Dear Sir,
It was very interesting to read the letter printed in last week’s Newton News from Cllr Tony Armstrong about the Independent Group.
What he had written was true. They are a group who block vote in the council chamber with Cllr Arun Chandrun as the leader of the group who intends to run the council his way only.
So much so he needs an ‘Independent’ to be the Mayor, which means in the event of a tied vote the Mayor/Chair person gets the deciding vote.
Tradition has always meant that the Deputy Mayor will be voted as Mayor the following year, as we did with both previous Independent Mayor’s.
But not this year!
This year Arun and his Independent Group have decided, regardless, they want the Mayoral position again and will probably have enough votes in their ‘group’ with the upcoming by election, to win. So they are disregarding politeness to the current Deputy Mayor, Nev Jones, and the tradition of the council, to stand and vote against him. All for their own selfish gain.
As such, Nev and I have decided there is already too much divide in the council that this is a fight we don’t want to be in the middle of. Newton Aycliffe and its residents have always been the reason we stood as Councillors and we will always put them first. So, we decided that this next year we will withdraw our nomination and concentrate on our charity work and the Basic Life Support education programme.
We know that a lot of residents will be disappointed to hear we will not be your Mayor and Mayoress next year, as are we, however, we would like to thank everyone, including our Lib Dem friends and the Labour group for the opportunity we experienced this year to represent the town as Deputy Mayor and Mayoress. Nev was very proud to honour our late Queen by reading the proclamation in the absence of Ken Robson. These memories cannot not be taken away from us and, whether we are Mayor or not, we will continue to work hard for our town.