Entries from July 2010 ↓

I don’t know who slapped the Miliband campaign down, but there are a number of prospects. It seems that their claim that Dame Bryony Rudkin is the leader of Ipswich council has been removed.

Before

Leader of the Council? Really?

After

As to who did the slapping it could have been Liz Harsant, the real leader of Ipswich Council, David Ellesmere, the leader of the Ipswich Labour group or Sandy Martin who defeated her as the leader of the Suffolk Council Labour group. But we don’t care.

The question we must ask is how much time has been spent working on the Miliband campaign and how much time has been working in Bridge ward. Was that a reason why no Labour councillors bothered to represent Bridge when the police priorities were set?

I can understand the Conservative case for letting Turkey into the European Union. It will destabilise the EU and will lock Turkey in with the West like it locked France in when De Gaulle, er, took France out of NATO. Is the European Union really less powerful than it was when we joined it and there were only twelve members? Maastricht, Lisbon and the Single European Act would argue that it hasn’t.

So letting Turkey in will fail in any geopolitical gambit.

And what about the practical effect on us here? Bridge ward, particularly the Old Stoke part, has been a magnet for Eastern European immigrants. This has clearly put wages down and rents up, and it also has had an effect on school rolls – although its not really affected the doctor’s surgeries.

Turkey will be more of the same. Much more. The rural heart of Turkey is both poorer and more populous than Eastern European countries. And did I mention illiteracy? There is also the issue of an increasingly more militant Islam. We’re assuming that Turkish kids will be immune from this, because the Turkish upper middle class used to be. That’s one massive assumption.

The Conservatives canvassed on the basis that they would listen to people’s concerns on immigration and take them seriously. If the Conservatives simply put a cap on skilled immigration and then drown this out through a far larger increase in the amount of people allowed in through EU accession they will not be forgiven or forgotten. David Cameron’s guff that Turkey was always improving and so there wouldn’t be anything to worry about on immigration sounds a bit like Tony Blair assuring us that there would only be a few thousand people coming in from the EU accession states. We could put Blair’s mistake down to ignorance, Cameron won’t have the same excuse.

The left has sacrificed the interests of the working class to trendy concerns in favour of windmills and against church going, the Conservatives promised to listen. Letting Turkey in to the EU is not listening.

I was at the South West Area forum yesterday. It was quite far away, in the Triangle Church in Dickens Road, but there were issues that affected Bridge being discussed there.

Sadly there were no councillors from Bridge there. No newly re-elected Jim Powell, no soon to stand for re-election Philip Smart and no double County and Borough councillor Bryony Rudkin. For shame.

The other two county councillors from the area were present and there were councillors from the other three wards in the area. There was a debate in which the policing priorities were set for the South West area of Ipswich. Not surprisingly Bridge did very poorly in this. Last year it was generally remarked upon by other councillors of both parties that Bridge was being better represented as the councillors were scared that they could lose to the Tories. It’s now been commented that as Labour thinks Bridge will be in the bag next year that the Bridge councillors are returning to their bad, self indulgent habits of quango hunting and wittering on about pet subjects. I didn’t want to believe it, but when the bread and butter of local representation is neglected like this, then what can you believe?

This is why Bridge must never revert to being a safe Labour seat.

The South West Area forum is today at 7 pm (for the pro-Europeans that’s 19:00) at the Triangle Community Centre, Dickens Road, IP2 0JW.

Here’s a link to a map.

When we were a bit children we all tried to impress our friends by telling them that our dad was more important than he was. Then we tried to tell our friends that our job or achievements were more important than they were. Middle age is the time when we sadly realise that potential is not the same as achievement, and we’ve probably achieved less than we are capable. So with this in mind I felt that I should go a bit easy on this, where she anoints David Miliband as her preferred candidate for the leadership:

Leader of the Council? Really?

Liz Harsant, the real life leader of Ipswich Council, may have something to say on this. The Conservative group may welcome Bryony with open arms (she’s second favourite to defect among Tory activists) but I’m not sure they think she should be leader yet. Perhaps David Ellesmere, the leader on the Labour Group, may also want a word.

Dame Bryony has many, many jobs, but not leader of Ipswich council.

David Miliband got an unimaginable boost to his campaign when our very own Dame Bryony Rudkin announced that she would anoint him as her candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party. Former councillor John Cook, who seems to find any excuse to come down to Ipswich, is spreading the gospel for wounded candidate Ed Balls (as is Tory Councillor Paul West).

