Bridge Ward News » General Election

Why Berlin time should not be our time

James Spencer — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:28:48 +0000

Eurosceptics have managed in the last twenty years to change the idea of giving further powers to Brussels from a thriposition held by a substantial minority to the rough equivalent of a cold bucket of sick in the opinion polls. It’s changed the idea of repatriating powers from Brussels from a minority to an overwhelming majority position. Even the idea of leaving the EU, which looked like it was dead in the water has been resurected and in many cases commands a small majority when polls are conducted. It’s got to the point that the sort of people who even a couple of years ago wanted to hold a stark in and out referendum because they knew that it would blackmail the British people are now the very people who are most against it.

But Europhiles chortle, in their comfortable leather chairs with their gout inducing port and cigars, that the British public may be against them, but the public aren’t really that interested in Europe. And it’s true. It’s way down the opinion polls. And the Eurosceptics have persuaded the British people that Europe is bad for them, but not that it’s important enough to care about.

Nick Clegg wants to change all that.

You see he wants us all to go to Continental European time. Instead of having 12 noon at (roughly) the time when the sun is at the top of the sky in London it will be at the time when the sun is at the top of the sky in Berlin.

I didn’t think that this made a difference. I was against it, of course, on the general principle of if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. But I didn’t see why it’s important.

Then I spent three days in York.

I’ve been doing some work there so I try to get in to the office early. But not massively early, around 7.30. And it’s dark. In October.

In the north of England, and even more so in Scotland, the winter comes in quick.

If we go on Berlin time it will not be unusual to walk into the office, or in to school, in the dark for months on end. This cannot be good for road safety or for people’s emotional health.

Similarly in the summer (they have longer days up north) then people will be trying to get to sleep when it’s light. Again for months on end.

There’s a reason for the time to be where it is. I didn’t realise that until the last couple of weeks.

And so when we don’t see any daylight from Monday to Friday, we will thank Europe. Or when we struggle through another summer day without sleep because its been daylight when we’ve been trying to go to sleep, we will thank Europe. And the MPs who voted to make our lives miserable on the whim of Europe.

Have we got Nick Clegg wrong? Is he really a secret genius of Euroscepticism. Is he the man who will bring Europe to the kitchen table?

Not me

James Spencer — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 06:51:45 +0000

Gavin Maclure says:

I used to be a big fan of David Cameron and was in the vanguard when he first appeared on the political stage as a leadership candidate in 2005. I was an ardent supporter,

Certainly true.

persuading my fellow Party members to vote for him when I was the Chairman of the Ipswich Conservative Party

Not me.

The real problem is that few Conservatives can admit that we lost the elction in 2010. The other parties lost more (Prime Minister Gordon Brown – you had to be smoking hard drugs to take that seriously), but the 2010 election was ours to lose.

We did.

Just give that woman a seat

James Spencer — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:15:07 +0000

Labour have announced a shortlist of four candidates for the Ipswich seat. Naturally only Labour members are allowed to vote, showing the openness one would expect from the Ipswich comrades. These are:

David Ellesmere
Neil McDonald – who may be related to the ”MACDONALD, Neil” who got the lowest amount of votes for the Labour Policy Forum in the whole country. Some achievement.
Frances Rehal. Never heard of her? The Labour nomination committee in South Swindon have, they’ve listed this big society fan on their shortlist as well. Nice to know that Ipswich is so special to her.
Jeremy Miles. Another sat nav candidate.

The last three clearly look like they’re making up the numbers. For those who have a taste for Pravda-esque statements, there’s a gem from (what appears to be) John Cook “Longlisting and shortlisting was undertaken by a ten member Selection Committee, five men and five women selected to reflect the demographics of the constituency.” Nobbling is a far more elegant term.

The treasure of Bridge Ward, Dame Bryony Rudkin, decided not to stand – although it”s not clear whether this was because she could see that the local party did not like a (relatively) sensible candidate to go against Comrade Camel or whether the idea of representing a seat where she lived was too strange a concept.

Haven’t Labour learned from the Gordon Brown debacle – fixing internal elections tend to mean that the party goes to the electorate with weaker candidates.

Did the Ipswich Labour Party let Chris Mole sink?

