In May, people from across Brighton and Hove will again be voting for the 54 councillors who run our city.
For the past 12 years, our city has been mismanaged by the Greens and Labour with ineffective, unconstructive Conservative opposition.
We all know how the system works: these people put the needs of their political parties first – and those of our city and its residents second.
They have failed so many people in so many different ways, with so many bad decisions guided by party ideology. So many avoidable and self-made disasters. So much hypocrisy and incompetence.
It’s clear that the city that we love is in trouble. Things have got to change.
And they can. Because this year, residents will be able to make a different voting choice – Brighton and Hove Independents.
Approved and regulated by the Electoral Commission, Brighton and Hove Independents is a group of local people who are passionate about our city – and offering a genuine alternative to the traditional political parties.
Our goal is to improve the running of Brighton and Hove through the election of non-political candidates with the life and work experiences needed to manage our city of nearly 300,000 people.
We are people who have lived and worked in Brighton and Hove for decades. In our careers, we have successful track records of getting things done – and we want to use this experience and know-how to make the right decisions for Brighton and Hove.
We are open-minded, honest, impartial, experienced, transparent, practical, pragmatic and solution-oriented. We are not aligned with dogmatic, ideologically driven national political parties.
We all know that times are tough and there have been significant cuts in funding from central government – which makes it even more important that our city is run wisely and prudently. That means no more vanity projects, incompetence and mismanagement.
Our manifesto is clear
- We will put the needs and wishes of the people of Brighton and Hove first.
- We will be prudent with your money, making decisions based on evidence and analysis, with clear KPIs and measures of success.
- When you come to us with a problem, we will listen – and act.
- No more fobbing off. No more excuses. No more vanity projects based on whims.
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Candidates for May 2023 are being lined up across our city. If you are interested in standing, or volunteering behind the scenes, then please contact bridget@bridgetbythesea.com.
The nationwide political parties are backed by trade unions, lobby groups and businesses. Brighton and Hove Independents will be funded by residents who want to see change.
To donate, please click here.
And please visit our website to share your thoughts on how our city can be improved – and sign up for our newsletter.
And, if you’re not sure if you’re registered to vote then please visit https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/voting-and-elections/register-vote.
Brighton and Hove Independents. Led By Locals. Putting People Before Politics. The Change Our City Needs.
Bridget Fishleigh is the only councillor who was elected as an independent to Brighton and Hove City Council and was shortlisted in the national 2021 UK Councillor of the Year awards.
The city needs competent and sensible people running it – now more than ever. No more hobby horses and vanity projects conceived purely to win awards/gain national attention/further personal and political ambitions. If there has ever been a time to try something new, this is surely it.
It is by default a Party. A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country’s elections. I
Fantastic, a ray of sunshine finally cracking through the dark clouds over Brighton & Hove.
Now looking forward to May when things can improve dramatically with some adults in charge of the council for a change
If you form a group, you’re not independents, you’re a political group. Sure, you’re not Labour or Conservatives, but you’re still a group who will presumably vote together in an aligned way. Calling yourselves “independent” is an oxymoron.
No, you’re wrong Jen (though I follow your logic). Take the Flatpack Democracy movement for example. It started in Frome. The group had a shared vision but it also embraced outlook diversity – they were united by their desire to break with the party model and unshackle local governance from the problem of party politics – namely Councillors tied to party diktat and indifferent to their constituents. In Frome ‘Independents for Frome’ necessarily had to register as a minor political party in order achieve an identifiable logo on the ballot paper. Only by doing this can voters hope to link a name to a website and check that a particular ‘independent’ isn’t simply a person who has been chucked out by a political party or otherwise has an approach antithetical to the principles of independent politics.
Their manifesto isn’t clear it’s vague and meaningless
Why do local politics need a manifesto ? all we want is services delivered effectively, value for money and a degree of honesty. What we don’t need is our money spending on vanity projects etc…
The history of a manifesto, in whatever politics, national or local (particularly national at the moment), is not relevant. A manifesto is meaningless. Circumstances come up which make them redundant/impossible or, in many cases, the proponents just don’t stick to them. I agree with you – what many of us want is for somebody, anybody, to fix all the basic stuff that has been totally neglected for years – we pay, others who don’t pay get the benefit, and we get nothing.
This is Councillor Bridget Fishleigh who tried to get one independent candidate to withdraw from the Rottingdean Coastal by-election in favour of her own preferred independent candidate.
