As the incoming Mayor for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough said, if he doesn’t work with politicians from other parties, he will fail – and so will they
So here in Cambridge we have:
- Cambridge City Council – Labour
- Cambridgeshire County Council – Liberal Democrats
- Mayoralty of the CPCA – Conservative
Can they play nicely together?
And that’s before considering the Cambridge Growth Company and its new powers, plus the University of Cambridge which is a law unto itself.
Will the Greater Cambridge Partnership be disbanded?
- Mayor Bristow has it in his manifesto, but because it was established by the Coalition Government it is not within his power to abolish it.
- With 31 seats, the Liberal Democrats do not need Labour to hold the county council’s seat on the Greater Cambridge Partnership – will they replace Cllr Meschini (who was re-elected in King’s Hedges) with one of their own councillors, and thus take full political responsibility for the controversial busways?
- Mayor Bristow has also called for the scrapping of the busways plans – both the Cambourne one and the South East Cambridge one.
- Mayor Bristow wants to re-open Mill Road Bridge to all motor traffic – but the powers for that reside with the county council. Furthermore, the people of the eastern side of Mill Road in Romsey have just returned a Green Party county councillor for the first time in the area’s history – despite the incumbent now former Cllr Neil Shailer of Labour being one of the people who helped bring in the restrictions on motor traffic.
The first GCP Assembly meeting of this political year is in about seven weeks time – likely 19th June 2025.
It will be interesting to see how all of these – in particular that last one, get resolved.
Who will lead Cambridge City Council?
With the vacancy in the Labour group that runs the council following Councillor Mike Davey’s decision to return to the back benches, will Councillor Anna Smith put her name forward to re-stand? Recall she was voted out in favour of Cllr Davey back in May 2023. Furthermore, given the statement that the incoming CPCA Mayor made about the nature of Labour’s campaign in the mayoral elections – one that was clearly run by the national party rather than the local parties as in previous elections, how would Cllr Smith as a returning leader build bridges that had been so clearly damaged?
As Cllr Naomi Bennett of The Cambridge Green Party told Nigel Pauley, onetime Comms Chief for Nik Johnson during his campaign in 2021, the decision to go on the attack by Labour’s hierarchy now looks like an extremely poor decision.
Not only that, when reviewing the manifesto document published in her name, it read like a generic document published by a consultancy that knew very little about the local area. Out of the 15 short statements in that document, only one mentioned a place, and only one other mentioned something that applied to part of the CPCA area (the Tiger buses). Everything else was Party HQ lines-to-take. Which meant from where I saw it, there was very little real policy content for Cllr Smith to work with.
What’s worse is that as a candidate Cllr Smith is a competent politician. But because she was so boxed in by limitations both with the mayoralty itself having so few independent powers and so little in terms of funding with no strings attached, she had no opportunity to demonstrate this to the electorate. Instead, the only campaigning card she had was the ability to bring in very senior government ministers to support her campaign. And in significant numbers they came. As did volunteers from other parts of the country. The problem was that for a locality-specific election, the public can find out very easily if an activist is local or not. As others noted, bussing up activists from London can end up having the opposite effect of putting off potential voters rather than recruiting them. Thus my concern for Cllr Smith – who remains one of my ward councillors in Cambridge, is that her political reputation will have been damaged by a campaign that she seemed to have little personal control over, but one that very much had her name and face on it. Senior Labour figures in the national party – including ministers, might want to reflect on that.
Given how centralised the party is, was it within Cllr Smith’s ability to stand up to the big machine and tell it to back off? I don’t know – that’s one for party members and those more familiar with the internal workings of the party to comment on.
That’s not to say Cllr Smith didn’t make any mistakes or errors in the campaign. I’ve known her long enough to know that she’d be the first person to identify things that she should/shoudn’t have done on reflection, and things that maybe in future campaigns she would do differently. But this didn’t feel like the sort of campaign that she had any control over with once central HQ got involved.
What the numbers show comparing mayoralty votes with county council votes
In Cambridge, there were some striking differences between the total number of votes each party got for the county seats in Cambridge vs the mayoral votes. I put together this table in spite of the best efforts of the county council’s officers to make extracting the data as difficult as possible. So there may be some errors as I had to do this manually!
Above – crunching the numbers in the Cambridge seats from the county council election
The first thing to note is under First Past The Post, there was a massive tactical switch in favour of Cllr Anna Smith as Labour’s mayoral candidate from voters that voted either Liberal Democrats, or Greens in the county council election. Furthermore, there was also a noticeable switch from both those parties in the county council elections to Paul Bristow of the Conservatives – the total difference being over 1,000 votes. There’s a similar phenomenon for Mr Bristow in South Cambridgeshire too.
“Was that Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire voters indicating their displeasure with Labour over the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s proposals for new busways?”
Could well have been – noting Mayor Bristow is calling for the abolition of the GCP altogether, which would inevitably mean the scraping of the controversial busway plans.
Ministers have a decision to make on Cambridge Light Rail
Just before the elections, the Department for Transport responded to my question on what their light rail policy was. You can read their response here. Furthermore, the National Audit Office’s report on light rail from the early 2000s still applies.
Unlike the 2021 mayoral elections where none of the candidates produced clear manifestos, Paul Bristow did – and you can read it here. Furthermore, he made it very clear early on in is campaign (back in January 2025 – see here) following a meeting with Cambridge Connect Light Rail for Cambridge, (which I have been supporting ever since it was launched around a decade ago – I still run its FB page so please Like it!) that if elected he would get a light rail for Cambridge built.
“Cambridge is expanding and needs a transport solution. The Labour government has continued the growth agenda and is talking about 150,000 new homes. Light rail is a proven technology. The Cambridge Growth Company is already doing some feasibility work, drawing on excellent suggestions from the grassroots campaign, Cambridge Connect. I will make light rail a precondition of the government’s growth plans.”
Paul Bristow to Conservative Home, 01 Apr 2025
Following the mayoral elections, Cambridge Connect Light Rail published a press release:
“We warmly congratulate Paul Bristow on his election as the new Mayor for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. We especially welcome his plans to bring forward light rail to get the region moving. Paul stood on a clear platform to deliver light rail mass transit to Cambridge, and it is now time to turn a corner on the flawed busway schemes and bring forward a more enduring and integrated vision.”
Cambridge Connect Light Rail, 02 May 2025
A decision for ministers
Ministers can either concede and work with the new mayor to come up with whatever structures, systems, and processes are needed to get a light rail system built, or they can block it completely in which case ministers risk demonstrating that combined authority mayors are politically impotent unless they have the support of ministers – which makes a nonsense of any devolution claims. Because it will show that policies are still decided in Whitehall, not locally in the communities and areas that are directly impacted.
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