Inside Handforth: Jackie Weaver and the battle for England’s soul

By John Phipps

For 11 centuries between the unification of England in 927AD and the present day, very little happened in Handforth. A hamlet near Manchester, it hosted a large prisoner-of-war camp during the first world war and a Royal Air Force depot during the second world war. This was the sum total of its imprint on the English national story. In the 1960s, several new housing estates transformed this tiny village into a small town. Then, in the 1990s, the government completed a bypass. As a result, even less happened than had been happening before.

That is until a few months ago, when Handforth became the most talked-about place in Britain after a video of a chaotic meeting of the parish council went viral. The meeting, which you can watch in full on YouTube, is a calamitous pantomime of righteous fury and unmuted mics. It takes place in two acts.

The first is purgatorial. Disembodied voices speak from beyond darkened screens. The conversation opens with a discussion about whether the meeting can actually begin. A voice of uncertain provenance can be heard whispering “fuck off”. Brian Tolver, the hoarse chairman, starts grilling someone called Jackie Weaver about her role in the meeting. She works for an organisation that advises parish councils and had been dispatched to broker peace between the warring parties in Handforth. Some question her authority.

Another councillor tries to make a point of order, but Tolver tells him he can’t because the meeting hasn’t started. Tolver then begins proceedings, all the while insisting that the meeting is, in fact, illegal. When Weaver contradicts him, he and another councillor begin shouting at her. Weaver peremptorily ejects Tolver.

Hellfire is unleashed. An ally of Tolver bellows at Weaver: “Read the standing orders. READ THEM AND UNDERSTAND THEM!”, referring to the rules that govern such meetings.

“Dear me,” says a voice.

“Appalling behaviour!” gasps another.

A different ally of the exiled chairman is ejected from the meeting and several people burst into peals of feigned, malicious laughter. No one speaks as they cackle. The seconds pass and still the meeting has not technically begun. The man who shouted about standing orders can be heard shrieking to himself. Weaver removes him too and peace returns as another councillor is elected chairman.

Act two begins. “Welcome to Handforth,” the new chairman says. “May I start?”

The extraordinary meeting of Handforth Parish Council on December 10th 2020 was called over a dispute about whether a meeting in November had been held legitimately. This earlier meeting had been called to resolve a disagreement about the status of the meeting before that. For several months, in fact, Handforth Parish Council had met primarily for the purpose of disagreeing about whether it was lawfully meeting. This chain of procedural quarrels had begun in late 2019. The people arguing had loathed each other for far longer.

For a long time, Handforth Parish Council had met primarily for the purpose of disagreeing about whether it was lawfully meeting

Handforth went into meltdown just as Donald Trump was disputing the result of his second presidential campaign: the anger and division at the parish-council meeting represented the faintest echo of the roaring distrust and polarisation in parliaments and congresses around the world. The most striking thing about the parish-council meeting was not the disagreement between two sides but the unabashed personal hatred on display. Even this most localised form of government, which largely concerns itself with things like litter bins and public toilets, has fallen prey to the magnetising effects of partisanship.

The meeting seemed to show a very old idea of Englishness being squeezed, with immense discomfort, into modern form. Handforth, a town of 6,000 people, seemed to be a place of barely restrained resentment, where curtains twitch, looks kill and the houses seethe like kettles under sheets of thin, continuous rain. So I went to Handforth to find out why it was so divided. Someone had to.

The bypass changed Handforth. Fewer people passed through town and, in time, there were fewer reasons to visit. The butcher, the greengrocer and the toyshop closed. Customers flocked instead to a retail park just off the new road, which has acres of parking and a warehouse-sized Marks & Spencer. The bypass was first planned in 1966 and finally completed in 1995. By then, Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy initiative, which allowed tenants to purchase publicly owned housing at a discount, had dramatically changed the complexion of built-up areas.

Handforth seemed to be a place where curtains twitch, looks kill and the houses seethe like kettles under sheets of thin, continuous rain

Many inhabitants of Handforth’s estates were now able to sell their council houses and move to nicer ones. Property prices rose, prompting the building of more houses, and development filled the town’s empty spaces. A building near the station owned by the Royal British Legion was knocked down to make way for more homes. Handforth’s residents grew rich as the sense of community shrunk: there was more money, but less there.