So who are Ipswich Labour party supporting? Ipswich Labour Party’s strength and abiding weakness is that they have stayed tribal when the rest of the country is far less tribal than it was a generation ago. This is why they didn’t see Ben Gummer’s challenge until it was too late. However it also means that they should be able to keep the whole show on the road and not implode after government as other Constituency Labour Parties seem to be doing.

Ed Balls image as a “no compromise with the voters” candidate should appeal to the Ipswich Labour Party. That is, however, the Ipswich Labour Party’s problem.

The Vegetable Games at the Maidenhall Allotments in Halifax Road have proved really successful. The Town and Bridge project is proving to be coming up with some very innovative ideas and the Community Garden which looked a bit out of place last year now looks like an integral part of the Maidenhall Allotments.

Ben Gummer was also there, doing the MP sort of things. What’s really striking is how many people he knows already. I got mistaken for his brother, twice. Now I have no problem with people thinking that I look like Ben, he volunteered for public life and insults are a new way of life for him. But his poor brother, what did he do to deserve the calumny?

If they do decide to hold this event next year it is a really good idea to go down.

Sorry it’s late but Ben Gummer will be in the Spread Eagle on Fore Street (near St Pancras church) today from 8pm onwards. Ask him awkward questions.

I’d just written an email to James Ball at The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on the Channel 4 story about Ben Gummer and then realise that they were the ones who originally commissioned the piece. Silly me:

Dear Mr Ball,

On your website you say that you want to get emails from any “journalist, campaigner or member of the public with a story you think the Bureau should be investigating”. I have a rather puzzling investigation.

There have been two investigations done on Channel 4 about expense investigations. These have covered six MPs, Zac Goldsmith, Ben Gummer, Gavin Barwell, Dan Byles, Sarah Teather and Phil Woolas. Four of these were Conservative, one Liberal Democrat and one Labour. That’s not that interesting.

What is interesting is the identity of the second party. In Croydon Central, Ipswich, Warwickshire and Brent Central the second party was Labour. In the other two it was Liberal Democrats. It seems very odd that there are no Conservatives in second place. Was Channel 4 and whatever third party outfit they were using biased on this? And how unusual was it?

I did a quick count of all the seats that had a majority of less than 4,092 (185 seats) where the Conservatives were second (75 seats). 4,092 is one more than the highest majority among these six (Zac Goldsmith with 4,091). Now the probability of any one of these seats at random having a Tory runner up would be 40.54%. So getting a non-Tory is a perfectly respectable 59.45% chance. To get two non Tory runners up and no-one else would be a lower but credible 35.22%. Three non-Tory runners up would be 20.7%, four would be 12.2% and five would be 7.15%. This would be very hard to justify as a fair representation. However six non Tory runners up would actually have a probability of 4.175%. Just under a one in twenty four chance.

Perhaps it was only the Conservatives who overspent, but I got an email today from the Sunlight Centre who said that they “have this week begun a new investigation into the election spending of Zac Goldsmith, Chris Huhne and Ed Balls.” In two of these cases the second place candidate was a Tory and in one they were not. Which one did Channel 4 and Anthony Barnett cover?

I must declare an interest on this (on which more later) and I am a constituent of Ben Gummer and I even wore one of the now famous Tee Shirts. I do like Mr Gummer but even his biggest fans would not claim that he was more newsworthy than Chris Huhne and Ed Balls, one of whom is a cabinet minister and one of whom was a cabinet minister in the recent past. Why have they not been covered?

On declaring an interest, I have watched the two broadcasts and read a lot of the articles on this and the main journalist is a Mr Anthony Barnett. It is not made clear that he was a director of the broadly anti-Conservative Charter 88, a writer for the Labour supporting New Statesman and on the editorial board of the Marxist New Left Review. It makes the one in twenty four chance look very odd indeed. I also notice that he has shared a platform with Chris Huhne in his role as the Co-Director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. Perhaps conflicts of interest of this one time soft left campaigner and new born journalist could be investigated?

I understand that the (non-partisan) Sunlight Centre have scooped you on all the major stories on MPs expenses, so perhaps this would be a story where you could scoop them?

Yours,

James Spencer

UPDATE:

Welcome to readers from ITN (the producers of Channel 4 News), the Labour Party and the Channel 4 Corporate division. You may want to see Panscourer’s post on this. He chides me for being mild.

Just a quick note, in Monmouth Close there is a fox about and he has been attacking pets. Please keep your pets safe.