Tag: Stoke-on-Trent

However, the council has switched in recent years between Labour and no overall control, and is run by a coalition of Conservatives and the City Independents, which despite its name is a party and includes among its councillors longtime independents as well as defectors from parties as varied as Labour, Ukip and the British National party. Mohammed Pervez, the energetic leader of the Labour group, which remains the council’s biggest, is fighting an avowedly local campaign, focused on traditional areas such as litter, parking, potholes and schools. During a canvass of comfortably sized postwar terraced houses in his own ward north of the city centre, Pervez delivers a well-drilled message about “four years of chaos” covering everything from children’s services to road maintenance. Our challenge is to make people understand that this election is not about Brexit, but about local services. “We always get asked how, as independents, we have influence on the government,” James says. “But governments have never supported Stoke-on-Trent by putting money into it. The Conservative group leader, Abi Brown, who is number two to James in the council, recounts the period before 2015 when her party had two representatives – her and Brereton – and “were regarded as a bit of an irrelevance”. Now they have seven, and like Pervez, Brown is keen to keep the campaigning as far away as possible from national issues like Brexit: “I’d like to think that in the wards we hold, people know their councillors and while they might be unhappy with things at a national level – and it does get raised – they’ll vote on local issues. Landon declines to tell Pervez how he will vote – “all the councillors have always been rubbish. Now you can’t really predict anything.”