Yep. Almost like they’re a political group. A group of disgruntled ex-Tory’s who hate Brighton and talk it down at every opportunity.
In Bridget we trust!
Good stuff. Just what Brighton (and many places) needs.
This is a group of independent voices under an umbrella of cooperation and participation. It is not a political party that selects loyalists to follow the party line where groups vote against one another in council chambers as they blindly follow outdated dogma putting political point scoring before the needs of the city and its residents. It is time to move away from Westminster ideology to true local activism where our representative’s concerns are solely with their wards and external national colour blind politics are redundant.
Anything that would get rid of this rotten to the core council is worth supporting.
Anything? Anything? Are you sure? Anything?
If I may stick my oar in here – Bridget is my local councillor, but will not be at the next elections, because of the boundary changes. However, her current ward is supposed to have three councillors, so we had the one who got into bother with the police, which constituents were never told about until it hit the papers, and this person was only ever out for personal ambition. This fiasco eventually forced a by-election, returning a councillor who has, unfortunately, (and I wish him all the best) been very ill ever since and is not standing again. Plus, a long-standing councillor for the ward has apparently been very ill for some time and has not been seen or heard of for ages. Bridget has been coping with all the issues in the ward (despite Russell-Moyle’s claims that his office has been dealing with some of the issues of the newer Labour councillor, for which there is no evidence offered), so she deserves major credit for her efforts and achievements And she gets stuck in practically – like with paintbrush, food banks and charity collecting tin very often, giving up what should be personal time. In amongst all this she has a business to run. Somehow.
Gary above is right. A single ‘voice in the wilderness’ doesn’t work, and Bridget has been that since the last election. One person gets fobbed off by all concerned, especially council officers. However, a loose grouping of candidates – not a Party – (who focus on actual issues that affect residents, which is what a council is supposed to be about, but which is something that the Greens in particular don’t understand) would be welcome to a lot of us rather than the political ideologies which waste our money and do nothing for many of us.
Politics, in the sense of Labour, Tories, Greens and their Party stances, are not needed in B&H. What we need are practical and talented, sensible people who actually listen to and serve residents.
There is no place for party political polotics in governing a city like Brighton and Hove… leave that to Westminster. Let’s get people who will focus on, and address, local issues that are most pressing and are th priorities of teh people who live here.
Councils always used to be run by people who live locally & are therefore invested in the local issues. Then politics got in the way & the leading Party followed whatever their Westminster leaders dictated.
Here’s a chance to make a change. If we don’t take that chance we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Bridget Fishleigh has worked tirelessly for her ward & challenged and lobbied and, importantly, listened.
Brighton & Hove is known for being bold, innovative & I afraid to challenge accepted practice; here is the opportunity to do what we are known for.
The issue with electing a bunch of independents rather than a few as at present, is that they will despite protestations become a de facto group or party. Either they will be a disparate group of individuals with different priorities, as the current core of independent councillors are or they will have pre-election agreed on policy, therefore being no different to the other parties.
However the downside is they will lack experience of working with officers, committees etc. The city has seen no party hold a majority over recent years and therefore what is needed is a strong majority council. A group of independents will not aid this but rather lead to an even more fragmented council with poorer decisions being made.
Whilst we do need a reduction in Westminster debate, some issues like the cost of living crisis and the state of our local NHS departments do cross over into local debate. Many of our current councillors are experienced with many life experiences and skill sets. Any independents will not offer anything new and whilst asking for change in this article, I do not see them offering any new policy ideas. So the risk is too great for me.
Another fragmented council with an extra disparate party of independents with no ideas or the hope of a majority council led by political experience and able to finally deliver fresh ideas. I prefer the later.
Agree. This is why these “groups” don’t work in the long run. It seems this lot are just angry Tories in disguise in any case.
Except that there’s only one elected Independent at present – Bridget Fishleigh. The rest have either decided to become Independents, having been elected as representatives of a mainstream party, or have been chucked out of a mainstream party.
Realistically, only some of the Indies would get elected and, no doubt, they would have differing views on quite a few issues, but the point is that they would not be driven by the political dogma that has been so prevalent over the past years. They would also, hopefully, have experience of the real world of business and good administration, skills that nobody could claim for many of the current councillors.
