Entries Tagged 'Ipswich blogs' ↓

I haven’t done one of these in ages.  I decided to go through the last months search results to see the biggest hits:

* bridge ward news
* stoke hall
* ipswich underground railway
* ipswich underground
* ben gummer
* bridgeward.org.uk
* bridgeward
* maidenhall residents association ipswich
* lord spring
* joyce windows
* ipswich bus to wherstead
* Bryony Rudkin
* bridgewardnews
* bridge ward social club
* wherstead road assosiation
* bridgeward club ipswich
* route 66 presentation

Stoke Hall and Lord Spring are two surprises, Ipswich Underground most certainly is not.   Only one councillor in this (rather extended) list.  Seriously, if you want to get hits on an Ipswich based blog, talk about a non-existent underground railway.

I’ll look at the more random results in a later post.  They are far funnier than this lot.

What is it with Labour councillors and setting up straw men?  A straw man is a characterisation of another person’s argument that (a) isn’t actually espoused by the other side and (b) quite easy to refute.  It’s usually the sign of a weak argument on one’s own side.

So we have Alastair Ross’s piece (well comment)  in Ipswich Spy where he says “Watching BBC News last week – the Thatcher myth was exposed – she signed away more to Europe than any other PM – Tories trying to re write history.”  Of course we can ask whether that means he approves of Thatcher or Eurosceptacism, but he’d probably need time to get the right groupthink.

I’m not sure what myths Labour believe in, but most Tories who know any history are quite aware that Thatcher campaigned in 1975 to keep us in the EEC and signed the Single European Act in 1985.  To be fair she actually admitted she got that last one wrong – and I can’t think of anything apart from the Millenium Dome that either of the last two ex-Prime Ministers admitted to getting wrong.

But this was at a time when the country was having trouble economically reforming itself as well as having to help keep Western Europe together in the Cold War.  Thatcher managed to reform the country and the Soviet Union imploded.  By 1989 circumstances had changed – and so resistance to the European integration rose to such a point that Margaret Thatcher was overthrown in a coup very largely led by true Federalist believers – including Ben Gummer’s dad.

That’s why Thatcher was in favour of supporting the European project up until the late 1980s and why she changed afterwards.  She may have been (with hindsight she was) wrong, but she had a perfectly coherant viewpoint.  There was also the fact that at least in the 1970s the European project was less ambitious – at least in public.

So deal all you like with myths, Councillor Ross, I prefer to deal in facts.

I wasn’t there, again.  We did, for a change, have a couple of Bridge Ward councillors including Dame Bryony visiting from St Margaret’s.  We also had the irrepresible Kevin Algar.

He has a report of the event which shows the strength of the blogosphere at exposing the humbug of our rulers and betters:

There were some complaints about street lights going off at midnight during which time Former Suffolk County Council Leader, Bryony Rudkin mentioned about a street light being on during the day near her house in leafy Saint Margaret’s. (Though she didn’t mention that she lived in Saint Margaret’s) If the former leader of the Council doesn’t know what to do, who does? Except she does know what to do because someone by the name of St Margaret’s Ward Labour Party reported it here on Sunday. I wonder if the Saint Margaret’s Ward Labour party has a lot of members. Going by the amount of votes they got recently, I don’t reckon. I found the alias of Saint Margaret’s Ward Labour Party amusing, hence when I saw the street lights day burning in Elliott Street earlier, I had an idea here

Pure genius.

Ipswich Spy claims loftily float above agendas by keeping itself anonymous.  At Bridge Ward News we think it’s poppycock.  It simply means that the agenda is hidden.

Take this message about John Carnall.  Now I once had a voter who was not in Cllr Carnall’s ward telling me that they did not like him (although he was not the leader at the time).  And that’s it.  I once had someone telling me that something Liz Harsant said about unitary status had annoyed them.  I don’t remember if this was in Holywells, but I don’t think that it was.  But that we two years ago.

I’ve heard plenty of people talking about councillors when it’s the councillor’s ward.  But nothing outside of the ward.  This may change with the plethora of newspaper columns, but I haven’t seen this effect.

So why this idea that getting rid of John Carnall would improve the fortunes of the Tories?  I have no idea.

