The Campaign for a Democratic Rye is breaking, in part, with its past. It is examining its role in local politics and rebranding itself. Last week, in a letter to Rye News [CDR’s ‘false promises’], Rother Cllr Sam Souster took the CDR to task. Here Granville Bantick, one of the three founder members of CDR, pens a reply, admits to mistakes and looks to the future of a pressure group that has no intention of dying just yet:
Dear Editor,
It seems there is nothing that Cllr Sam Souster enjoys doing more when the opportunity arises than to rub salt into a sore wound (well, it is election time!). I am the first to admit the Campaign for a Democratic Rye (CDR) made a critical mistake in promising a number of things during the 2011 election campaign which were unachievable at that time, and will probably never be so until there is a massive change in how local government is reorganised. The cash-strapped authorities may well have no alternative but to form a unitary authority combining Rother District Council and East Sussex County Council.
At the time, the town’s residents were rightly angry with Rother’s neglect of Rye and its apparent largesse of spending money on Bexhill with little spent on Rye. Nothing has changed much, of course, and Rye is still angry.
The CDR had noble aspirations of changing the political landscape by hoping to create a new structure of area committees, similar to what many other local authorities have created for themselves, where power would be less centralised. As time went by, the frustration of not achieving our aims for a change in local governance due to the opposition of Rother and the lack of support from the parishes, the group came to the conclusion that there was a need for it to reinvent itself and to think of a new strategy.
It is heartening that we do now have a new identity following strong support from members and others who agreed at the recent annual meeting that the CDR should be dissolved, and in its place should be a new group calling itself Campaign for Action in Rye. Its main aim will be to co-operate with other organisations, with their consent, to make the town a more attractive place in which to live and to bring more visitors to the town, which would help the economy.
Cllr Lord Ampthill’s [Conservative, Rother District Council] comments were well received when he graciously said: “Hats off [to the CDR] for stirring things up.” Yep, at least we did that!
Granville Bantick
Rye
Granville Bantick is a Rye town councillor and was a founder member of the former CDR / Photo: Tony Nunn