Hold up, coordinated candidates to compete in an election with a “manifesto” is not a political party? Say what! I thought: Vote For Insanity was from that Monster Raving Loony Party. Only in Brighton (and Hove).
Whilst, in a free society, it’s understandable that those already known to regular readers of B&H News as blinkered advocates for the already discredited local Green and Labour local councillor groups their trying to defend the indefensible, by latching on to the technicality of Independents being part of a formally registered Party, simply makes their posturing even more laughable than it already had become, surely?
So let’s look at the realities:
1. The Independents appear to be a 100% City group, not subservient to any other political or religious organisation. So Independent enough, surely?
2. What has to count for all of us is the content of the Manifesto on which they seek to get elected.
From the above article it sounds like they’re offering what almost every City taxpayer (and non-voting visitor and business) wants and needs – sound management of our municipality, not rocket-science, mainly needing logic and honesty, and sometimes a willingness to look at the best of hundreds, or more, books written on the more arcane aspects of good municipal business management best practice, so no dogma or doctrines!
3. In the workings of our Council one has to be a registered group, of as many Councillors as can get elected, in order to emerge from the Proportional Representation calculations with at least a seat on each of our Executive Committees.
At present we have about 6 non-Party Councillors (with Cllr Fishleigh being the only one actually elected as an Independent – the others having left the mainstream Parties under whose banners they were elected).
And these now unaffiliated only get the chance of a seat on secondary committees, with it being very unclear which of the six gets the one or two seats on offer – perhaps by drawing lots among themselves?
Whilst one can hope that the Independents’ Manifesto headlines will be given a bit more detail in the lead-up to the May council elections the reality, over the last 25+ years since 1997, is that, apart from the foolish schemes forced through by both Green administrations (generally conflicting with the published national policies of the Green Party of England, would you believe?) is that almost all residents simply want a competent, well-run, humane, and a frugal municipality, surely?
Neither a pipe-dream, nor a unicorn – many will remember the professional and generally excellent operation of Hove Borough Council. So excellent that at merger-time in 1997 HBC finances were so healthy that, in compensation for the big bag of spare cash which HBC was forced to bring into the shotgun-marriage, residents of Hove and Portslade were exempted from paying Council Tax for 1997-98!
And since then the Brighton majority have treated Hove and Portslade as a second-class stepchild!
Perhaps the worst of the indignaties being the £18m or so vandalistic destruction of the award-winning Hove Town Hall’s nationally renowned Great Hall, for conversion into pokey rabbit-hutch offices, many without windows or other natural light, for council staff.
There were two better options, each almost certainly costing less than £10m!
1. Buy the freehold of the expiring lease of the Priory House offices at Bartholomew Square (connected by an expensive, but now useless, double-deck bridged corridor structure to Brighton Town Hall) or;
2. Using modern lightweight building techniques add two extra floors of offices onto the existing block at the north end of HTH (no problems with extra weight – apparently the original foundations were/are calculated in the expectation of constructing high-rise offices, had the mooted possibility of a large Unitary Authority, from the Adur to the Ouse, been agreed).
So that needless and ludicrously expensive destruction of Hove’s magnificent Great Hall is the kind of vanity-project waste for which we need to elect enough Independent Councillors to be able to block!
Hopefully starting with those ludicrous external lift-towers for the Madeira Terraces, when the logical solution is internal lifts, concealed under the Marine Parade footpath, behind the Green Wall (which also needs to be over-clad with the longest run, 800m or more, of PV solar panels in our City).
Hence the crying need of our City to elect Councillors sufficiently independent not to be cowed by council officers muttering ‘Micro-management, councillor?’ whenever one of our elected Councillors politely asks: ‘Please show me?’.
And, since we all pay shed-loads of money for our Council to computerise its functions one has to hope that some of the Independents who hopefully get elected will have the confidence to demand that they be given read-only access, 24/7, to whichever of our council’s ICT systems they have an interest in?
And whatever training might be needed to be able to access such systems might flag-up quirks and difficulties which Council staff have to suffer every working-day?
Naturally nothing should impede Councillors of the other Parties from having similar access to operational data – so during the 25+ years of our City council to what extent have any of them actually got to grips with these ICT ‘Levers of Power’ or, like too many party-politicians of all levels, do they prefer to be ill-informed loudmouths, or even passive ‘Sheeple’, rather than to immediately accept that 2+2 will always equal 4, and so the need is to get down to analysing and understanding the core facts of any issue?
