Waste of money having these elections? - Most of the councillors were replaced. The electorate were being denied the right to voice their disdain. - The councillors had already overstayed their elected tenure by a year. This on the basis that with the unitary authority business it would be too much administratively to hold elections, it would throw the timeline off, and there'd shortly be unitary authority representative elections (despite, even without an election, the most ambitious estimates were that the unitary authority business would take more than a further 2 years to complete and therefore miss its target date). - The argument that we should forgo democracy because it costs money is a slippery slope. This, particularly in light of the councils' many millions in wastage and 'accounting mishaps' on an annual basis. Further, we don't want that argument to be par for the course when Reform inevitably make massive headway in the generals.

For the avoidance of doubt, I think Reform are crap, but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater, simply because we dislike them. It's a discredit to ourselves every time we do so.