Following the ongoing story of county councillors’ remuneration and apparent contempt shown by two of them in reply to a taxpayer’s question, I, like many, was amazed at the total lack of respect and understanding shown in reply to a genuine question on how they voted.

As reported by the Oxford Mail, Kevin Bulmer and Rodney Rose both asked Andy Beal to reveal his pay package before they reveal whether they voted. This not only misses the point that the taxpayer is paying for this increase at a time council tax bills may rise and £20m in cuts have been announced, but also highlights a bigger issue we have in local politics; voter apathy breeding contempt.

A quick look at the results for the 2013 councillor election show that Mr Bulmer gained his position with 47 per cent of the vote. Not a bad figure, until you realise that turnout was only 27 per cent. This means he was actually elected by 12.7 per cent of the total electorate.

Similarly Mr Rose was won his seat with 39 per cent of a 31 per cent turnout. That is a lower 12.1 per cent of the electorate that gave him their backing. Even the council leader Ian Hudspeth only scraped 12.3 per cent.

Today’s letters

The result is that when it comes to having to reply with any sympathy or understanding to the concerns of the electorate they claim to represent they can afford to be sadly lacking. When they can easily offend nearly nine in 10 voters in their constituencies without fear of losing their seat, compassion to voters’ concerns is not a trait that is required to keep them in power.

Start including those people who vote along party lines regardless, then the amount of people you can dismiss willy-nilly becomes a figure close to the amount of pounds increase they have voted for.

The answer is for people to start showing that we have the power. The only way to do that is to vote. Even if, as seems common these day, we don’t want to vote for any of them, spoil the ballot. It still counts to the overall turnout and shows that we are willing to drag ourselves to the polling station to say we don’t want any of them.

Ideally we would have enough decent candidates that had won the argument to vote for rather than shoo-ins that just managed to get more supporters out on polling day than the other guy, but until then it would be sweet to have “spoiled ballots” getting the most votes. If that were to happen I think Mr Rose, Mr Bulmer and all their friends on the county council would give a more thought-out and reasoned response to gain people’s trust and respect, rather than the petty “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” we have seen.

Ollie Perks Newland Witney

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