This is the same Ipswich Spy that says that the Tories should forget about Europe, a subject that certainly comes up on doorsteps – less than immigration but more than fuel duty – and an issue where you can barely tell the difference between the settled view of the General Public and the Tory backbench view (sadly not our Tory backbencher’s view).  Instead, says the Spy, we should all concentrate on throwing each other out of windows.

Now I can imagine if I were running an anonymous blog that I would be calling for the Labour Party to stop wasting their time on the NHS and to instead launch into a series of pointless fratricidal disputes.  But then I’m a Tory supporter and want the Labour Party to do badly.

What’s the Spy’s excuse?

I expected the local politics scene in Ipswich to explode with blogs when I started blogging.  Back then the only ongoing blogs were Alasdair Ross, Andy Coates and Pan Scourer.  I think I was the first Tory blogger, now there are three others.  But the growth has not been explosive.  The left have added Ipswich Spy (although in traffic they are the monster of the blogs they are less partisan than the other left wing blogs), and for a while Paul Geater of the Morning Evening Star looked like he was going to blog for Labour, but event that didn’t pan out.  The local left seem to be good at twitter, but just don’t seem to have the attention span necessary for blogging, which is surprising as apologies are usually more than 140 characters and they’ll need a lot of them.

We now have a new blog from Councillor Ken Bates who is going to be the first active Lib Dem blog (my former Bridge Ward opponent Ric Hardacre’s blog seems to have gone entirely to twitter now).  Good luck Ken.

Thanks to Gavin Maclure for pointing this out.

Ipswich Spy can dish it out, but they can’t take it, even anonymously.

Comments that were there in the morning from this humble blog questioning their motivation for their repeated attacks on Ben Gummer for him wondering why we need to spend more than any other country on legal aid for not much return seems to have been taken down.  In one of these cases it was the only comment.  

Obviously they feel very secure in their arguments.  It comes from being anonymous you see.

UPDATE:  This just in from Ipswich Spy:

Just checked and for some reason the pingbacks had gone into the spam folder. We don’t censor our comments unless they are potentially libellous. Of course we allow comments. Unlike Bridge Ward News.

Ipswich Spy has had not just one, but two, attacks on Ben Gummer for his article on legal aid cuts.

Now I have my concerns here, as Ben is clearly acting as a proxy for Ken Clarke whose carefully crafted bluff charisma hides the lazy assumptions of conservatism for the comfortable classes with views views on crime, Europe and hatred of anything associated with the Daily Mail that would gradually consign the Conservative Party to minor party status as everyone in the bottom three income quartiles (including me) deserts the party.  The fact that Labour members almost always have something nice to say about Clarke should be a massive clue here.  Ben Gummer may be a long standing friend with Ken Clarke, but he should be using that friendship to steer the Wets towards the population’s views on Europe and crime (as to his credit he is doing on immigration) and not to fruitlessly try and bring the electorate round to views that offend the common sense of almost anyone who earns less than six figures a year.

However on the issue of legal aid Ken Clarke, and Ben Gummer, has a point.  We do manage to spend more on legal aid than almost any other first world country with little to show for it in terms of access to justice.  It is great for the beneficiaries, but as anyone who has been in a legal dispute with someone who can summon up legal aid on very shaky grounds knows – as I have twice - that there is no resolve to settle cases by mediation, just an endless stream of letters paid for by your taxes mocking you (and not very subtly) for the fact that every letter they send you is coming out of your PAYE and every letter you send back is coming out of your savings. 

Legal aid serves the feckless, the very rich (such as the spawn of the Labour crook, Ipswich asset stripper and pension thief Robert Maxwell) and surprisingly few lawyers very, very well.  For those who work it is yet another way the welfare state has found to make our lives harder and to show its contempt on anyone who contributes to society.  Legal aid is not the main reason why we have fewer “hard working families” than we did fourteen or forty years ago, but it is part of the panopoly of state disincentives for doing the right things in life.

I’m sure that this is not Ken Clarke’s reasoning, it sounds a bit Daily Mail, but the country’s best newspaper and the great unelectable are aligning at the right place here.

Which  brings us to the Spy.  Why are they attacking Ben Gummer?  Are they somehow a beneficiary of legal aid?  Are they a third rate solicitor that generates a large income from spurious contests to wills and mean spirtited custody battles funded by the opposite party through their taxes?  Why is the Spy so intent on gleefully rubbing our noses in the vomit of the parasitical classes?