James Spencer — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:09:35 +0000

From Kevan Lim:

Unfortunately your figures are wrong. The tory vote was 17543 as you say, but the labour vote was 16764. Thats significantly more than Chris Mole’s vote. However my main point was the lib vote variation between parlamentary and borough. So I don’t think you can say my point was wrong. Allowing for the switch by some labour and tory voters to fringe like green,bnp and ukip, their were numbers of labour and lib who voted for ben gummer and then went back to their usual political choice for the borough.

Kevan Lim is right and I’ve missed out Labour’s 912 votes in Bixley. This means that Labour actually scored 16,764 votes in the Borough which was 472 votes more than Chris Mole. This was about 3% of their borough vote and between a quarter and a fifth of Ben Gummer’s margin. I still think that this shows that there was not that much split ticket voting, although Kevan disagrees, arguing that the UKIP (and perhaps BNP) votes probably went to the Tories in the borough and so masking the Labour votes that went to Ben and back to Labour in the borough.

The collapse of the Liberal parliamentary vote is very important, and on that I don’t disagree with Kevan Lim. Their disastrous choice of Mark Dyson needs to be quickly acknowledged by the Liberal Democrats in Ipswich. There have been stories that he was getting rather tetchy with volunteers, these and other stories show that he needed to have some grounding in grass roots politics before going for being a Parliamentary candidate. I think a couple of stints of running for (Wandsworth) council should stop him making rookie mistakes. He’s clearly not a stupid man and seems quite well intentioned, but politics does not suit him and parachuting in to another seat won’t suit him either. Also, some electorates take kindly to carpet baggers, but not Ipswich.

I suspect a lot of the Liberal vote split between both Ben and Chris Mole as although Ben Gummer is probably the most Liberal Democrat friendly of the two candidates and there is a history of co-operation on the town, many Liberal Democratic voters are still anti-Tory. This will probably change with the economic climate, but the realisation of how bad things are has not really hit home yet.

However the psychological point that Chris Mole scored less well than his borough colleagues is very important, and could harm him in any reselection battle.

My main point still stands however – The decision makers in Ipswich Labour Party really seem to have seen this election as a fight to win the borough through concentrating effort in the marginal seats. To an outside observer this seems mad when there was a strong expectation that they could lose the Parliamentary seat, reflected in the betting markets. This seems like their fatal mistake (and not just because by losing Alexandra, they still are in a minority). Was it because they just didn’t believe the polls and the betting figures or did they just not think that saving the seat was that important – at least in the short term?

That’s not a question for me, I’ve no interest in Labour’s future electoral success. I suspect that those Labour supporting readers of this blog (I’ll exclude Kevan Lim, who has a clear grasp of what’s happened) either are too loyal, scared or nice to see what their local leadership has done.

Election Maths – The two main parties held firm

James Spencer — Mon, 10 May 2010 06:00:26 +0000

[EDIT: Kevan Lim sets me right on the Labour borough figure, which missed out Bixley and puts Chris Mole a bit behind the Labour borough vote.]

There has been a lot of talk about personal and negative votes and how the party machines got different votes from the borough and national elections, both Kevan Lim and Ipswich Spy have made this point. They are mainly wrong.

Actually I get the following results for adding up the votes in the constituency wards, Conservatives 17,543 and Labour 15,852. This was done by adding the highest vote in Alexandra plus the vote for the party candidate in the other twelve wards. This is not an enormous difference from the Parliamentary vote where Ben Gummer got 18,371 and Chris Mole got 16,292. The difference is probably mostly made up of those Liberal Democrat voters in wards who are more prepared to switch to the least bad party in a close parliamentary election (there’s 3,389 more Lib Dem borough votes than parliamentary votes).

There were crossover votes, but they largely cancelled each other out.

Labour did better than their vote would have suggested in the borough elections not because they were getting a far higher vote but because they were targeting their effort in certain wards. The seem to have fought this as a borough election rather than a parliamentary election, fighting hardest in seats such as Bridge, Rushmere, Alexandra and Sprites and not piling up the votes in Gipping and Gainsborough in the same way that the Tories were doing in Bixley and Holywells. For Heaven’s sake they were fighting in Whitehouse, which makes no sense as Labour knew they were destined to come third in the North Ipswich parliamentary seat.

Did they do this because in their heart they thought the game was up, or that they thought the Tories couldn’t win the seat or that they could fight two elections at once? I doubt we’ll know the answer for sure for a couple of years and a couple of defectors.

With their loss in Alexandra meaning that they’ve been denied control of the council it looks like they’ve miscalculated twice over.

So did the Ipswich Labour Party follow the Spencer Strategy?

