Richard Foord MP 

Firstly, a thank you to those people who voted Liberal Democrat at the local elections last Thursday.

It served to elect some brilliant new councillors, including five new Lib Dems here in the part of Mid and East Devon that I represent.

I am really looking forward to working with them as they take their place on Devon County Council.

They will complement two strong independent Councillors who have served on the Council before, and who have been re-elected.

County Councils have serious responsibilities.

The budget at Devon County Council is almost £2 billion.

The people whom we send to make decisions on how our money is spent need to be experienced, serious, and trustworthy.

The latest crop elected here in the Honiton & Sidmouth area is all those things.

Residents whose doors I knocked on in recent weeks gave me a variety of perspectives.

Some felt that Devon County Council needed a shake-up, after years of the Conservatives being in charge.

Others said that they were voting Lib Dem because they were more inclined to trust us on issues that the Council is responsible for, such as education, transport, and social care.

Nigel Farage wasn’t on anyone’s ballot paper in Devon.

Nonetheless, a few people told me that they were planning to vote for him, and I understood them to mean that they were voting on the basis of national, rather than local issues.

Local elections are always affected by national party politics.

Yet I am concerned that beyond our area, some effective, long-serving Councillors have been displaced by some individuals whose heart was not in serving their community.

I am not a fan of some of the ideas that Farage is importing from President Trump’s America.

Mr Farage seems to spend too much time in the United States, courting Donald Trump and acting in a sycophantic way towards him.

Farage has been “putting on notice” council workers who have been permitted previously to work from home.

If home is defined as being here in the UK (rather than in the US), I think Mr Farage could do with working from home more himself.

Once elected, I sense that people want their representatives to drop the ‘Punch and Judy’ party politics.

Residents told me that they want us to cooperate to get things done.

Instead, we sometimes see a relentless use of elected office for parties to either retain power, or gain power at future elections.

Lib Dem Councillors won’t be doing that; we will be negotiating with smaller parties and independents to form an effective administration for Devon.

I can offer assurance that in Parliament, I work with people from any party who share British values of tolerance, fair play, and mutual respect, to act on the imperatives that people here in Devon – our home – send me off to London to help tackle.

seatonmatters.org

As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we face within Britain the very same forces that we defeated from outside in 1945. Reform UK are not, yet, a full-blown fascist party, but they are unmistakably from the same family: racist, nationalist, and above all authoritarian and anti-democratic.

You can see this in Nigel Farage’s arrogant dismissal of all initiatives to promote equality and inclusion in our society, and in his attempt to make Reform wipe out, with a stroke of the pen, all the efforts of councils to combat the climate emergency. You can see it, above all, in his slavish worship and aping of Donald Trump’s authoritarian and dictatorial regime.

Remember that Farage defended Trump’s attempted violent coup in 2020. If Reform UK were to come to power in 2029 – thanks to our corrupt first-past-the-post system which might give him victory with 30 per cent of the votes – he would resort to the the antidemocratic steps that Trump took to hang on to power.

So here is my message to our Liberal Democrat, Green and Independent councillors: don’t normalise Reform. Allow then to represent their constituents (if they do), give them their fair share of committee places, but don’t do deals with them, don’t let them run things, keep them well away from power. They need to be defeated as we defeated their forerunners in the 1940s