The members of the Andover Independents Party (AIP) have announced their intention to disband the political party, after achieving the aims it originally set out to accomplish.
The AIP was initially founded as a direct response to the party claims that there had been failings from the Andover Alliance party, so that “the people of Andover could be put first”.
Cllr Rebecca Meyer, the outgoing Leader of the Andover Independents Party, said, “We set out on a separate mission, away from the mass hysteria caused by the then-newly established Andover Alliance, and to focus on one crucial goal, to ensure that the residents of Andover have people in power they know that they can count on. There has been a recent proliferation of other elected independent Councillors, so now there is no longer a clear need nor specific requirement to have a collection of Councillors under an independent party, therefore we have come to the conclusion to disband the party.”
She continued by saying that “We have demonstrated that national politics had no place in local Government, where local people must be making local decisions; decisions that had no right to be influenced by national interests such as by Tories or Lib Dems – we thought it was not right, so we did something about it.”
The Councillors – consisting of Cllrs Meyer, D Coole, J Coole, Asamoah and Ecclestone – will now serve as Independents, continuing to further the voices of their residents in their elected wards.
