Devolution in Cumbria – Page 5 – thecumbriachronic.co.uk

CRUMBRIA: 19/07/2025

AFTER six months of grandstanding about Mayors and Devolution, Crumbria’s two councils have gone into a screeching reversal and convinced the Government to kick the election of a Cumbria Mayor into the year 2027.

We’ll still get a free-spending Mayoral Authority imposed on us with all its trappings and overpaid interim directors, but no actual Mayor spending any devolved money for another year.

(Imagine going through with a wedding without a bride!)

As one Chronic subscriber tells me: “It’s totally impractical to have the Mayor arriving 12 months after the authority they will lead has been set up.”

So why kick the Crumbria Mayor election into 2027?

In a rare outbreak of parsimony, the Labour-daft Crumberland Council and the Lib Dem dictatorship in charge at Wokemoreland Council have been telling the Public and Press this week that it makes more financial sense to elect a mayor in May 2027 to dovetail with local council elections.

(They’ve never shown this financial foresight before!)

As per usual, our local papers – slow of thought and speech – have accepted this official line without turning over any stones and instead have been re-publishing press releases hailing this new development as a significant “milestone!”

The truth is, our two Councils have known for years that the next set of Council elections was going to be held in 2027, so why has this obvious money saver only registered on their radar now?

Because in January, our Clowncil leaders and Crumbria’s four novice Labour MPs all gave the very distinct impression that failure to get moving this year would leave Cumbria left behind as other parts of the country hoovered up millions of ‘devo’ dosh.

Back then, the Labour lot rushed out a breathless joint letter, run in its entirety on many front pages, calling on Crumbria to “Embrace the devolution revolution!” and finally “put Cumbria in the driving seat!”

Yet six months on from firing the starting pistol, Crumbria’s race for an elected Mayor finds itself at the end of a huge skid mark with its engine stoved in, the doors open, the sensors tinging, and the driver nowhere to be found.

No hard questions have been asked about the causes of this spectacular slow-motion crash.

But here’s some wild and highly speculative theories to consider:

Could the decision not to go ahead with a mayoral election in 2026 be in any way at all related to Labour’s appalling popularity slump this year?

(It’s nearly the lowest ever recorded under a modern Labour Government.)

For the first time, polls are predicting that Reform UK would kick every Labour MP in Crumbria out of office come 2029, with only Tim Farron MP hanging on for the Lib Dems.

Could our local Clowncil and political leaders fear that in the current political climate, a Labour or Lib Dem candidate standing for Cumbria Mayor next year would get absolutely rogered by a Reform candidate if a mass public vote went ahead?

Also, by 2027, alternative voting will be in place for Crumbria. This allows electors to nominate a second choice in the event of a runoff when no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote.

It’s another little tweak of the system that benefits all parties, but particularly Labour, which is strong in parts of Crumbria, while the Party nationally is currently shitting its pants by rushing in votes for 16-year-olds.

And wouldn’t a Reform UK mayor for Crumbria be a massive embarrassment for all of the county’s 2024 intake of Labour MPs who so vigorously championed a new mayor and deputy PM, Angela Rayner, whose brattish step-child devolution is?

We’re sure that these theories are wholly speculative and our totally innocent politicians are completely beyond reproach and only ever have the best interests of the general public at heart rather than their party’s political survival.

Interesting and unreported fact: 61% of the Crumbrian public have just told the Government’s Mayoral consultation that a Mayor WOULDN’T improve Local Government!

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