After all, once the full truth is laid on the table almost any rational educated person can rapidly see the least-worst solution indicated by the facts of the matter?
And many thanks to Commenter Adrian Hart above for identifying the apparent excellence of the way Frome is being served by a local Party, independent of national Party instructions.
Hove and Portslade was a well-run Borough, even whilst controlled for decades by an almost autocratic body of Conservative Cllrs, the secret of that Borough’s success seems to be mainly due to recruiting capable professional staff, and taking full account of their well-reasoned proposals? Sadly this excellent body of professional municipal seniors got laid-off around 1997 with gold-plated redundancy terms (for which we’re all still paying!).
Apparently because New Labour wanted its own candidates at work, as known to be willing to bend themselves to every political whim of New Labour!
Even today far from difficult to achieve Town Hall excelllence – many who see the generally good way in which the combined boroughs of Adur/Shoreham, and Worthing, works will envy that high standard. And, irony of ironies, that municipal partnership is headed by a former B&H deputy chief executive, ably assisted by two or more senior officers who also left our hapless ‘Ship of Fools’ to join him – as far too many other competent senior officers have also left us over the years for other, and presumably better, public bodies!
So let’s fervently hope that the Independents will field quality candidates in May, and that enough voters will realise we need the local common-sense improvement offered by the Independents far more than the empty rhetoric of the mainstream Parties who’ve allowed Town Hall officers to drag our City into a ‘Slough of Despond and Neglect’ during these past 25+ years!
That is all spot-on, BAHTAG. It seems that B&H Indies have to register as a ‘party’ with the Electoral Commission to get on the ballot paper as a group, which seems to me a lot better than isolated individuals just paying their deposit and standing as independent individuals. I have no doubt that they will come up with a kind-of mission statement before May, but I guess it would be a loose thing which basically articulates all that you have said. In simplistic terms, they might say we have experience in business/ efficient administration and all the things that the Council currently lacks, and has done for a long time, and we are not driven by a particular political ideology. In other words, ideology doesn’t drive our bus, but efficient delivery of basic services, scrutiny and holding officers to account does.
This is such good news! Living in Brighton and having run businesses here I’ve seen so many bad decisions being made, and good ideas being ignored because of toxic political rivalries – and worse than that, total inactivity because of an inability for the opposing sides to just get a grip and do what’s best for us all. Local Government should be just that – local. I’m fed up to the back teeth of having representatives who stand because they want to further National politics instead of working for the needs of the city and its residents.
As someone who led one of the groups on the city council for five years, let me put one thing straight. No one told us what to do. Not once did I have a call from Labour HQ telling me how my councillors should vote on whatever local issue we were facing. In sixteen years as a councillor, we met as a Group every fortnight and decided major issues amongst ourselves – those on particular committees would decide amongst themselves how to vote on things – and it was pretty rare anyone was forced by the Whip to vote against their own views. Indeed I always tried to ensure cllrs could vote how they and their residents wanted (not that there is any settled view on anything in one street, let alone an entire ward – there’s no silent majority out there, just lots of differing opinions). So a group of independents can only function in the same way as any of the other groups on the council – it’s just that when allied with a party and a manifesto, voters have a general idea of who and what they are getting.
Oddly, Warren, although I have never been a Labour supporter and no longer support any of the ‘mainstream’ parties, I quite liked you, because at one point you said something like you weren’t subscribing to all the politically correct BS and just got on with job. However, you were ousted by your party and were consigned to oblivion politically. But at least you didn’t make a catastrophic mess and run away like Kitcat did and like Mac Cafferty hopefully will.
The point is that nothing has worked in the City for a lot of years now – CEOs have come and gone, council leaders have come and gone at frequent intervals, councillors have deserted their parties or been expelled, sitting councillors have had enough and are
not standing in May, and the result is the total mess we are now in.
So, why not try something a bit different? It could hardly do any worse than what we have been through in recent years.
Brighton and Hove needs a fresh start because all the main parties are completely tainted. The Greens under the execrable Phelim are nothing better than a 6th from debating society. Labour is still infested with Mementonites and Corbyn lickspittles. Conservatives have blown it and will always have the stench of Geoffrey and his failed i360 project hanging round them.
Good luck Bridget, you are a breath of fresh air. If I was still in the town I would join you. Let’s get some we civic pride back and the carpet baggers out.