Sorry for the Daily Mail type headline, but this little comment invited it:

http://www.davidosler.com/2010/01/hewitt_hoon_and_hubris.html#comment-40564

Ipswich’s very own Andrew Coates manages to fit in quite a few little allegations:

- Ipswich Labour, led by John Cook the Norwich North candidate (the “full-time Secretary-Agent”) is busy building links and working closely with the “hard left”
- The Ipswich Buses campaign is a front for a hard left campaign
- Sandy Martin (“Comrade Sandy Martin” no less) was elected as leader of the Suffolk Labour county council group (all four of them) because of non-Comrade Bryony Rudkin’s Blairite deviation

John Cook is definately left wing enough to be comfortable in a BBC editorial meeting but I suspect that he won’t welcome Andrew Coates blowing the cover on that non-existent plot.  Chris Mole, who’s the minister in charge of bus privatisation, could stop the bus privatisation in its tracks, but he won’t.  Ipswich Labour councillors, including the alleged Brezhnevites of Cook and Martin, could force him to block it, but they won’t.

They know that if Labour gets in they will have to privatise it in some shape (which is why they are saying it’s not the right time) and that currently it makes a great signature magnet and vote propellant.  I’m not saying this as a condemnation as I know that all parties do this.

The Ipswich Buses campaign is a way of getting some last gasp of life from the grass roots, no more, no less.

I can’t claim any insight into the machinations of the Suffolk Labour group of four, but whatever they may tell their former comrade about their Leninist sympathies I somehow think that the fact that Sandy Martin comfortably won a marginal seat in the face of a concerted Tory campaign while Bryony Rudkin almost lost one of Labour’s safest county seat in the face of one Tory leaflet (I was her Tory opponent and I spent most of election day in Sandy Martin’s seat) probably had more to do with it.

I know who I’d want to lead me.

Why the contrasting fortunes?  Sandy Martin is a good local campaigner and he’s loved for it.  If he was a right wing Tory or a dripping wet Liberal doing the same sort of assiduous work he’d win with the same ease. 

Bryony Rudkin may have other qualities, but she’s not interested in being a ward councillor and everyone knows it.  In four county council elections, she’s never sought re-election in any ward, and when she tried to to represent substantially the same ward as she represented in the borough she got the second worse Labour result on the night (after Gainsborough – and no one saw that coming).  Not only that her previous ward, the rock solid Chantry elected a Tory for the first time since the estate was built.  If I were Andrew Coates I’d be asking why Labour lets her float around safe wards like a butterfly making safe seats marginal.  Obviously not much sympathy for his revolution in the self-destructive Labour machine.

There may be some pseudo-Marxist plot to get rid of all traces of the Blairite deviation from Suffolk County Council, but just perhaps it may be that Labour councillors recognise that they’re better off with a leader who wins marginal seats than one who almost loses safe ones.

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