OK, this is outside Bridge Ward and in Rushmere, but some of the Tory activists (Ben Gummer’s on the phone) have been spotted by the Google Street map van canvasing on the Rushmere Estate:
(You’ll have to go to Ter to see them.)
As Comrade Alasdair Ross seems to be spending all his time in Bridge or on Twitter these days they were getting some good results.
This was actually taken a while ago, as I looked at my house and the old owners’ cars were in the driveway.
There’s no meeting of the Maidenhall Residents’ Association today as the second Thursday of the month clashes with a South West Area housing panel meeting.
Due to the attempted denial of service attack recently I’ve been a bit more jumpy about who’s visiting my site and that means I’m examining a good deal of IPs that show suspicious behaviour. I’m starting to get a better idea of who reads this site (and there are a surprising number).
One that’s come on today is from the IP address 194.60.38.10 which belongs to the Houses of Parliament. Which is nice, but I thought it would be a good little service to publish what they read. Remember a lot of this will be from Chris Mole’s office but some of it will be other offices, especially those that came from Google. There are probably other IP addresses registered to Parliament who read this site, so I’ve not got anything like the full picture. There’s no real way of telling for sure, although the ones that tend to read about Ipswich Labour Party’s fund raising and campaigning have a fairly rare marker on their browser. It’s backwards in time as the later stuff is the more interesting:
Today (10th March) there was a direct hit on my site looking at the article about the Ipswich Labour Party fund raising / doorstep gambling operation as well as a quick look to see how my comments were doing (thanks guys, I didn’t know you cared).
Yesterday (9th March) the rare browser was looking at loads of things on the site, a bit about John Major’s speech but also about how the taxpayer funds the Ipswich Labour Party more than its members do and for some reason something about last year’s Lark in the Park. On the 8th there was another trawl looking around the status of my comments section (you just need to say hello Chris) and about John Major’s speech.
Apart from a quick peek on the 4th March the previous visit was on 26th Feb. There were three quick visits to the homepage on 26th Feb, one of them referred from Ipswich Spy. The 24th and 25th of Feb also saw a lot of visits to my home page. What were they worried about?
On the 23rd of March there was a bit of a rummidge around the site which started from a referral from Ipswich Spy (they like Ipswich Spy!) looking for information on Ben Gummer, Nick Herbert and Chris Mole’s expenses.
Chris Mole’s unwillingness to advertise Gordon Brown’s visit was read a few times on the 22nd.
On the 18th we only got one visitor looking for Sophie Stanbrook on Google. I get in trouble when I speculate why people look for Sophie Stanbrook and not Ben Gummer, so I won’t. On the 17th we had a visitor who came to read what one three year old on Maidenhall thought of Gordon Brown.
On the 13th Feb (a Saturday) there was a sole Parliamentary visit reading about Nick Herbert’s visit to Bridge, the same day it was posted. On the 11th, there was a Google query on “Noise Action Group Ipswich”. Was that Mr Herbert’s researcher?
The only activity in January was on the 27th when there was a little flurry of activity looking for information on Chris Mole his expenses and his stint as Transport under-under-secretary, including the evidence of divine displeasure when he was appointed transport secretary. This is probably the first time that Chris Mole’s office looked at the site.
On the 10th of December last year we had a Parliamentary Googler looking ups some information on the Labour communications allowances beneficiaries Public Impact. On the 2nd of December there was someone looking for information on John Cook, who had been selected for Norwich North a couple of days earlier. Nothing in November.
On the 6th October there was a Googler looking for “chris mole mp+railways+labour party”. The statistics were put in on the 12th June so this was the first hit from this IP address.
So the Parliamentary interest in the Ipswich political blog scene is increasing, probably as a result of Ipswich Spy’s appearance. Recently there has been far less Google traffic as a proportion of the hits I’ve got from this source, which as well as the increase in traffic shows that there’s more interest.
So if you want to get noticed, now’s the time to start a blog.
It’s rather embarassing for the Ipswich Labour Party that they get more from their MP’s office allowance than they do from their members, but both these sums come to less than 10% each of their income.
The vast bulk of their income comes from a more surprising source, and that’s gambling. And not any old gambling, but week in, week out doorstep gambling. In 2008 £56,926 of their total income of £79,238 came from “fundraising” (around three quarters of their total income) and this is how they describe it:
8. Fundraising
The Unit runs a number of fundraising activities, these include:
- “100″ Club – a monthly draw;
- Red Rose Labour Tote – a weekly lottery collected door-to-door and registered with Ipswich Borough Council;
- Norfolk Labour Tote – a weekly lottery operating in Norfolk, managed by Ipswich CLP
- Instant bingo tickets – sold door-to-door, a co-operative venture with other local CLPs;
- “SWELL” lottery cards – a national fundraising scheme administered locally;
- Raffles and draws at political meetings and social functions.
This is not dinners and coffee mornings, “social events” were seperately listed and raised £1,664 in that time (this is appallingly low for a party with 264 members, but I digress). If they are raising funds only from their committed supporters then they really should be looking at raising their subscriptions (£2,091) and donations (£4,375) which don’t need to give out prizes. In fact, as is obvious from above this operation reaches out into the rest of Suffolk and Norfolk, and very possibly Essex as well through the “Instant bingo” tickets.
