Almost back up to speed

At last I've been reunited with my blog.I had to go through several cyber hoops to restore this blog,mind you it hasn't been too distressful.I have been able to get on with my book and have made excellent progress.
The fearful symmetry of what I have been doing is that the behaviour of the Communist Party apparachniks in the 1850's seems so little different from their modern counterparts in the East Midlands Labour Party!
Marx was right,history does repeat itself,first time as tragedy the second time as farce!

So the Labour candidate for Northampton South,who is standing for re-election to Waltham Forest Council is once again facing both ways, he tells the people of Waltham Forest that he's only a paper candidate in Northampton and yet tells the Chronicle & Echo here that he's going to fight to win in Northampton.
Not so much a paper candidate-more a paper tiger!

Northampton deserves better,much better and so as each day passes the candidature of Tony Clarke looks stronger and far more credible.
Binners is a busted flush-even though his stage managed debate with Mr. L & G Church might proke more smoke than fire.
Varno is lurking at around 100 to 1 and is once again demonstrating his breathtaking shallowness-I watched him perform at a Scrutiny Committee call in earlier in the week and his mediocrity was only outclipsed by the rambings of Cllr.Brian Hoare.A leader of Council who has yet to understand the inner workings of a NBC microphone-it helps when you switch it on!
And Clyde Loakes is the MaCavity of local politics.Astonishingly with all that's happening in Northampton he finds it impossible to get here.
It's true a Labour Party loyalist in Duston,or maybe THE Labour Party loyalist imn Duston claimed that the mighty Clyde,(what 'ere may betide) has leafletted over in Duston.
Well if its the crap piece of printing I saw not going out in Castle Ward, then Duston's gain is nobody else's loss!
Loakes is clearly not a serious candidate, and with no active members to support him it is scandalous that the local Labour party is still taking money from unions who could be making more use of scarce resources helping striking workers.

But then of course,the Rehional labour party won't really care very much, they'll all be out helping Ms.Oldknow fight her seat in Nottinghamshire that she conveniently fell into!
A lesson Clyde, if you want a seat in the East Midlands-get a job as the office junior in the Regional Office.
This pesky General Election has meant that the 'political' columnists on the Chronicle & Echo are now in purdah until May 7th.That means Pandora,John Grosvenor and myself will have to write anodyne a-political material for a few
So if its anodyne and a-political I guess I'll be weiting a lot about the Lib-Dems for the next few weeks.

When will they ever learn?

So at last someone in authority(I use that word loosely) has spotted the fact that Marefair and Gold Street,recently 'regenerated' and around six million pounds is not all it was cracked up to be!

As a matter of fact parts of the surface, the aesthetically beautiful granite bits,are cracking up.
We are told that it will cost aover a quarter million pounds to put the surface right, and the replacement will be aesthetically beautiful ashphalt.

And all after six months.

Yet whilst the work was going on the guys who were working on the job were telling local shopkeepers that the material being used was not suitable for the task(once again something not fit for purpose) and that the contractors had told the clients this right from the start.

The clients of course being NCC, NBC and WNDC.Remember ooh all those six months ago the proud notices proclaiming the scheme.In fact I think there is still one up on Black Lion Hill, and remember the fun and frolics in the rain when the project was opened.
How proud our Councillors were that day.How they wallowed in the public adulation.Well they had the little matter of cleaning and sealing the new pavements-but the mighty portfolio holder for Regeneration-Richard Church ensured that everything was neat and clean.
Nothing to rain on his parade that day!
But six months on, the pavements now have an interesting patina of used chewing gum once again, and where there once was uneaven clumps of nasty ashphalt there now are'uneaven clumps of nasty ashphalt'.
One thing you can be sure of in Northampton, whether its the Borough or the County, when everything changes sadly nothing changes!

Now we will see endless buck passing and the contractors and their workforce will take the bulk of the blame.But there is ample evidence that they made it clear that the materials would not do the job, but aesthetics prevailed over common sense.
In the end the contractors did what they were told, in the end the customer is always right.
Now the cusromer was the local authorities and the WNDC.I suspect they had endless meetings and consultations, site visits with Councillors in their pretty hard hats, and lots of press calls and photo opportunities.
It is likely that some junior planning officer relayed the contractors concerns-but of couurse image is everything these days-and regeneration needs a bright shiny image of modernity.
So who will take responsibility? Will it be the contractors? The Council officials? Or the elected members who oversaw the project and took the praise six months ago?

What's the betting that the final blame will lie with some poor sod in a quarry somewhere in Aberdeenshire whose never heard of bloody Northampton!

