Yesterday was the last day for the Crawley Conservative Association, which should be a cause of some celebration amongst the Crawley Labour party, but I’m not so sure its a good thing.

The local Tories are not disappearing off the face of the Earth: just merging with neighbouring Horsham. They say it is because of falling membership and there not being enough members in Crawley for it to function properly. Obviously we feel a bit smug about that since we have been signing up new members in Labour all year, but it is a sign of the decreasing participation in party politics generally.

How many members do you need to function anyway? The local Liberals will say they are a fully-functioning local party and they can’t have more than 100 members.

I heard about this merger a while ago, along with some juicy gossip about the terms of the amalgamation which I’ll sit on in case its not true, and there has been some speculation that the Tories are banking on local government reforms resulting in a unitary authority of Horsham + Crawley.

I just think this is a bad move for Crawley. Look at the facts: Horsham must have more members, including a Tory MP, who is also Chair of the Conservative party nationally. There is a danger that the Crawley Tories will get overshadowed. The chair of the new body is to be a Horsham person, with Crawley’s old chair being her deputy.

When I moved here, the parliamentary boundaries had been recently changed so that the constituency boundaries were contiguous with the Borough boundaries. We were moving towards having the constituency, borough, PCT and other organisations all having the same area. Sussex police use the same boundaries for the Crawley police area (except that Gatwick has its own section). Within the town we now have county divisions aligned with borough wards. Unfortunately the hospital is lumped into a trust which also covers Redhill, Dorking, Horsham and a few other places, but otherwise everything was starting to get into line.

It is what makes this town sometimes feel either self-contained or insular, depending on your point of view, but now there is talk of PCTs merging and other changes which will start blurring the boundaries and this Tory merger is another sign of these changes.

We may not like them (corporately that is. Some of them are OK on a personal level) but at least they were ‘our’ Tories.