11 Comments
Apr 23, 2022Liked by Dan Hayes

Interesting article. I presume you will be interviewing all candidates. I understand there are certain rule regarding media during purdah. Voting for someone without experience in office seems pretty risky to me.

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Hi Dan, I'm a researcher/consultant working on community wealth building. Would you mind contacting me at oliverseabarron@cles.org.uk? I'm keen to clear up some confusion that there seems to be about community wealth building written here! Thanks Oliver

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founding

Great article and gives me confidence that Coppard will do a good job (or at least the best he can) for us all. We just need to get the democratic deficiency that Peter Moore mentions dealt with, and perhaps community assemblies will help.

Interesting comment on ownership and public control, since I very much think that public control is what is essential. There is not a binary between private (shareholder control) and public (direct ownership) - there are other ways to own stuff. To enable public control to succeed it would be better in my view to have some form of cooperative and/or community interest ownership. This would provide separation of powers and direct accountability whilst enabling 'public control'.

From 'The Miners Next Step' Issued by the Unofficial Reform Committee, Tonypandy, 1912:

"Nationalisation of Mines ... simply makes a National Trust, with all the force of the Government

behind it, whose one concern will be, to see that the industry is run in such a way, as to pay the interest on the bonds, with which the Coalowners are paid out, and to extract as much more profit as possible, in order to relieve the taxation of other landlords and capitalists. "

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Having never voted for a South Yorkshire mayor l read this article with interest. I now know more about what is the Mayor's role, but l feel that a lot of it is about ifs and buts. Nothing seems to have much credibility. If you asked anyone in the area where l live if they will be voting for the next South Yorkshire mayor, l doubt there would be a flicker of interest. Good luck Mr Coppard, in today's cynical world you certainly need it.

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The story is not whether he will win. There is no doubt he will be elected. The other parties aren't even campaigning. So it is a forgone conclusion. Only Barnsley and Sheffield have council elections on the same day so the turn out is likely to be well under 30%. So to me the story is why so many of us will not bother to vote? Why not go out in to the streets and ask passers by what they know or care about the South Yorkshire Mayoral election. If Mr Coppard gets 50% of the vote then he will have been voted into high office by under 20% of the people registered to vote. So 80% of us will not have supported him. How is that representative democracy?

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Excellent. Oliver comes across as a very likeable and thoughtful person.

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Great article- I feel I know a lot more about this prospective mayoral candidate

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