Kirklees Council’s Annual Meeting, following the last local elections were in many ways business as usual and in some ways very different. As usual no Party had an overall majority on the Council. In fact no single Party had even a third of the seats. Labour were the largest Party following the election with 24 out of 69 Councillors and they put their leader forward to lead the Council for the next four years. The Conservatives with 19 Councillors did not put a candidate before the Council to lead Kirklees and instead, and bizarrely nominated the Leader of the Liberal Democrats with 20 Councillors forward. What was bizarre about this was they hadn’t even asked her before the meeting whether she was willing to be put forward and of course she wasn’t. It was just some strange political game being played out.
So the Labour leader Mehboob Khan was the only one put forward. His term is supposedly for 4 years but local elections and votes of no confidence could conceivably bring that date forward as could Cllr Khan’s promise to submit himself for re-election before the Council each year despite their no longer being any legal requirement for him to do so.
So the only option put before the Councils was a Labour leader. The four Greens on the Council backed the Labour leader on the basis that we would work together on protecting the local economy as much as we could from the effects of the recession.
(The picture is from Star Wars and is Garven Dreis who narrowly missed blowing up the Death Star and was shortly after killed by Darth Vader. And the relevance is? His callsign is 'Red Leader'. I guess I could have just put a picture of Mehboob Khan up there but where would be the fun in that?)
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