The end of the Labour Party

The Sunday Times (6th December) published a dispiriting story that I think sums up the New Labour Party and the real end of the Labour Party that I once proudly belonged to for almost 40 years.
Paddy Tipping, the Labour MP for Sherwood in Nottinghamshire is stepping down at the next election.
The Party has decided that it will be an All Women Shortlist and it would appear that the front runner is Emille Oldknow,the Regional Director for the East Midlands.
The gist of the story is that another local woman is withdrawing from the selection process because of a series of dirty tricks originating from the Regional Office.

Oldknow is well known in Northampton South, almost singlehanded she and another numpty,Matt Forde(an adolescent organiser now dispatched ro work for the Mayor of somewhere) destroyed the party in this constituency.

She is simply a hack in the worst 'jobsworth' tradition.There was a time many years ago when the Party employed organisers who were competent at organising ,often a bit obsessed by the rulebook,but flexible enough to understand that the party was made up of volunteers who needed support not instructions.
Go to Labour Home and pump in Northampton South and you can read the whole awful saga of the destruction of a constituency party by the sheer uselessness and incompetence of the Regional Office.
Since a few of us were expelled two years ago we have demanded an open and public inquiry,and we would have settled for the outcome.
Instead of which they have continued to attack the CLP, suspended it, and are currently holding a series of show trials to expel the few remaining activists the party has left.
Oldknow is of course assured of a safe Labour seat, she has what is left of the party machine behind her(her boyfriend works directly for Gordon Brown) and after the xperiences in Northampton South,there can be little doubt that dirty tricks are going on to secure her the nomination.

But then only a few months ago attempts were made to parachute Georgia Gould into a Labour held seat, and as the election gets closer the Inner party clique who now run New Labour will ensure that all the favoured sons and daughters will find what they hope to be safe berths in Westminster.
Can this be true? Well in the same Sunday Times piece it indicated that Oldknow's boyfriend is also likely to find a nearby'safe' seat!
Years ago there used to be seats that appeared to be in the 'gift'of certain powerful unions.Now it would seem that such seats are the exclusive gift of what Chairman Mao used to call"the Top Party People in Authority taking the Capitalist Road'
Except our modern capitalist roaders are insignificant political pigmies interested only in being career politicians-they probably don't really care which party!

It's the Sun wot did it!

Gordon Brown's short hand written notes to bereaved families struck me as a generous and humane gesture.Yet even such simple gestures become the stuff of political intrigue and frenzied speculation-dominating the news for days!
From such small beginnings whole empires can crumble.
parking an old car and leaving it with an out of date tax disc reminds us all where lack of attention to detail can lead!
So Gordon Brown has lousy handwriting, and his staff don't appear to check his out going mail.
The young soldier's mother is extremely upset and agitated at the apparent slight-and the Sun gets a whiff of a not very significant story!

Within hours Brown is a cruel and uncaring man, not fit to be PM, in fact probably not fit for anything other the politician's knackers yard.
A whole career shot down because he uses a felt tip pen and hasn't mastered joined up writing.

If that was a measure of failure then half of Fleet Street would be collecting P45's and the other half would be composing articles with a John Bull Printing Set with the 'w' missing.

The real question of course is why are their troops in Afghanistan in the first place?
Right at the outset I believe it is sometimes right to intervene in situations where fascism in any of its hydra headed forms is kikely to appear.The events in the former Yugoslavia proved that intervention was right,the only problem being that it was too late to prevent genocide.
There are other places where the threat of genocide or the development of extremely oppressive regiemes call for action.
Sadly however we in the West rarely intervene, we allowed apartheid to murder thousands without even the hint of sanctions.Yet for decades this country supported the US in imposing sanctions on Cuba.
A small nation whose crime against humanity has been exporting 40,000 of its doctors and health care workers to assist in the poorest countries of the world(more than all of the G20 countries put together!)
The Bush led coalition went into Iraq, a miserable little dictatorship, no better or worse than any other,to topple the evil 'Saddam'.
There was an easier way- to support the indigenous people and the Iraqi trade union movement who were trying internally to defeat the Ba'athist regieme.
But that was too simple, there might have been a popular left leaning government-oh and the big oil companies might not have got back in!


