SOME weeks ago, Peter Doherty wondered in his column on this page, why nominations for independent candidates for the local election had not been received from any member of the multitude of groups that have been so critical of Labour's recent record in Bury.

As a member of the Ramsbottom St Paul's Focus Group which, like Affetside, has seen Bury MBC subvert logic and procedure to discount our simple case for the advantages of small community-bases schools, I can suggest reasons why it is quite pointless for an independent to stand for the council.

First, the system of plurality voting, or first-past-the-post, is now so widely discredited that it has been abandoned in virtually every world democracy. It is so unrepresentative as to have returned governments in this country, on two occasions since World War Two, that polled fewer votes than the main opposition party -- in 1951 and 1974. And it famously delivered the US presidency to the Republicans in 1999, despite Bush polling fewer votes than his Democrat rival.

In local elections, this problem is exacerbated by very low turnout -- when only 30 per cent vote, councillors are invariably returned in three and four-cornered contests with only a third of votes cast and the support of barely one in eight of those on the electoral roll. Labour in Bury scored an overall gain in council seats in May 2002, despite attracting fewer votes than the opposition parties' total.

The winner-take-all system punishes the smaller parties. It gives local candidates, who are not affiliated to the larger parties, no chance at all.

Second, even if an independent were elected to Bury Council, what influence would a back-bencher have, given the introduction of the Cabinet system in 2001? The school campaigners saw that this was dominated by a few senior hacks, time-servers who have earned their recently doubled expenses through loyal voting records. The role of the opposition councillors is relegated to the Scrutiny committees.

Third, the dominance of the officers leads to a culture of "officer knows best", and they are deferred to. Questions are not asked or followed through.

There is a cosy partnership between a small cabal of Old Labour loyalists and officials. The electoral system makes Councillor Byrne accountable only to East Ward voters. To protect his position, he needs to keep them sweet. So, officers leave his school alone in the Primary Schools Review, even though it has a higher percentage of empty places than St Paul's . . . because houses are being built in East Ward. This was an argument which somehow lost its cogency when the word "Ramsbottom" became the subject of the statement!

In 1913, Ramsbottom voters were given a referendum choice as to whether they wanted to spend ratepayers' money on trolley buses. Given the changes in communication technology since then, such votes on local issues could take place regularly. This might energise local democracy, because area boards certainly will not if they vote almost unanimously for retention of their community schools, only to be ignored.

There can neither be a way in, nor a role for, the old "independent" or "ratepayer" councillor in a Bury run like this. And that is how the Labour party likes it.

ANDREW TODD,

Bolton Street,

Ramsbottom.