Of course the Spy tells us that we cannot know and should not ask.  They sit in judgement of us named mortals in the same disinterested way as philosopher kings.  They have, they assure us, a pure interest in our welfare that is uncontaminated by something as low as personal experience.

But that is not how the world works.  We are shaped by our personal experiences, and we can’t get around that.  The way to deal with this is to tell people what our personal experiences are and to then let our listeners decide as to whether we are informed or blinkered by them.  Ipswich Spy has three choices here, to be honest about why they feel so out of tune with the rest of the country, to pipe down on an issue they clearly care about or to allow someone to join the dots together and to expose the people behind the blog. 

This would be a shame as the Spy is an interesting voice in the Ipswich blog world and has brought a coherance and shape to the Ipswich political blog scene that it never had before. 

Ipswich Spy should not, however, be anonymous – and this is one of the many reasons why.  The price they have to pay is self censorship.

Kevin Algar cries out that class does not matter claiming that he is a one nation Tory.  I’m about as much as a one nation Tory as the Ipswich Labour Party is working class, and they’re only working class if you count the Tories as working class, ie they hold down a job.

But that’s (intentionally) meaningless tosh. If you hold the standard sociological view of the working class the Labour Party was heavily (although not overwhelmingly) working class until the early 1970s and from that point on it has been going through embourgoisement until it is significantly more middle class not just compared to it’s electorate, but also to the whole electorate and even the portion of the electorate who vote against them. This goes from Andy Coates through Sandy Martin to Bryony Rudkin. The reason why the Labour Party is so bloody awful when running anything in Ipswich or Suffolk is because they think that the interests of their narrow social group – the white collar public sector – are identical to the interests of Ipswich. This is why local Labour councillors think that it is better to cut front line services than to cut back office staff.

It hurts their friends to cut the staff, so they don’t notice that it hurts their constituents to cut the services.

So class does matter, and it’s not simply a matter for Marxists.  The social make up of the Labour Party and their councillors, and just where they earn their living, is the key to why they will appear so callous over the next two years.

Alasdair Ross, the rugby coach at the very expensive Ipswich School, is not a man known for his manners but his latest post shows a nasty and intolerant snobbishness which betrays how Labour feel when they are rattled.  It is all very well for middle class people to speak up in favour of the Tories, it seems, indeed he’s almost obsequious about this blog saying that a couple of my posts are thought provoking although the higher praise is when he mentions my habit of “calling councillors stupid names”.  But I’m middle class (although from a left wing family) and so I have a licence to be right.  The working class, in whose name the private school rugby coach presumes to speak, have no such rights.

However the post is merely a long lead up to sticking the boot into Kevin Algar, of a Riverside View, a man who has done an immense amount of decent local blogging particularly in regard to the threatened closure of the Iceni centre.  What is Kevin’s crime?  To indulge in banter that may hurt the over inflated ego of a Labour councillors by commenting on her (lack of) attractiveness.

But Kevin’s crime is being working class and being an intelligent and independent minded Tory (his latest post is a full throated attack on Cameron, you never see a murmur of dissent in the Ross blog).  Labour really don’t like being answered back.  Why this prickly attitude?

The Ipswich Labour Party, like the rest of the country, has seen working class activists and supporters leave while the middle class support has been quite solid – and so they have seen the white collar public sector dominate their party.  Some of them know that this is going to lead to weird and in the long term undesireable results – such as the support of the anti-all-cuts demonstrations.  Most of them don’t but have a general unease.  Which means that they will strike out when they see what they fear most – a working class man with a library card.

The Battle of the Anoraks, sorry Ipswich political blogs
OK, this is a quick and (very) dirty break down of the influence of blogs. But there are three blogs, all of whom who have linked to me, and only recently, and I thought it would be interesting to compare the number of incoming links.

Ipswich Spy 105
Tendance Coatsey 17
Alasdair Ross 1

Now, I know that this is not perfect. Ipswich Spy has mentioned me a few times although I’m way down on the side bar. I tried to get in as a Conservative link because, well, I’m sad and I saw that the Conservatives were much higher. It should also be pointed out that it is only recently that
The Ben Gummer local links page sent me 30 hits, but I’ve been on there for a much longer time.