No local elections for Northamptonshire council this week? How convenient | Patrick Butler

Voters will not be given the chance to hold the Tory-run council to account, despite the lengthy list of failure and incompetence

One of the commonplace virtues of elections is said to be the way they enable voters to punish political incompetence and hold to account politicians who fall out of step with their values. If you don’t like it, we are promised, you can always vote them out. Or almost always. On Thursday, voters will get their say in 248 local authorities in England, but not in the council where you’d expect that particular democratic virtue to be most emphatically demonstrated.

Conservative-controlled Northamptonshire county council, dubbed by one local Tory MP “the worst run in the country”, would normally be holding elections this week, along with the county’s seven district and borough councils. However, the communities secretary James Brokenshire decreed in November that they would not take place. As the councils are due to be abolished in 2020, and replaced by two unitary councils (although this outcome has still to be formally ratified), holding elections, he decided, would “risk confusing voters and would involve significant costs that would be hard to justify”.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Ld1xUn