April 2028. Photo: Exeter City Council.
So these fifteen Labour councillors are now set to receive more than £350,000 because there will be no city council elections this year or next. And that’s without including the expenses some claim on top – among them Laura Wright and Paul Knott claimed an additional £1,400 in 2024-25.
In this context it should come as no surprise that Phil Bialyk had the brass to canvass his party members to continue as their leader at the January council meeting at the same time he was ensuring that, as party leader, he would remain council leader after the elections cancellation.
He received more than £32,000 for playing this role in 2024-25, including £3,200 in expenses. He accepted £700 in “gifts and hospitalities” alone, mostly in connection with Exeter Chiefs. His allowances have risen to more than £30,000 this year – before expenses and gifts – and are set to rise again to more than £31,000 in 2026-27, then again in 2027-28.
He would otherwise have received only a standard stipend of £7,296 in 2026-27 and a little more the following year.
He has got away with all this because the council currently has 22 Labour members and so a majority of three. The opposition is comprised of seven Green, four Liberal Democrat, two Conservative, two Reform UK and two Independent members. (Alison Sheridan defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK late last year. Independent Zoe Hughes was previously a Labour member.)
Of the thirteen seats that would have been up for election this May, eight are held by Labour. At least six of these looked very vulnerable until the elections were cancelled – the party lost more than half its support across Devon in the May 2025 elections and all its Exeter seats, and its popularity has fallen still further since.
Of the thirteen seats that would have been up for election in May 2027, another seven are held by Labour. All these fifteen Labour councillors will now keep their seats until the city council is abolished in April 2028, instead of facing the electorate, including seven of the council’s eight executive committee members.
Among them only Phil Bialyk would have retained an electoral mandate until the council’s abolition, but only in his ward. His legitimacy as council leader will expire in May this year, leaving Exeter without democratically-elected leadership as local government reorganisation gets under way.
The day after the meeting Phil Bialyk went on the defensive, insisting that “we are not suspending democracy” and that “as a council we are accountable and will continue to be accountable.”
If he thought he was fooling anyone, the wave of anger that crested then broke over the city council and local Labour Party surely must have disabused him of his delusion.
The following day, Thursday 15 January, he wrote to Alison McGovern to green-light the cancellation. Never one to miss a chance to let council officers put words in his mouth, most of the letter was lifted straight from council chief executive Bindu Arjoon’s report – including a 300-word section which was copied verbatim.
Despite telling council members at their Tuesday meeting that he would convey the full spectrum of their views on elections cancellation to the minister, he instead included a link to the meeting agenda and said the minutes would be published at some point during the following fortnight.
Devon County Council leader Julian Brazil, meanwhile, had written to local government secretary Steve Reed, rendering the city council’s delivery capacity claims redundant by offering County Hall resources to enable the city council elections to go ahead.
He said cancelling the elections would carry “significant democratic, legal and practical risks”, adding: “The electorate has a legitimate expectation that elections will take place as scheduled, and postponement or cancellation, unless in truly exceptional circumstances, risks undermining public confidence in local democratic institutions.”
He continued: “Local government has historically demonstrated its ability to deliver elections successfully alongside periods of significant structural change. While we recognise that preparation for LGR is complex and resource-intensive, it does not make running elections unworkable.
“On the contrary, holding elections during a period of reform can provide renewed democratic legitimacy at a time when major decisions are being taken.”
Local government secretary Steve Reed had other ideas. In an opinion piece for The Times he claimed that the public didn’t want “pointless elections” for what he called “zombie councils” to go ahead at all.
Letter from Devon County Council leader Julian Brazil to local government secretary Steve Reed
As it happened, Phil Bialyk was scheduled to appear in front of a council scrutiny committee that evening, to present a report which admitted that “the budget and resource implications of the work that will be required” for local government reorganisation was still only “underway”.
By the time the committee convened all five city council opposition groups had also written, together, to Alison McGovern. They said: “The rationale we have been presented with lacks sufficient evidence to justify the postponement of elections”, adding that Phil Bialyk’s letter did not “fairly represent the views put forward at the council meeting on Tuesday 13 January”.
They pointed out that they had “never once, since the wheels of LGR were set in motion, been presented with a single report to suggest that Exeter City Council lacked the resources to deliver both the May 2026 elections and a comprehensive LGR programme”.
They added: “Without clear evidence that we have a problem or that ‘essential capacity’ is needed to allow reorganisation to progress effectively, the decision by the leader to ask for a postponement is, in our view, not evidence-based and appears to place the interests of the Labour Party above the need for the council going forward to have a democratic mandate.”
They concluded: “We are so concerned about the potential erosion of democratic values in our city that we have put aside our political differences to write to you with one voice and ask clearly that elections for Exeter City Council in May 2026 go ahead as budgeted for, planned and expected by the citizens of our great city.”
