There was an announcement on Facebook in the last couple of days that two new councillors have been appointed to the Town Council. There was no election. Goole Town Councillors held a vote and chose these two councillors to join them.

The Facebook announcement stated that the vote was unanimous.

Your writer does not know either of the people selected by the Town Councillors to join them, and is not aware of ever having met them.

While the Town Council does have the power to co-opt members, they don’t have to do so. How healthy for local democracy is it?

Take the statement that the vote was unanimous. At first glance that can seem very positive. There is another side to it though. It can also suggest a council intolerant of different points of view, and determined to select only those councillors who will comply and conform with the wishes of a clique which holds power and is determined to keep it. They therefore select their chums as colleagues. That is how Vladimir Putin, to take one example, took control of Russia.

The All About Goole Facebook page has two Goole Town Councillors as moderators. The announcement was made on the All About Goole Facebook page.

Is it healthy democracy to have two councillors controlling what can be said on a Facebook group with 28,000 members in a town of about 20,000? Is it democratic for the councillors to decide who should join them on the council, rather than let the citizens of Goole decide?

There has been a good deal of criticism of the new Government because they are telling the public they will have to make yet more sacrifices after 16 years and counting since the banking crisis - taking away the Winter Fuel Allowance from the majority of pensioners being a particularly controversial proposal - while the PM and senior ministers have been accepting lots of freebies. They are allowed to accept the freebies, but as they have found many members of the public most certainly do not like it. It might be legal but it doesn’t pass the smell test.

This controversy has cost the new Government a lot of goodwill. The Government was chosen not because people really wanted it, but because they wanted rid of the previous Government. Given the unpopularity of decisions they are setting out to take, they can’t afford to be wasting their stock of public goodwill.

Does Goole Town Council pass the smell test for you? How do you feel about two councillors being the moderators, and controlling posts and comments, on a main town Facebook group? How do you feel about councillors deciding who will be fellow councillors, without asking the citizens?

After the announcement of the new co-opted Town Councillors, there was a flow of positive comments about them. Co-opting them rather than having an election may have done those two councillors an injustice.  The fact that All About Goole has two Town Councillors as moderators brings the possibility that the whole thing is stage managed. The danger is that this undermines public faith in local democracy.

The photo with this update shows work at the end of the first week of the Dunhill Road pavement drain and road refurbishment. This is the sort of work, the basics, which is much needed in many of Goole’s streets.