Leader Roger Dennison Ideology Localism | Headquarters Morecambe Lancaster City Council 2 / 60 | |
The Morecambe Bay Independents are a minor political party in Morecambe, Lancashire. The group ran Lancaster City Council from 1999 to 2003, and successfully campaigned in 2005 for the creation of Morecambe Town Council.
After being founded in the 1980s, the party won 13 seats on Lancaster City Council in May 1992. They selected Mark Turner for the Morecambe and Lunesdale seat in the general election, receiving 916 votes (2.1%). A former MBI councillor, Kathleen Egerton, was shot dead by her husband in a murder-suicide in 1995. After a by-election victory and a defection by former mayor Shirley Burns from the Conservatives in May 1998, they became the official opposition on the council.
They gained power on Lancaster City Council in 1999 when they more than doubled their seats to 22, sitting as a minority administration. The Labour Party refused to sit in cabinet with them. In July 2001, councillor, John Fretwell, defected to the Conservatives The then-leader of the MBI, Tricia Heath, was leader of Lancaster City Council for four years, but in May 2003 she lost her council seat, and the number of their seats fell from 16 to 11. Heath placed some of the blame for her loss on the District Auditor's report on "Blobbygate", a scandal over a deal the council made with Noel Edmonds in the mid-90s about a theme park in Morecambe. Another councillor, Shirley Reid, was expelled from the group in December 2003 for not attending meetings.
They had twelve of the sixty councillors on Lancaster City Council after the 2007 election (behind Labour on 14 and equal to the Greens and Conservatives), but Heath failed in her bid to be re-elected. They won twenty-five of the twenty-six councillors on Morecambe Town Council in 2009 with 64% of the vote, despite facing opposition from a new group of independents called Residents First.
Evelyn Archer stood down as leader of the MBI group in January 2010, being replaced by David Kerr. Archer was first elected in 1991, lost her seat in 1995, then was re-elected in 2003. In 2014, Kerr was replaced as group leader by Roger Dennison.