When I asked locals what they needed, they said the same things that people say everywhere: more doctors, more schools and especially more housing. Handforth is a desirable, if not beautiful, place to live: safe, vaguely rural and on the up. One of its primary schools is rated “outstanding” by the national school inspectorate. But the town is being crunched from both sides: its proximity to Manchester makes it attractive both to commuters and to émigrés priced out of Wilmslow, a wealthy town to the south.

As you walk around Handforth you can feel the price of property rising the same way you can always feel a drop of north-western rain in the air. It takes ten minutes to stroll from a mottled 1960s estate, where the pub was shuttered well before the pandemic, to long streets of red-brick houses with double-glazed windows that glow blue at dusk with the light of TVs. Soon you reach a street where the brick becomes a distinguished pink, the windows and doors sprout Georgian trimmings, and the hedges grow so high that even the nosiest passers-by are unable to snoop.

A back yard does not have defined dimensions. It can extend no farther than your gate or encompass an entire city

More than 200 new houses are under construction at the end of Meriton Road, where lorries thunder up and down all day. The site was once part of the green belt, legally protected land on the outskirts of cities which is off limits to developers. This was one of the last stretches of countryside you could reach on foot from the town centre. It was attractive, unlike many green-belt sites. Now it’s a maze of scaffolding. As you approach a sign reads, “CHANGED PRIORITIES AHEAD”. At the viewings office, I saw a well-dressed couple step out of a black Range Rover.

Residents are divided, to put it mildly, over whether these developments are a good thing. An elderly woman told me that her grandchildren could never afford to buy here and that the new arrivals made it impossible to get a doctor’s appointment. “That belongs to Manchester,” she said bitterly, gesturing north towards the Handforth surgery. On another road, I asked a woman walking a glossy dog how the town had changed over time. “It’s gone a bit better,” she told me.

Many locals feel that no one has consulted them about which sites, if any, should be developed. Everyone agrees that there should be more housing and everyone agrees about where it should be built: not in my back yard.

A back yard does not have defined dimensions. It may extend no farther than your gate or it can encompass an entire city. In Handforth, individual community members have attached themselves to certain public spaces and objects with a proprietary zeal that does not derive from any deed of ownership. Whether it’s the war memorial, the playground in the park or the pavilion that houses miniature trains for children to ride on, no patch of Handforth is so small or unlovable that it can’t be tended, manicured and, when necessary, fought over.

In 2012, Cheshire East Council proposed a huge new development on the east side of Handforth bypass. This involved building several thousand new houses and increasing the population of Handforth by almost 50%. The plan in effect created an entirely new town.

England sees itself as a green and pleasant land but worries that it is becoming increasingly grey

England sees itself as a green and pleasant land but worries that it is becoming increasingly grey. The overwhelming majority of homes built after the second world war were bland, pitched-roof dwellings. Flats are easier to heat, quick to build and use land more efficiently, yet just 15% of Britain’s population live in apartments, compared with nearly half of the European Union’s.

Many Britons retain a horror of towering concrete monstrosities designed to suit the fancies of architects rather than the needs of humans. Despite the Utopian efforts of British urban planners, survey after survey shows that most people prefer to live in a house. The English want a moated sense of privacy, with a corner of mythic English green at the back. This has meant that the greedy spread of towns and cities has guzzled up land, enveloping swathes of the countryside in private gardens.

Brian Tolver didn’t like the plan. He felt Handforth had been developed quite enough in the decades he’d lived there. So he helped found the Hands Off Handforth Green Belt campaign, which organised a petition and held a protest against the development. In photos of the demonstration you can see him: a small, square figure with two white puffs of hair. The protesters marched, the council listened and the development was scrapped before anyone so much as lay down in front of a bulldozer. Around this time, Tolver, newly politicised, was elected to the parish council which had just been established.

