It’s summer and its the Waterfront market.

For some information on how to volunteer please go to the Ipswich Events website.

From the Suffolk Police

Between 7pm Wednesday 16th and 11am Thursday 17th May a red Ford Sierra, registration G115WGV, was stolen from a car park area in Austin Street Ipswich.
And a beige Volkswagen Golf, registration A754DMO was stolen from a car park in  Ranelagh Road, Ipswich sometime between 8.45pm Tuesday and 8.30am Wednesday.

Calls relating to these thefts or the whereabouts of either vehicle should be made to Suffolk Police on 101 reference IW/12/1966 and 1967

OR Please use the following link to pass useful information to Suffolk Police about any incident.

http://www.suffolk.police.uk/safetyadvice/reportacrime/tellthepolice.aspx

If people thought the results in Ipswich were grisly for the Tories last week then thank the Lord that UKIP is not active in Ipswich.  There are a number of historic reasons for UKIP’s absence, the main one being tha the 2005 election candidate for North Ipswich left the party to found UK First.  The effort is now led by the likeable but rather uncharasmatic Chris Streatfield who doesn’t even live in Ipswich.  They don’t even get borough candidates.

And this is excellent news for the Tories.  In Ipswich the Tory base is incredibly fed up – and Labour is currently less toxic than it was when Chris Mole was around.  Some of this dissension is hard to pin down, and some of it (although far less than any of us thought) is a genuine dislike of the austerity measures – particularly if they are falling on a particular group – however a lot of it is the puzzlement over what on earth the point of a Conservative government is.

Although I’d like to say that this is driven by Europe, although the British electorate agrees with UKIP (and all every Ipswich Tory activist under 50 except Stephen Ion) on the need either for radical renegotitation or withdrawal, the level of importance is nowhere near as high as it is with UKIP.  Ten years ago the British people agreed with UKIP on the direction but not the destination of where they wanted to be on Europe.  Now they agree on the destination but disagree on its importance – placing it between fourth and eighth (itself a step up).

However it’s the general feel of the government that seems to fuel UKIP.  Despite what some Tories think House of Lords reform hasn’t upset the Tory base, but gay marriage has – I get this every bleeding Sunday at the moment.  So has the governemnt’s failure to follow through on its pledge to tackle the high immigration that we have.  The fact that its cornerstone in helping the nuclear family is the institution of same sex marriage is beyond bizarre.

So thank God that UKIP is so poorly organised, as we’d have been nursing the loss of Holywell’s and Castle Hill rather than Stoke Park and Rushmere.

I may not have been on the stump as much as in previous years, but those times I have been out I’ve been overwhelmingly in Stoke Park.  And it’s an eye opener.  The roads there are far better maintained than they are in Bridge.  Walk down Lanercost way and then walk down Maidenhall Approach or Prince of Wales Drive (my route back home after leafletting Lanercost – which by the way never seems to end).  The difference is instructive.  It’s more instructive when you drive.

Yet the person who holds the purse strings is Phil Smart, portfolio holder for transport, councillor for Bridge and resident in Holywells.  Phil Smart’s last election made much of how “Phil was fighting for Bridge” and to be honest both Phil Smart and Bryony Rudkin were both reported to be doing more to help Bridge from both residents and from councillors.  This last year they have taken the foot off the pedal to a shocking and scandalous degree, and it makes me feel genuinely angry.   I actually believed that they had learned from their mistakes.  Well fool me once…

The fact that the highway budget that is meant for roads in Bridge is diverted to roads in Stoke Park, a ward where Labour is fighting to get more councillors should not be shocking when you remember that Ipswich Labour is fundamentally corrupt.

One thing that voters should learn about politicians is that we are performing seals in suits.  You can reward us with votes or you can take away votes.  If we believe that the votes are in the bag we simply will refuse to perform.  If you need to get the politicians working Bridge again you must never, ever, let them think that this ward is sage.

Gavin Maclure raises an enormously important point about the May Day rally in Alexandria Park.  Why is the Borough Council still allowing it to be hosted at an enormous subsidy?  And how much is it costing to clean it up?

It’s another example of Ipswich Borough Council giving the Trade Unions a subsidy which they gratefully recycle into the Labour Party.  Everyone’s happy.  I’ve put in a Freedom of Information Request.

Kevan Lim is back and has another thought provoking blog post on diabetes, GP commissioning and the obsession with drugs in the health service.  It’s good to see him back, and I for one hope that we can hear more from the one person who has been in the belly of the Ipswich Labour beast.

