Happy 2025!
The start of the year is a time of hope, expectation, and personal commitments to improvement.
My hope is for a better method of conducting our politics – locally as well as nationally. All too often in recent times we have seen politics at its worst. Truth has been presented as lies and lies as truth. Opponents have been vilified and their arguments dismissed rather than engaged with. Civilized behaviour has seemingly been forgotten in desperate and unedifying efforts to establish party superiority.
We can do better than this. Politics should not be bloodless and without passion; but it does not need to be deceitful, disrespectful, and downright offensive.
Above all, it should be honest. Voters want the truth, not some fabricated story designed to gain party political advantage. If politicians treat voters as intelligent human beings, sharing with them the difficult choices that we are obliged to make, political processes and politicians will command more respect.
My expectation is that achieving the change I would like to see will not be easy. Altering established patterns of behaviour is always difficult. If politics at its worst is rewarded by voters, it will continue to be the default position for those who concern themselves only with short-term gain.
In the longer term, however, we all lose by this approach. If people are fed lies or led to believe that outcomes are possible that are unrealisable, disillusionment will follow.
Disillusionment will bring disengagement, with voters deciding to opt out of democratic processes.
We will shortly have an opportunity to see whether local political parties decide to adopt a positive approach. A by-election will take place due to the death of my friend and valued colleague Paul Fishwick, who served as a ward councillor for Winnersh from 2019 and as executive member responsible for Active Travel, Transport, and Highways from 2022.
Paul’s hard work and unfailing politeness won him much local support and admiration across the council chamber. All political parties owe it to him to conduct their campaigns with the honesty, openness, and commitment to public service that Paul believed in.
The way in which the by-election is fought will tell us whether we are going to see more of politics at its worst or the start of a new commitment to politics at its best – as a process of honest engagement with voters, designed to present them with realistic and viable options from which they can chose.
And my personal commitment? I cannot control what my political opponents decide to do – that choice is theirs – but I can try to live up to the ambition for a better politics that I have sketched out here. That’s my new year’s resolution.
Stephen Conway is the leader of Wokingham Borough Council
