For the last 50 or so years we have elected governments which have consistently failed to address the problems of our region. It looks as though we are on course to do exactly the same thing again. This is madness.
We need to be asking searching questions about how candidates are going to be able to change our region for the better. How can they secure the investment that we need? How much are they intending to invest? How is the money going to be spent? What will it deliver and when? How will it provide income for the future? If they cannot do any of this, will they allow us to do the job ourselves?
Politics is not just all about tax and spend. It is also about providing us with livelihoods for the future and giving us the means to look after ourselves. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Perhaps independents and some of the smaller parties, such as the Greens, LibDems and the Yorkshire Party, might be able to offer alternatives to the failures of the Establishment Parties.
Everybody can make their own personal choices when it comes to choosing a job or career, but it would be nice to think that they don’t have to move out of the region to have a future.
Extract from Why We Must Invest in Yorkshire’s Future
“As individuals we do not have the authority to do many of the things we might wish to do to benefit the region but we do have the capability to elect others to do much of the work on our behalf. We give them the authority to carry out this work on our behalf and we provide them with the means to get the job done. Under the centralised UK political system, local authorities have some powers but the way the UK works is that most of the power is vested in the central government. The central government had the authority to address the problems of the region, but they generally failed to do so.
We, of course, are responsible for electing the government but, when they failed to address the issues facing our region, we continued to elect the same people over and over again for around fifty years. Their policies may have differed slightly, but their methods and “solutions” were very similar. They consistently failed and we consistently continued to re-elect them. You could say that there are many other things to consider other than the economic wellbeing of our region and to a large extent the rest of country. This is true, but over a period the state of the regional economies, and Yorkshire’s in particular, should have worked its way to the top of the agenda. Ultimately, by continuing to elect people without the competence to get the job done, we have been responsible for our own demise.”