Ipswich Spy said that Labour now have Ipswich in a “vice like grip“.  And organisationally this is true.  The 1% to 2% of the Ipswich population who actively support the Labour Party are in an enormous number of positions of privilegein the Borough.  It has become the raison d’etre of the Labour Party in this place. 

However, their grip is not really vice like.  For years Labour was the party of the working class.  It represented the working class and not just in pushing for socialism but also for other things such as access to education. It was the party of the Daily Mirror.  But even at the start there was the party of the Guardian, the anti-establishment middle classes.  These people really hated the Tories and so the Labour Party was the best battering ram around.  And it was a fruitful relationship, the Guardian readers could be realists like Shirley Williams and Bryony Rudkin or borderline lunatics like Baron Anthony Wedgewood Benn and our own Andrew Coates, but they provided some expertise and a sense of intellectual depth that the political arm of the trade unions may have otherwise been without.

So a broadly patriotic, socially conservative and socialist party somehow muddled into the 1950s.  In the 1960s the Guardian reader extraordinaire Roy Jenkins became Home Secretary with a socially liberal agenda to make divorce rampant and the unborn murdered.  But the Labour Party was still the same creature but this time with a definite socially liberal streak.  However it was the 1980s that changed everything.  Despite a Conservative government the anti-establishment middle class were popping up everywhere.  They were running the BBC news programmes, theywere designing more and more “progressive” educational curriculums, they were becoming judges and bishops.  This had been happening for years, but the 1980s were a definite tipping point, the anti-establishment middle class now are the establishment.

They also started jetisoning the working class in the Labour Party.  The suicidal left ward turn of the Labour Party in the 1980s was certainly a start of this, but Tony Blair’s leadership was when this was cemented.  He represented his mates while crafting his message to the strivers of Swindon – the working class were out of the equation and  just expected to shut up and vote Labour.  On the right there was a move against socialism, while on the left there was a general lifting of immigration controls.  The rich got cheap nannies and gardeners and the working class got stuffed.

So what has this got to do with Ipswich?  Well its the vice like grip.  The Labour Party has now thoroughly abandoned the working class as a partner in power and only sees them now as a vote bank.  Look at the vitriol that solicitors husband John Cook and private school rugby coach Alasdair Ross direct towards Kevin Algar, a jobbing gardener who thinks for himself.  The working class are not expected to do that as far as Labour are concerned.

The Labour Party cannot win Ipswich without the working class, yet at the same time they hate them.  What’s more important to your average Labour councillor, cutting down on immigration or bringing in gay marriage?   How can a party survive if it fritters its time on gay marriage when people’s livelihoods are up for grabs.  That last sentence could also be addressed at my own side.

So the prize is there for the Tories.  They can win again in Ipswich as they have many times before.  The Labour Party in Ipswich  is now a corrupt little shell obsessed with its own interests, albeit a well organised corrupt little shell.  If the Tories may not exactly be a working class party, but unlike the other side we don’t hate the working class.  And that’s our advantage.

Well I lost again and lost big.  375 voters still came out for the side of right against 853 for Labour.  I’ll write more on the general results in Ipswich later.

I congratulate Mama Rudkin on her victory. 

Bridge will only represented properly again when people believe that it can be lost for Labour.  Hopefully next year we’ll give them a scare, or perhaps miracles will happen and they’ll start paying a bit less attention to their party organisation and a bit more attention to the darkened lamps and potholed roads in Bridge.   Miracles, do happen.  It’s just that they’re quite rare.

Do these people live in the same world as the rest of us?  I only ask because I saw this bizarre tweet from the treasure of Bridge Ward Bryony Rudkin:

#reggaebritannia on #BBC4. Worth every penny of licence fee

Every penny?  £145.50 for a TV progamme or two.  No wonder Ipswich Labour are wasting our money so freely.

But there is a serious point here.  Hundreds of people are sent to a prison due to the BBC licence fee.  Not middle class people, bus some of the most vulnerable people in the community.  Some of the people that Labour was set up to represent until they started selfishly lobying for feathering the nests for white collar public servants who are of no discernable use to society.

I know that there are problems, serious problems, with the death penalty, but do people really think that the swaggering that we are seeing in the Oslo courtroom would be happening if his maximum sentence was more than 21 years.  If it were death? 

He’s currently 33, and so will leave prison – allowing for the duration of the trial – when he’s 55.  That’s without good behaviour.  Plenty of late middle aged years to stand for election and address rallies – if he doesn’t do something like convert to Islam when prison attention is waning.

He’s going to serve 21 years for 77 deaths – less than four months per young life ended.

Would he really be calling for the death penalty if there were a chance that he would get it?