Stockport twinned with extremist French Mayor

The election of a far-right mayor in Béziers, France, the twin-town of Stockport, has prompted calls from a local Councillor for Stockport Council to cut ties with the French town.

The election of the new mayor, Robert Ménard, who represents the Front National Party, has caused the local Labour leadership to question the propriety of twinning with the town.

Stockport has been twinned with Béziers since 1972, but Labour Councillor Andy Verdeille, after the FN victory in the French local elections last week said:

Thousands of children over the years have visited Béziers, and vice-versa… [We] have had a successful relationship but when it is taken over by an extremist organisation we believe we have the right to object and withdraw. It is the right of the people of Béziers to vote how they wish and right of the people of Stockport to disassociate ourselves with those views. We express disgust at the election of a racially prejudiced town council with views not dissimilar to the National Front. We will call on the council to suspend and terminate if necessary the twinning agreement with Beziers.”

Ménard who has publicly described himself as a "reactionary", supports the reintroduction of the death penalty and objects to the legalisation of gay marriage.

Stockport Council Leader Sue Derbyshire, whilst recognising the rise of the right-wing party at the municipal level, said:

While I would not extend or accept an invitation to or from Béziers at the moment, I don’t see any need to say to them ‘we disapprove of you, therefore we’re not going to have anything to do with you. We wouldn’t like it if they did it to us and I don’t think we have the right to do it to them.”

Stockport’s Conservative Leader Councillor Syd Lloyd said the twinning agreement is about, “schools, residents and young people – not politics.”

However, the twinning of towns and cities by its very nature is a sign of a shared appreciation of political, social and cultural values and therefore is always political.

Many in the Front National believe in the crudest racist stereotypes, beliefs for which the party has been famous for more than 40 years. Last October, Anne-Sophie Leclère, a candidate in the municipal elections, compared France’s Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, to a monkey on her Facebook account.

Leclère claims she is not a racist (“some of [her] friends are black”), but footage has surfaced in which she confides that she would rather see Taubira on the branch of a tree than in the government. Most recently, Front National Leader Marine Le Pen, recently vowed to ban halal and kosher school lunches in France.

Therefore, Stockport Council has an important role to play in determining the values which it deems important for its young people and also to other towns and cities.

Francine Fernandes

Picture: Labour Councillor Andy Verdeille (Left) and the Mayor of Beziers Robert Ménard.