Then there is Afghanistan.The obvious reason we were told was to close down the terrorist cells that the Taliban were ptotecting.Given that there are fewer than a couplr of hundred Al Queda left then that was not really a valid objective,and given that most of them hang out with our friendly nuclear armed Pakistan Government anyway...
Then we were there to bring equal rights to the Afghan people and free them from the oppressive yoke of the Taliban.
Was that the same Taliban that we armed in order to fight the Russians and the pro-soviet government of Najibullah?
The Government that opened schools, health centres,education and equal rights for women, the breaking of medieval practices of the Taliban?
Shurely shome mishtake?
Do you see a pattern emerging.Cuba supporting healthcare-Communist led Aghanistan supporting healthcare-penny beginning to drop?
For the last few decades we have always been on the wrong side,defending the indefensible and opposing any progressive movement.
If we really wanted to hit at the heartland of international terrorism-apart from a small nuclear attack on Texas it would seem that Saudi Arabia, home of all those democracy loving princes ,would be the first target.
After all most of the world's terror 'gangs' have connections with that particular dictatorship.
Silly me! I forgot they were our allies!
The west is in Afghanistan simply once again to play the great game, to ensure that progressive forces throughout the middle and far east find it impossible to make common cause.
The presence of the West in Afghanistan is providing the same geopolitical purpose as continued support for the state of Israel does-the old imperialist function-divide and rule.And of course ensure the continued wealth and power of the oil companies-the modern day East India Company!
The only people who will defeat the Taliban will be the Afghan people, when freed from international intervention, the Taliban bandits, and the corrupt Afghan government.
If the UN gave every fatmer a tractor, grain and an opportunity for real education then the drug crop and the power of the warlords would be gone forever-and Gordon wouldn't need to scrawl tragic little letters.

Titter Ye not!

In those far off times when Terry Wire and I shared the same party,if not always the same politics,Terry was the Chief Whip on the Labour group.
He had many fine qualities,he was utterly brutal and no member would ever have been allowed to abandon an old Astra in the Guildhall carpark for102 days and he was also a fine mimic.

Terry could do anyone,he was especially good with old tory buffers and did a mean Frankie Howerd.
I wonder if he did his Frankie to entertain David Milipede,the Foreign Secretary at the Ex-Servicemen's Club last night?
I bet they needed a few laughs.

Ions ago when I was a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate it was impossible to persuade the Regional labour Party to send a big name speaker.
Frankly it was almost impossible to get a small name speaker, the shadow Under Secretary for paperclips was usually as good as things got!
I'm sure after special pleading we once got the shadow Minister for the Health of Retired Greyhounds (East Midlands Region) and that was bliss!
How times have changed, yesterday Sally Keeble had harriet Harman,Deputy Leader of the Party in the afternoon and Clyde Loakes(who he?) had the Foreign Secretary no less to grace a 'fundraiser' for the Loaksey parliamentary fiefdom.
Mind you, the much vaunted 'big gun' was only allowed to speak to a private fund raising meeting(prop.T Wire impresario) and one suspects the audience was imported from other constituencies to make up for the glaring spaces caused by the suspension of senior CLP members.
I expect however Cllr. Tess Scott had recovered from her sudden illness that coincided with Monday's Council meeting and I expect she had her autograph book with her.
It is of course probable that in the crush she got Terry's signature instead of Dave's.
And very wise too, for the only public evidence of the state visit was a press photo of Milipede and a grinning Wire.
Of Loakes, the McCavity of local politics-not a trace.
So it raises two questions-is Terry the real Labour Party candidate in Northampton South? and secondly, given that Regional Office always handled important front bench visitors was this secret debacle down to Little Emillie?
As we are told proudly that the Regional Office are now running the CLP we must assume that the invisible visit of the Foreign Secretary is the first triumph of the dynamic duo-scarcely visible Emille and the totally invisible Clyde.
The Labour Party once stood for something worthwhile in this town and attracted the sacrifice of generations of fine and committed people.That it has been reduced to this shambolic performance once may have been a tragedy-now it is simply a farce.

The job of an opposition is to....well oppose

It can be grim in the Council Chamber.There has always been a fanciful notion tthat it's best not to bring politics into local politics.
The current(although maybe not for much longer) leader of Northampton Borough Council cewrtainly does not like 'politics'.He refused to attend a meeting in the Guildhall that was called to discuss Sixfields and the Market Square and other issues because he said that it was'political'.
He then decided that complaints against him storing his untaxed car in the Guildhall car park was trivial and 'political'-the complaint initiated by a couple of us who were not 'bona fide' and indeed were'political'.
Leaving aside the fact that Tony Woods is the leader of a Liberal Democrat administration and last time I looked the Liberal Democrats claim to be a 'political' partyit is all rather strange.
Pete Seeger once said that everything is political-try singing the wrong hymn in the wrong church or try to persuade a child to eat his greens!

Nursery rhymes were often filled with political comment,'Mary Mary quite contrary' was an allegory about Mary Tudor and her attempt to rstore Catholicism just as 'Little Jack Horner' was a rhyme about her father Henry's closures of the monestries.
And if your ever tempted to croon the old ballad 'My bonnie Moorhen' remember your campaigning for the Jacobite cause.