Everyone agrees that there should be more housing and everyone agrees about where it should be built: not in my back yard

England has one of the most byzantine systems of local government in the world. Rural areas often, though not always, operate under a two-tier system, in which a district council sits beneath a county council. Between them they divvy up a range of services, from social care and education to housing and waste collection (the last of these is immensely important in local elections), paid for by local taxes and a central-government grant. Over the past 30 years, central government has stripped these local authorities of both power and money. Parish councils, the lowest and most local form of local government, have expanded to fill some of the gaps.

Though they have their origins in an ancient ecclesiastical system, parish councils have existed only since the late 19th century. Village government had been dominated by local magnates since medieval times; as the national franchise was widened, parish councils were created to give more locals a voice. For most of their history, parish councils could exercise only those powers explicitly granted to them by Parliament: the authority to provide public clocks, for example, was given in 1957. That changed in 2011, when the Localism Act granted parish councils the ominous-sounding General Power of Competence, which allowed them to do anything that an individual is legally permitted to do. But parish councils are not required by law to do much at all – each one must decide how best to serve its community.

Handforth sits within the jurisdiction of Cheshire East Council, which is responsible for the well-being of 380,000 people. The division between Cheshire East’s responsibilities and those Handforth Parish Council has taken on doesn’t always seem logical: though Cheshire East maintains the roads in Handforth, the parish council tends the flower boxes beside them; if you’re bed-ridden, Cheshire East can send a carer, but if you suddenly collapse on the main road, a wall-mounted defibrillator, paid for by Handforth Parish Council, is on hand to restart your heart. Crucially, higher authorities must consult parish councils, if not necessarily listen to them, about building projects. In small rural communities, this issue can be emotive.

The combination of extreme parochialism and limited power means that parish councils attract two very different types of personality: the first organises fêtes, picks up litter and raises money to revamp local amenities; the second calls the police if you touch their bins. Other volunteer-run bodies exist in Handforth. One group runs the miniature trains in the park, another oversees the park’s upkeep, a third tends the station garden. There are parents’ groups, a Rotary Club and an active Church of England congregation. Napoleon called the English a nation of shopkeepers. In truth, it is a nation of committee members.

Protesters marched and the development was scrapped before anyone so much as laid down in front of a bulldozer

The large number of competing committees, personal fiefdoms and governmental organisations that operate in Handforth creates many opportunities for friction. Tight-lipped skirmishes are not uncommon as rivals dispute how far the boundaries of their back yards – which may be purely conceptual – extend. The parish council is the one body that will consider your proposal or strongly worded objection on all manner of questions.

And if you want to have your say, you need to know how Handforth Parish Council works. In other words, you need to read the standing orders. You need to read them and understand them.

Handforth Parish Council was established in 2011 by residents who believed that the town council of Wilmslow, their larger neighbour, was neglecting their needs. From the beginning, it was an unhappy organisation. Almost the first project it took on was the construction of a war memorial to bear the names of Handforth men who had died in the two world wars, as well as commemorating Jamie Webb, a local lad killed in Afghanistan in 2013. More than 1,000 people lined the streets of Handforth to pay their respects at his funeral. The idea for a memorial was touted by Anthony Harrison, a former soldier who remembered Webb from school.

The project showed how quickly a strong consensus that something should be done can dissolve into fierce disagreement over how to do it. “They were all on board with it, but it descended into carnage,” remembers Harrison. One person wanted a glass memorial, another wanted a stone one. “One of them wanted something interactive that you could mould. I said, ‘Look, one day you’re going to wake up to a giant willy.’”

Napoleon called the English a nation of shopkeepers. In truth, it is a nation of committee members

There was also a dispute over whose back yard the memorial would be situated in. Barry Burkhill, a councillor for Cheshire East, was a friend of Tolver and a supporter of Hands Off Handforth Green Belt. He objected to putting the memorial on a grassy verge by the main road. Harrison says Burkhill sent letters to local residents explaining that the location was inappropriate, as the site was green-belt land.

The acrimony bred mistrust on the council. Proposals were often blocked for no good reason and accusations of personal interest were levelled. An atmosphere of suspicion prevailed – any new plan was assumed to benefit the councillor who had introduced it. People objected to an after-school club, the creation of a parish-council Facebook page and the installation of security cameras on the main road. A majority bloc on the council managed to vote these proposals through, but only after prolonged attempts to frustrate them. The same people always seemed to be saying “no”. They are known as the Handforth ratepayers.

