Up until the last local election, we were under no overall control, but the council was Conservative led. Then at the last locals the CONS gained actual control, and are gaining.
We live in Walsall, famously one of the most deprived areas of the U.K., at the town centre, but once you start spreading out to the outskirts there’s an affluence band and a large, affluent Sikh population where we are. It’s not necessarily the 50 year old white man here, either. You can’t tell everything via names (for example, Bobby Bains is the only one I know of relatively well from various local things, and he’s a Sikh guy) but looking at the names I’d guess a few of these elected Conservative councillors were women and a few non-white.
Hussain, Ismar (Izzy)
Harrison, Louise
Murray, John
Gill, Manju Chamdal
Sohal, Gurmeet
Khan, Moz
Towe, Christopher
Waters, Vera
Garcha, Amandeep Kaur
Samra, Suky
Larden, Rob
Bains, Bobby
I honestly don’t know how… I’m feeling surprisingly sunken. I remember when the area had seventeen libraries where we moved here. One central library, and sixteen community libraries. Now there is one library, which they shrank in half. When the library closed because of Covid and then everything opened back up again, the Tory council leader said they weren’t going to reopen it because, in his eyes, anything that hadn’t been used in 18 months wasn’t really needed to begin with. Ultimately, after quite a bit of uproar, this was overturned, and it partially reopened, but hell on legs, what an a-hole.