• I HAVE received postal vote documents for the Referendum on the Neighbourhood Plan for Dartmouth Park.

All looks very impressive, identical to the recent general election postal voting ballot paper and envelopes. Must have cost Camden – that is to say, its residents – a pretty penny to organise.

Shame no one at the council thought to include or to communicate at any stage beforehand details of what the plan is that it is now inviting us to vote on.

What a complete waste of money! I presume we were all expected to search for the details on the council website, as we are all supposed to be online these days.

I shall not be bothering. Camden’s consultations are all notoriously cosmetic and bogus. Whatever – or indeed whomever – we vote for or against, after the event it will be Camden’s unelected “officers” that decide what suits them, as we have just seen yet again with the 100 Avenue Road development.

I am afraid councillors of all parties bear very much of the responsibility for the hollowing out of local democracy in our borough over the decades.

Anyone putting themselves forward for election should have at their very core a belief in local, representative democracy that is so strong as to feel absolutely affronted by the recent actions of the unelected who heads the planning department which resulted in the overruling of our elected representatives.

Yet whilst councillors happily hold grand­standing debates on climate change and Brexit, they will not, I’m sure, hold a debate about the role and remit of unelected officers.

They will keep their collective heads down, carry on ceding the power we have given them, pocket their salaries and hope for a cabinet job down the line or maybe even an MP’s position.

Yet just imagine what signals a vote challenging the right of unelected officers would send to all the others, and what support councillors of all political parties could expect from Camden’s electorate, who are willing them – to coin a familiar phrase – “To take back control”.

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