The defeat of the campaign for an elected mayor should have heralded a return to sanity in local politics.

Instead, as the Brighton and Hove City Council meeting of April 25 showed, we are being led into a strangled version of the committee system, "improved" in the interests of the ruling group. Yet who is the ruling group, when no elected representative dares make a stand?

Christopher Hawtree's pertinent letter (April 26) had much to say about the lack of debate. There will soon be an urgency sub-committee of seven councillors holding the real power. This is a small fraction of the elected majority and unaccountable if - as Mr Hawtree suggests - the Tories and Labour merge at a local level.

In the 2003 elections, we will vote for 54 councillors instead of 78. On the Tuesday before April's council meeting, candidates were selected in Labour wards and many rebels were dropped. This is wrong. All councillors should stand for re-election so the public can de-select those it dislikes. If the dropped councillors have any guts, they must stand as independents. This way the public will judge them on their own performance.

In the past there were no parties in local government. A council of individuals, agreeing or disagreeing on individual issues, would be a far better model. Why are the Greens and Liberal-Democrats not fighting this blatant betrayal? Were they not Allies for Democracy or was that just a token gesture to save their jobs? Groups such as Our Power have done the real consultation with few resources, while the council has used its taxation and power base to rig this new system in its own interests.

Unless the politicians take account of public feeling, they will stand revealed as an utter sham. Who will bother to vote and why should they? Labour cares not for those who labour, the Conservatives conserve nothing, the Liberal-Democrats are neither liberal nor democratic and the Greens have become what they never wanted to be - grey.

-Peter Poole, Hove