Persuasion, discussion, arguement are all political processes that need to take place inorder to demonstrate that places like local councils are not monolithic bastions of little grey people who all agree with the supreme being in control.
The most important function therefore of the opposition,whether within the ruling administration or outside it is to test the executive,to challenge their ideas and to question their decisions.
As a callow young Labour councillor I was first an administration, but after one term became part of an opposition and remained that for many years.
With large Tory majorities we recognised that we had few opportunities to present an alternative view that the public might get to hear about.The press rarely if ever attended committee meetings and even Council meetings were sparsely attended.
But every six weeks or so the full Council meeting was the public platform that an effective opposition could use creatively.
In those far off days we had 'shadow' chairs of each committee and it was the job of the shadow to know their brief and to try and put pressure on the chair.It was especially true at budget time when Geoff Howes had gone through every budget and ensured that no stone was left unturned.
For many years I was shadow leisure spokesman and every meeting I relished roughing up dear old Fred Evans-who once his chief officer brief was used up he was on his own!
Council meetings are where the opposition can do the job it is supposed to do.Now I know the smaller the group the harder being effective can be,but Tony Clarke as a group of one has been more effective than all the others put together.
On Monday however the depths were reached.There are only five Labour members and on that day only two were present! The Leader was away, his deputy was away and the group whip was absent too!
Bad planning perhaps-maybe they were all at the TUC-oh no, they couldn't have been, for Councillor Tess Scott had agreed to second a motion put forward by a Liberal PPC attacking the local rail unions for their actions the previous Sunday.
Now apart from the fact they got the union wrong, they thought it was RMT when in fact it was ASLEF, and apart from the fact that it was none of the business of the local authority,and apart from the fact Cllr Scott hadn't discussed it with her colleagues it was all a bit tragic.
Luckily for Councillor Scott she fell ill at about 4l15pm that afternoon and was unable to second the Liberal's opportunistic motion.

But then I'm sure she will be able to explain her political rationale to her other group members at their next meeting to discuss tactics and I'm sure Keith Davies will be encouraged by Tess's political initiative,he was after all a staunch union activist in another rail union for many years(TSSA)
I'm sure also that when the crafty political brain that Tess so obviously has she will enjoy explaining her stance to Comrade Loakes and Brother Miliband when the Foreign Secretary addresses the assembled multitude(by invitation only) of Northampton South Labour Party at the Ex-servicemens Club in Sheep Street this Thursday. Perhaps Milipede will bring back tales of fraternal discussions from the TUC to regale the assembled brothers and sisters.

PS. When Loakes approaches ASLEF for an election bung will he take Tess with him as his political advisor?
PSS Is ASLEF still affiliated to the now suspended Northampton South CLP?

Boringate-sorry once more!

I'd hoped that 'Astragate' was behind us, that the due process would take its 'due process 'course and Tony Woods would end up wishing he had done what he should have done in the first place.

On Tuesday morning I popped into my favourite little Italian cafe on Fish Street for my usual coffee.Sitting in a huddle by the counter the traditional conspirators of the Lib-Dem firmament-Cllrs Meredith,Church and the man of the moment-Woodsy!
"Morning Dennis,Morning Richard " and as Woods refused to acknowledge me " and morning to your friend!"
With that jaunty little greeting I went on to place my order.At that point Woods got up and rushed out of the cafe at an unusually fast pace-leaving his coffee.
"Something upset your friend!" I ventured a small piece of drollery.
At which point that nice Mr Church unleased a very nasty and very public piece of invective against me.I really didn't listen too carefully but the word 'shit' appeared to be his favourite word.
Let me make it clear once and for all.I do not like Tony Woods,I think he is a bully and an inept local politician(I'm sure those feelings are mutual)-but that's politics!
However when I reported his actions to the Standards Board it was on the request of NBC employees who felt they were not able to complain themselves.Subsequently it would appear that not even the Chief Executive was able to persuade Woods to do the right thing.

Political motivation? Probably that could be argued, but the fact that he was in the wrong and he knew it seems to me adequate justification.He could have ended this saga before it ever got started.
By the way for local Lib-Dem activist to argue in the letters column tonight(25th August) that he was doing his neigbours a favour by not parking in the street is a somewhat pathetic defence as the vehicle was untaxed.
Politics is not about being liked, or even about being popular, its about making judgements and hoping you've got it right.
Tony Woods made the wrong judgement and made the life of a number of NBC employees difficult.
Richard Church,in his abusive defence of the indefensible simply demonstrated how shallow and insecure the administration at the Guildhall appears to be.
A number of Lib-Dem supporters and putative Lib-Dem supporters have asked to keep personalities out of politics.
Well I may be a scruffy little muppet but I have yet to call an opponent a shit in a public cafe!
Mind you there is still time I suppose, or I could even invoke the John Prescott response.