A couple of interesting facts that other people may want to follow up, do they employ people to collect the gambling stakes or is it their activists who do this? Do Labour councillors declare their interest whenever lottery licensing is discussed? I’m sure there are other questions. Let’s be clear this is preferable to being funded by that public school former Communist Charlie Whelan’s Unite Union, as I’m sure that Comrade Chris Mole (Dulwich) shares my aversion to expensively educated ex-Marxists. In fact there’s a lot to admire in the entrepreneurial nature of the whole enterprise.
The Ipswich Constituency Labour Party is in fact a door-to-door gambling operation with a couple of councillors attached.
No, I haven’t turned them off (deliberately).
I have gone through various security measures to stop a denial of service attack that may have been aimed at taking this blog down, and while this seems to have been successful something I have done, or my hosting provider has done seems to have disabled the comments. Please feel free to write a comment to see if you can get in.
Needless to say, I do want the comments up as soon as possible. In the meantime please email me at james@bridgeward.org.uk if you want to add a comment and I will update the relevant blog post, or even start a totally new blog post.
UPDATE: Still not a lot of progress. I’ve reverted to the old theme and turned off all the plugins. I’ve tried to change the link structure but this is stopping links coming in to me. Doubtless it’s something that will be obvious in hindsight.
I’m on the top of Google’s results for John Major Ipswich. Above Sky. That won’t last for long, but while it does I thought I’d give a quick verdict on the speech.
Well it was OK, John Major is a professional politician (or was one) and giving a good speech is part of his forte. He had three themes, defence, how rubbish the economy was and civil liberties. Not Europe, where he would have bought the house down with anything even mildly sceptical, but considering that there were a whole clutch of Gummers there, perhaps its not so surprising. On defence he claimed we shouldn’t be in Iraq or Afghanistan, or at least not in the way we are currently and also accused Gordon Brown of being less than honest on the funding issue and using the forces as a political diversion. On the economy there was the big “you’re in more debt than you can imagine” which is quite a common refrain these days. As John Major did not say, the Spectator’s debt clock has every man, woman and child owing £31,146 – at the moment. That includes public sector middle managers who make up the ranks of Labour activists and councillors who have no prospect of ever contributing anything worthwhile to the economy. On civil liberties there was a generalised attack on New Labour rather than simply Gordon Brown and John Major even used the “libertarian” word. Of course John Major’s administration was nowhere near as contemptuous of civil liberties as New Labour is, but still… As they say heaven rejoices more at a sinner who repents, so I suppose we all should be glad at this concern for civil liberties which perhaps was not as obvious during his time in office.
In short a statesmanlike and polished performance, but with the exception of allusions to knowing Ben Gummer when he was a baby, not one that I would be surprised to hear in Walsall, Norwich North or any other Conservative-Labour marginal. I was genuinely surprised when I found out later that the criticism about Brown was new to the speech.
Ben Gummer’s speech was a lot better, and did the required bit of guilt tripping of the hundreds of people who had come in from safe Conservative seats in other parts of Suffolk. It was also locally based, going on about various episodes from Ipswich’s electoral history, and actually quite funny. We also had Peter Burgoyne doing the auction (it looks bloody difficult) and Paul West doing some introductions – and I’ve never seen Paul look so awed, he’s usually a very fluent speaker. Michael Irvine was the last speaker, the MP for Ipswich from 1987 to 1992. He was unintentionally funny with impassioned calls for “days of hard pounding behind Ben”, without making it clear what Ben thought about this, but sadly his speech was very short and he wouldn’t let us know any more.
Was it worth the £60 per head? Well the money’s going on fighting one of most marginal seats in the country and it was very well organised by Kathy Kenna and Penny Gummer.
All this Ashcroft got me wondering about the Ipswich Labour Party’s finances.
The 2008 details are here (in PDF format). The bulk of the Labour Party fundraising is through a profitable door to door gambling operation that reaches out into other parts of Suffolk and Norfolk. It’s lumped together as “fundraising”.
Anyway the rent that we the taxpayer paid through Chris Mole’s parliamentary allowances in 2008 was £7,200 (up 20% from the previous year). We also paid £3,000 extra in advance, so you could (but I won’t)say we paid £10,200 in that year. Enough for quarter of an agent.
But the members, what about the members. Well they paid £2,091 in subscriptions (less than a third of Chris Mole’s rent). They also received donations of £4,375. Trade Union affiliation fees were £155.
In total the membership raised £6,621. And we the taxpayer paid £7,200.
Here’s an interesting piece of local colour about the Garden at the top of Wherstead Road, near Peppercorn Way. They’re called the HG Clarke Gardens, and although I live about five minutes away I never remember the nam. Hat tip to Comrade Ross (I credit my stories, unlike a certain councillor who copies the Tory candidate without accreditation – a very ineffective way to rebut this).
UPDATE: This in from Alasdair Ross:
Thanks for the link to the story abot the Herbert Clarke Gardens, I do read Ben’s website but did not see hisstory on the Bacon Loop or correct name Cord (as used by Ben) I got the story from a friend who works fr Network Rail and then got further details from Clrr Smart, so sorry did not borrow from Ben.
I’m not sure why there are such frequent interruptions with the blog, but please bear with us on this.
I don’t think there’s anything sinister here.
Comments continued
I’ve got the comments back, sort of. I’ve installed a new comment system, disqus and I’m trying to integrate the existing comments in to this.