Neil Wilby Media

In May 2023, rookie Labour councillor, Joshua Charters, scraped home by just 12 votes to finally secure a seat on Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council. 

Before being one of the three successful St James ward candidates in last year’s ‘all-out’ local elections, surprisingly finishing ahead of the very promising sitting Labour councillor, Leanne Munroe, he had failed at the polls several times elsewhere since 2019.

In that year, Cllr Charters lost the Saddleworth West and Lees seat, previously held in that ward by Labour, after the sitting councillor, Stephen Hewitt, was de-selected by the Party over his support of the Save Our Valleys campaign. A popular local character, Cllr Hewitt, as he was then, chaired a group opposing the building of almost 500 new homes on two controversial sites.

Opponents in the Saddleworth area had characterised Josh Charters as ‘lazy and arrogant’, despite politics, or employment obtained through political connections, being dominant on his curriculum vitae. He has, remarkably, had 12 jobs since 2017, none of them lasting more than 12 months, most of them much less. 

His biography (or autobiography, more likely) on the Oldham Labour Group (OLG) website describes him as an expert in human rights law and political science. The same website that continues its palpably false pledge of ‘Holding senior officers to account for the treatment residents get from Oldham Council and improving customer service’, despite being held up to public opprobrium over that palpably dishonest claim. That article headlined, unsurprisingly, ‘Labour stick with fake holding to account pledge’ here). It stands, as yet, unchallenged by Oldham Labour Group, 

Cllr Charters is now Secretary of the OLG, and its trainee Organiser, despite offering up what was described at the time as ‘the most inept maiden speech in living memory’ and his questionable employment and local election history. The manner in which he dealt with the outfall from the article referenced in the above paragraph also reflected poorly on him personally, his standing as an elected Member and his Party.

But being a noted apparatchik, and enjoying the patronage, for the moment at least, of the Council Leader, Cllr Arooj Shah, are, apparently, far more crucial to Labour, locally, then ability or stability. It also the clearest of indicators of how shallow, in more than one sense of the word, the Party’s talent pool is in Oldham and its attendant ethical and professional deficit..

On Thursday of this week (7th March, 2024) an article headlined ‘Places for Everyone and the great betrayal’ (read in full here) was published by Neil Wilby Media. At its core was an extensive and highly forensic report, by local activist Matthew Broadbent, upon the dangers inherent in the PfE plan to areas of land in the Oldham Borough currently designated as Green Belt.

One of the areas under threat is actually situated in Derker, which falls in the St James ward. Thus directly impacting on Cllr Charters and how he votes on whether the Full Council adopts PfE which is the Greater Manchester Mayor’s flagship plan to alleviate the present housing crisis across the City Region (read more here from the Mayor’s PR team). It has a troubled history dating back to 2014 when it was launched as the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework, a handle that became toxic and was replaced in 2021 by Places for Everyone.  

At the end of 2020, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, following a rebellion by Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors, had voted against GMSF, leaving the remaining nine districts in the Region ((Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan)) to decide whether to conjoin and adopt PfE.

Over three years later, the moment for Oldham to decide comes at a Full Council meeting that will take place at the Civic Centre on Wednesday 13th March, 2024. 

The vote is expected to be tight, more so as several Labour councillors have confirmed that the Mayor, Dr Zahid Chauhan OBE, will again be absent for very understandable personal reasons. Meaning that a maximum of 32 (out of a total of 60) will be present for the vote, which includes the Deputy Mayor, Cllr Eddie Moores, who will chair the meeting and may only be able to vote in the event of a deadlock. By a curious twist of fate, his own Chadderton North ward is also adversely affected by the PfE proposals and he, too, is holding onto a dangerously small majority when he faces re-election in less than two months time.

Josh Charters has already made his decision, without it seems reading the Neil Wilby Media PfE article, which, of course, he is perfectly entitled to do. A post on his Facebook page on Friday afternoon (8th March) confirms his voting position:

Page last updated: Sunday 9th March, 2024 at 1355 hours

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Picture credit: Save Derker Green Belt/Facebook

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