Rates are an ancient form of local taxation: the word “ratepayer” is simply an old-fashioned way of saying “taxpayer”. The ratepayers focused on keeping down parish-council spending; they also vocally opposed the development of the Handforth green belt. Former councillors I spoke to looked visibly deflated when they recalled the long, often angry meetings at which they watched their ideas wither and die. One described the atmosphere as “toxic and uncomfortable”. Many felt quietly appalled at how much time they had wasted.

The ratepayers’ rivals, a group called Improving Handforth, held a majority on the council from 2015 to 2019, when new elections were held. During that time, relations between the parties grew increasingly fractious. The monitoring officer at Cheshire East, who oversees the conduct of councillors, received formal complaints from both sides. There were accusations of corruption. Statements drafted by lawyers were read out at council meetings on a regular basis.

The vicious behaviour that would later delight a nation became more common in this period.

One member of the public, who backed the ratepayers, “would sit in the front row of the meeting and look at you like he wanted to kill you”, as one former councillor puts it. He made formal complaints against five councillors and the parish clerk. This year, he became famous for telling Jackie Weaver to read and understand the standing orders. His name is Aled Brewerton. In 2019, running against a divided field, he was narrowly elected. Councillors affiliated to the ratepayers gained a majority, sweeping to power with four seats on the seven-member council.

The war-memorial project showed how a strong consensus dissolves quickly into fierce disagreement

With no elections for another four years, the authority of the ratepayers looked secure. Yet within a year, two shocks sent the council into a tailspin. The first took place at a meeting in November 2019. During a motion about the circumstances in which councillors should undergo criminal-records checks, ratepayer Jean Thompson stood up and left the meeting. The next month, she didn’t return. And the next one. If councillors fail to attend meetings for six months, they are automatically dismissed. This meant that, by early March 2020, only a few months were left before a swing vacancy opened up, potentially endangering the Ratepayers’ majority.

The second shock, of course, was the coronavirus.

Julie Smith knew which way the wind was blowing. As an employee of Handforth’s main pharmacy and councillor on Cheshire East Council, she saw early on that the government was going to ask vulnerable people to shield. Many would face the choice of going to the supermarket – at a time when leaving the house felt increasingly like taking your life in your hands – or starving at home. Using Facebook, Smith enlisted 80 volunteers to help deliver essential items to shielding residents. She contacted the clerk of the parish council, who agreed to co-ordinate the scheme, and printed 500 flyers with the parish council’s phone number on them. Smith left these on the front desk of the local doctors’ surgery.

Three days later, Smith received a call from the surgery. As Smith tells it, the caller said Tolver had complained that the volunteering scheme involved inappropriate use of the parish-council phone and demanded that the surgery stop distributing the leaflets. People who needed help, he said, should turn instead to Cheshire East, the body organising the local pandemic response. Smith was flabbergasted. (Tolver denies objecting to the leaflets and says he was worried the clerk would be overburdened with calls.)

The local authorities had been caught off guard. Supermarket-delivery slots were booked up for weeks. Cheshire East Council scrambled desperately through the first month of lockdown to identify those in need. By the time it had established its own volunteering scheme and contacted Smith, she had been running her initiative for several weeks, albeit without using the parish-council phone.

A body of community-minded individuals with strong local roots, a network of contacts and public money to spend could have done a lot of good in the early months of the pandemic. Unfortunately, Handforth Parish Council stopped meeting at this very moment. The clerk – a trained, non-partisan official employed to administer the council – tried to convene a meeting by video in April, pointing out that the Coronavirus Act made it legal to do so. Brewerton, one of the ratepayers and a non-practising solicitor, wrote back contending that it wasn’t.

The clerk made a second attempt in May. This time Tolver insisted that all council business be paused. Naturally, he said, this would apply to the automatic dismissal of Thompson as a councillor, which should now be postponed until three months after normal business resumed. By implication, that meant there was no immediate chance of a by-election that might jeopardise the ratepayers’ hegemony. In the meantime, while every other council in Britain held meetings remotely (as did both houses of Parliament), Handforth Parish Council did not sit in deliberation.