Teignbridge District Council leader Richard Keeling also wrote to Phil Biaylk, also to offer the resources required to enable the city council to hold elections in May. He said: “We are confident that we can assist and remove this burden.”
At the scrutiny meeting, committee member Kevin Mitchell asked Phil Bialyk how he had replied to the county council’s offer of help to enable the local elections to go ahead.
Phil Biaylk’s response was to fume that the offer was “a direct attack on me and my council” which was “patronising” and “totally unnecessary”. He added: “They are hell-bent on putting our proposals at risk and I’m not going to have it”.
Letter from Exeter City Council opposition parties to local government minister Alison McGovern
During the days which followed, most of the councils which had been invited to cancel their May elections and had not previously announced their positions declared whether they would go ahead or not. Nineteen are run by Labour, nine by the Conservatives, eight by Liberal Democrats and 27 are in no overall control.
(Curiously, the government asked four to clarify their positions, Labour-led Oxford City Council and Southampton City Council and Conservative-led Essex County Council and Norfolk County Council, despite all having already made clear they wanted their elections to go ahead.)
Then, on 22 January, MHCLG confirmed that this May’s elections would be cancelled in 29 council areas. It said they had all “provided sufficient evidence” on how doing so “would release capacity to help deliver local government reorganisation”.
Steve Reed continued to insist that the elections would only be “postponed” – following what he called a “comprehensive consideration of all the evidence” – in his follow-up letter to council leaders.
He did not acknowledge Devon County Council’s offer to provide the resources and capacity necessary for the elections to go ahead in Exeter, and had not seen the minutes of the Exeter City Council meeting to which Phil Bialyk had referred in his letter as they had not been published.
15 of the 19 Labour councils which had been invited to cancel their elections had agreed to do so, alongside three Conservative councils, one Liberal Democrat council – Cheltenham, where the party holds 36 of 40 seats, all of which were elected in 2024 – and eight of the 27 in no overall control.
Among these eight, three are in minority Labour control and two others have Labour leaders as part of a coalition arrangement. So two-thirds of the councils which will now not hold local elections this year are Labour-led.
Letter from local government secretary Steve Reed to council leaders
The reaction in Exeter was unsurprising. Exmouth & Exeter East MP David Reed had already accused the city council of moving towards “some form of local tinpot autocracy” in the House of Commons.
Diana Moore said that the cancellation was “one giant Labour stitch-up”, adding: “Labour simply cannot be trusted with local democracy. They are denying people their say in May, treating elections as a privilege instead of a right.”
Julian Brazil said: “We and one of the district councils offered the city council a commitment to provide resources and capacity to support the elections to go ahead, so that excuse holds no water. Government has chosen to ignore that offer of help and I leave people to come to their own conclusions about why they insist on cancelling these elections.”
All Phil Bialyk has since been able to come up with in his defence – without acknowledging the two years and two months between now and then during which his party will now illicitly cling on to power – is that he thinks “the focus should be on who represents you on the new authority which will take all our futures forward”.
At the same time the city council has said it intends to submit another bid for UK City of Culture status next week after failing even to make it onto the longlist of eight the last time it submitted a bid in 2022, and despite having to compete with both Bristol and Plymouth this time around.
Both council CEO Bindu Arjoon and development director Ian Collinson – as well as two other members of council staff – managed to find time despite their incapacitating local government reorganisation workload to attend a two-hour PR junket on Monday at which the bid was announced.
Meanwhile, the deadline for Steve Reed to provide his reasons for cancelling the elections to the High Court after a legal challenge from Reform UK passed on Thursday. Al 63 affected councils were invited to join the case as interested parties, or seek permission to intervene.
A two-day hearing is scheduled for 19 and 20 February, when the court will decide whether to grant permission for judicial review. It will proceed immediately to determination if it does.
If Phil Bialyk hasn’t already realised the magnitude of the political error he has made, he must surely do so soon. Labour now has to remain in power in Exeter, as a party of autocrats without authority, for two more years as its many failures from the past thirteen continue to come home to roost.
Until last week it had a chance of winning some seats on the new unitary authority in which Exeter will sit in next May’s shadow elections. Now Exeter voters know in whose interests it seeks to govern.
Phil Bialyk thinks people will forget, but he’s wrong. Exeter’s citizens already understand that the cancellation of this year’s local elections is part of the dismantling of democracy on which bad actors are hell-bent all over the world.
He has gifted Reform UK an enduring narrative which will add fuel on the populist fire and increase the already excellent chances of Steve Race losing his party parliamentary seat in 2029.
So much for Steve Race’s 2,000 years of proud Exeter democracy. 2026 will instead be remembered as the year it ended – at the Labour Party’s hands.