James Spencer — Fri, 07 May 2010 19:37:32 +0000

One of the odder points of the campaign was how the Labour Party did not seem to be piling up their vote in their safe seats but doing just enough to win their council seats. Would it have been easier to find voters on the Gainsborough Estate or in Whitehouse? This is particularly pertinent for Whitehouse as it is not even in the Ipswich constituency, but in North Ipswich. Why was Whitehouse a priority?

So was this a failure of the Ipswich Labour Party or a deliberate choice to concentrate on winning control of the council and letting Chris Mole take his own chances? We’ll probably never find out. Some of the activists certainly won’t.

If it did do this were they were following a strategy that I had suggested about six months ago. National opposition is good for rebuilding a party as is control of a council. Chris Mole has enemies in the Ipswich Labour Party.

As much as I would never wish to stoke up suspicions and infighting within the Ipswich Labour Party (who were totally behind Chris Mole as the 30% of activists who stayed to listen to his concession speech at the count showed), it’s obviously not the sort of thing that David Ellesmere or any other senior councillor would do. After all what would they have to gain apart from a nomination for a normally Labour seat?

Leader of a local Labour council has always been a good way to get the Labour nomination in Ipswich.

And I've still got my job, Chris.

36 Hours to Save Ipswich Hospital

James Spencer — Wed, 05 May 2010 10:00:14 +0000

One of the things that should not be forgotten as we go into the polling booth is that Chris Mole has supported plans to cut the specialist units out of Ipswich Hospital and Ben Gummer has campaigned to attract them here. That’s what Ipswich gets when Labour (or any party) takes it for granted.

Save Ipsiwch Hospital Services

(If you look at the photo closely you’ll see Ben Gummer had a beard at the time. Oh dear.)

Yesterday Andrew Lansley came up to Ipswich Hospital in his battle bus (more like a skirmish van, but anyway) and was met by more than sixty supporters. In this he promised that a Conservative government would give Ipswich Hospital trust status. This will be a real advance.

He’s the only shadow cabinet minister to be guaranteed to get his portfolio should the Conservatives get a majority Let’s get him in and let’s hold him to it.

The NHYes battle bus

Let’s stop Labour taking Bridge for granted

James Spencer — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:42:58 +0000

Last night I was out with a team of canvassers canvassing Bridge. We bumped into Jim Powell who was typically charming and leafleting on his own.

However we also bumped into Richard Kirby, Labour councillor for Sprites and opponent of doing anything about the Southern Cement ship noise. He had no red rosette and was coming back from Starfish on Wherstead Road (he has better taste in fish and chips than in politics).

“What are you doing here?”

“Canvassing Bridge”

“Why?”

“We only lost it by 13 votes last time.”

“Ha ha ha. You’ll never win Bridge, it’s ours.”

If Labour go back to thinking like that then Bridge will be ignored as much as it was before 2004.

That, and not my charm or Ben Gummer’s good looks, is why you should vote Conservative tomorrow.

(Actually don’t count my charm or Ben’s looks in the equation.)

Kevan Lim votes for Ben Gummer

James Spencer — Tue, 04 May 2010 22:11:12 +0000

Kevan Lim the former deputy leader of Labour in Suffolk County Council, after a lifetime of voting Labour has decided to vote for Ben Gummer.

Despite the fact that he comes from a totally different political tradition from me (although I used to be a Labour activist, but years ago) he comes up with a couple of points that I wholeheartedly agree with:

1) Like it or not we are in a big hole with this deficit, and some painful things need to be done now
2) Ben Gummer’s strongest point is not that he’s a Tory but that he’s independent minded and, let’s be honest, more than a bit mouthy
3) Mark Dyson doesn’t understand Ipswich and it’s a mystery as to why the Liberals didn’t choose a local candidate

Kevan Lim firmly remains a man of the left, but he has switched because Ben Gummer will be a stronger voice for Ipswich – not because he’s suddenly fallen in love with the Conservative Party.

Gordon Brown’s visit, can’t they get anything right?

James Spencer — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:41:57 +0000

Two poor students were going into the UCS building to get hold of a book. Little did they know that the hapless Eastern Region Labour machine were lurking for them. Worried about the average age of the audience they grabbed these two hapless students who were most definitely not Labour supporters, pinned rosettes to them and told them to stand where the TV cameras would pick them out.

All rather stupid. Even more stupid when one of them is going to put in an official complaint.