In June the clerk announced that Thompson had been dismissed. (He had checked this decision with, among others, Jackie Weaver.) In response, Tolver and the ratepayers began to agitate for the clerk’s removal. Their position was complicated by the fact that Thompson seemed to have no desire to continue serving as a councillor. In emails seen by 1843, Tolver mentioned that he was worried she would be “reinstated against her will” and again refuse to attend meetings. (Thompson turned down my request for an interview.)

In August 2020, Handforth Parish Council finally assembled for the first time in almost six months – not long before all sitting councillors would, by the letter of the law, have been dismissed from their positions – at an extraordinary meeting called by Tolver. From that point on, the council split down the middle: each faction called its own meetings and argued that those held by the other side were illegitimate. In November, the ratepayers used a sub-committee under their control to move to suspend the clerk, pending a full investigation. Tolver seized the clerk’s official email account. (This is why he appeared under the handle “Handforth PC Clerk” at the now-famous meeting clerked by Weaver.)

“One of them wanted something interactive that you could mould. I said, ‘Look, one day you’re going to wake up to a giant willy.’”

After a week in Handforth trying to reconstruct the manoeuvring that led to the town’s brief blaze of fame, I was left with two feelings. First, an irrational but pronounced hatred of the Handforth Premier Inn. Second, a prevailing sense that I did not understand the central questions of this story: why try to reinstate a councillor who didn’t want to be reinstated? Why forbid well-meaning volunteers from using the parish-council phone? Why claim that meetings were illegal when they clearly weren’t? Above all, why fight so intensely over such small stakes?

Those in Handforth who follow parish-council politics have a theory. A vacant plot of land near the bypass has been earmarked as the future site of the North Cheshire Growth Village, a new development of 2,000 houses. This will transform Handforth, but whether it will rejuvenate the place or suck the life out of it is hard to predict. Only two things are certain: Handforth will never be the same again. And Handforth Parish Council will make a lot of money.

At present, Handforth Parish Council’s kitty contains roughly £170,000, on top of which the council receives £90,000 a year in taxes. If the North Cheshire Growth Village is built, the council will make a windfall of roughly £2.2m. Some in Handforth say that this is the reason why the ratepayers have been fighting so hard. Those in power will decide how the money is spent. Perhaps it does explain, in part, their desperate tactics to retain their majority, but it doesn’t explain the previous five years of obstruction, bickering and obfuscation. And it sits uneasily with the fact that Tolver, the leading ratepayer, became involved in politics to prevent the development of that very same piece of green-belt land.

I was eager to solve this mystery but none of the ratepayers would speak to me. Then, when I’d almost given up hope, I received an email from Tolver. He gave me an unasked-for rundown of the parish council’s annual budget and expenses:

Income (council-tax precept): £90,000
Costs of existing (clerk, premises, expenses, annual fees, subscriptions): £50,000
Christmas lights: £20,000
Remaining “disposal income”: £20,000

“The council”, wrote Tolver, “has absorbed just under £1m of taxpayer money since its inception in 2011.”

I emailed him back and asked: “Do you believe that Handforth Parish Council should exist?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “That's what this is all about.”

What makes a good parish council? Most people tell you it should fix things, fund things, furnish the community with better public spaces and, in doing so, marginally improve the lives of the locals. One councillor took me to a park and showed me a path that trails off into the mud halfway around. The parish council could complete that path if it chose to. A former councillor talked about an after-school club that she used to run with parish-council funding. Almost everyone mentioned the Christmas lights and how happy they made the local children each year.

Though they can’t undertake large-scale projects, parish councils give small communities a voice of protest against the actions of distant, impersonal government bodies. They can remonstrate again decisions made miles away, which affect their own back yards. Sometimes they even offer a measure of redress. A current councillor told me she wanted the parish council to begin running the local library, which cash-strapped Cheshire East may not be able to afford to keep going much longer. The parish priest talked to me about a food bank he helps run. Though most funding comes from small donations from individuals, the parish council gives much larger sums on a semi-regular basis. A fierce idealism burns within such proposals.

Parish councils should fix things, fund things, furnish the community with better public spaces and make the lives of locals marginally better

Over Zoom I asked Tolver what makes a good parish council. He gave me a definitive answer: “Proper adherence to laws and rules is a starting point. Proper use of taxpayers’ money.” A parish council, unlike a local council, has no defined duties, he explained. “We have no responsibilities. Only what we take upon ourselves. But that would have to be with the broad agreement of the residents of Handforth.”

I asked Tolver if he could think of any projects that the parish council would want to spend money on. He asked me the same question back. At which point, having first heard of the council less than a month before, and having left Handforth after just a few days with no plans ever to return, I found myself in the unusual journalistic position of suggesting how the parish council might profitably spend its money.

How about taking over the library? It’s already run by Cheshire East, explains Tolver. There’s no reason for the parish council to take it over. The youth centre? That would involve acquiring the liabilities of the building without owning the asset. It wouldn’t make financial sense. Finish the path in the park? “I think it would cost a lot of money, and I'm not sure about the number of people who use the park,” he replied. He said he would have to take a look at the numbers.

Tolver has a breathy voice and large, wet eyes. He didn’t answer my questions about his personal life, though at one point a Scottish woman could be heard entering the room before he hissed her away. Tolver has lived in Handforth for almost 50 years but doesn’t believe the town has a strong sense of community. He can’t say what makes him proudest about the place or put his finger on how it has changed. He doesn’t mention the war memorial or the food bank. Handforth, as an actual place inhabited by real people, seems barely to exist for him.

Instead Tolver tells me what matters: that the parish council is properly run, that its finances are properly maintained and its proceedings occur in accordance with the relevant rules. Since the running costs of Handforth Parish Council amount to just over half its income, he believes that taxpayers’ money is going to waste. For some years, Tolver has thought that the parish council should either be dissolved or re-absorbed into the town council of neighbouring Wilmslow. Throughout this time, he has felt obliged to run for a position on a representative body which he believes should not exist.

Tolver is diabetic and frequently refers to his own poor health. He has spent much of the last year shielding. Yet when he mentions the “crisis” of 2020, as he does several times during our conversation, he is talking not about the impact of covid-19 but the dismissal of Councillor Thompson in June. I ask him why he didn’t call a meeting when the largest national crisis since the second world war struck the country, and he tells me that it is the clerk’s job to call meetings. But why didn’t he exercise his own prerogative to do so? He says that there was nothing in his in-tray.

Shouldn’t last year, of all years, have been the moment when Handforth Parish Council stepped into the breach, in the same way that individuals and volunteer groups all around the country did? “Well did they all over the country?” he replies sceptically. “I don’t know that they did.” He claims to have been unaware of the desperate circumstances faced by some of his fellow townsfolk.

The meeting, which you can watch in full on YouTube, is a calamitous pantomime of righteous fury and unmuted mics

Tolver speaks about his work on the parish council with the same air of pained martyrdom that he uses to talk about his ailments. For a time, I thought that Tolver resented the council, with its infighting and absorption of public money. I have come to believe that the reverse is true. He sees its proper stewardship as a personal calling, and for ten years he has devoted himself diligently and methodically to his task.

He showers it with the microscopic attention that the residents of towns all over the country give to their carefully maintained back yards. He does not consider it an instrument for the administration of the town, but as a town in itself, a little world. Handforth Parish Council is his private kingdom and he would rather see it destroyed than pass into someone else’s hands. The whole of England is made up of similar private kingdoms. Their contested borders rub against each other in long streets packed tight with houses that seem to get more eye-wateringly expensive by the year.

Tolver may get his wish. As part of wider boundary review Cheshire East Council is considering whether Handforth Parish Council should be re-integrated into Wilmslow Town Council, as Tolver desires. Officials at Cheshire East are embarrassed and angry at their dysfunctional child. The outcome, however it is resolved, will not stop the development of the 2,000 new homes. I asked Tolver what, in an ideal world, would be the future of Handforth Parish Council. He looked at me with an expression close to despair. We sat in silence for a moment as house prices rose around the country.

Eventually he answered in a low, dead voice. “There is no ideal world.”■

John Phipps is a freelance writer

PHOTOGRAPHS: DOUGIE WALLACE