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.

I received this today from Councillor Alasdair Ross, the Games Master at Ipswich School:

James
This local candidate issue does not stand up to scrutiny- I live in Rushmere and I am the Cllr for the ward- unlike Mrs Terry or Smith who both live outside the ward, but Mrs Smith is a great local Cllr, so are people that bothered? And before you keep going on about Cllr Smart – sort out your own party- Cllr Pope lives in East Ipswich but represents Stoke Park, I think you will find that is further way than Cllr’s Smart and Rudkin. even in Bixley the safest Tory seat, only one of the Cllr’s lives in the ward.

Well let’s ignore the fact that it was apparently Soo Smart, Mrs Philip Smart, who brought up the question.

The fight for Bridge will be within the ward, not in Bixley. Yes I do believe that local councillors are better. And that does put me at odds with many in my own party (not for the first time),

All politics is local. It is not about party. Party is important but one of Alasdair Ross’s (and Philip Smart’s) abiding failures is their inability to see that the party should come behind their duty to their constituents. A long way behind.

The party is simply a label. I believe in low council tax, economic growth, efficient services and strong families. The Conservative Party by and large believe in these things too, and so it is a good label for me. If I stand under the Conservative banner then people know where I’m coming from.

However, it is merely a label. What is most important is representing your patch. Although I don’t doubt that Philip Smart cares about Bridge, I don’t believe that he originally chose Bridge because of the links he had with the place. I’d love to be proven wrong. And as for Dame Bryony…

I simply think that a person is not as good a representative if they don’t live in the ward, shop in the ward and socialise in the ward. This is not some silly point of contrariness this is why I’ve refused to stand outside Bridge. I don’t mind another (local) candidate taking over – well I mind quite a lot, but I’ll accept it – but I will not stand where I don’t live. And yes, writing things like this paragraph does drive other Tories in the Association to the point of distraction.

I want to represent my patch and do what’s best for my neighbours. To me that is a far higher honour than being the youngest recorded mayor of the borough or the chairman of Ipswich Buses. I know that this does not “stand up to scrutiny” if your party is more important than your constituents. If your constituents are more important than your party, then what I said makes perfect sense.

A story reaches me about the small business hustings at the General Election.

A questioner asked whether the General Election candidates lived in the Ipswich Constituency. Chris Mole answered that he had been around for thirty years. Ben Gummer said that he was living in the constituency and had been in Suffolk all his life. Mark Dyson (who’s now left the scene) came out with some waffle about Battersea being like Bristol being like Ipswich.

An interesting question, and I wasn’t at the hustings so it wasn’t my particular obsession coming out again. Or was it?

The questioner was Susan Smart, who runs a successful design agency Double S Designs. She’s probably better known to readers as Mrs Philip Smart, the wife of the youngest mayor of Ipswich, Labour transport spokesman, former chairman of Ipswich Buses and proud resident of Holywells Ward. Oh, and a councillor for Bridge Ward, I suppose he needs a platform and Bridge was as good a safe seat as any when he started.

So is this a guilty conscience, or a nagging fear?

Whoever the Conservative candidate for Bridge is at the next borough election I’m going to move heaven and earth to make sure he or she lives in the ward. Can Labour promise the same?

As it’s Philip Smart’s turn to be up for re-election, that will be an interesting question.

Labour activists have a strange attitude to the white working class. This was shown when Gordon Brown called an innocent Labour voting pensioner a “bigot” for daring to ask him questions about the effects of Eastern European immigration.

This will be placed as a question of the Prime Minister’s two-faced nature and his temper. Perhaps it will stretch to questions about Brown’s, ahem, mental stability or the judgement of Labour MPs like Chris Mole who know Brown one hundred times better than we do and who still wanted him as leader of their party. Those are all questions that should be asked, but frankly they are not the most worrying question.

The fact is that middle class Labour activists treat the white English working class with horror. They may think that they speak for them, they may depend on them for their votes and they may even pretend to be like them.

However they can not stand the views of the working class, and they genuinely do regard them as bigoted. This is especially so with immigration. What is in effect a narrow sectional interest – a desire for cheaper restaurants, gardeners and nannies – is transformed into a moral crusade and everyone else has to knuckle down.

When this hurts the loyal white working class, then there is no real sympathy. Obviously if you have been on the doorstep you know that the feeling is intense compared to ten years ago, and curiously non-racial. There is just a feeling that unchecked immigration has lowered wages, raised rents and put a strain on services.

When the white working class complain about immigration they are not calling for an all white Britain but some control over their circumstances. The problem is that from Corder Road or Severn Road this looks like bigotry. In most cases when the class interests of the representatives differ from the clearly expressed interest of those that they wish to represent, the representatives knuckle down and, well, represent.

This has been turned on its head. The people have to be “led”. God help them.

I am just about old enough to remember the 1980s and nerdish enough to have cared about politics (and from a left wing perspective). When the Labour Party was in opposition they cared about the waste of unemployment. Although it’s clear that if it wasn’t for Thatcher’s medicine (and Healey’s before that) the country would have gone bankrupt, they had a point. Even though there really was no alternative, this critique of Thatcherism was self-evidently right – even if it missed the other parts of the picture.

So how much do Labour care for jobs when they are are in power? Although Labour have actually started to address immigration some old time Labour hacks do think that any protection of the working class through control of immigration must be dismissed as pandering to the BNP. However the issue is not what some ex-members think, but the sheer amount of time for Labour to look at immigration as an unsustainable economic boom did not lead to higher wages for the worst off – the very section of society that Labour was formed to protect and advance. This party was saying that there was “no natural limit” for the amount of people coming in, which makes sense if you own rather than rent your own house in Corder or Severn road and the gardener looks like they’re putting up their rate.

So we move to Tesco. Here are up to 900 jobs being created within walking or cycling distance from every bit of Bridge ward. I know a large number of people who’ve lost their job recently, I was one of them, and many of these people were not as lucky as I was to get a new (albeit less well paid) job quite quickly. The Tesco jobs will not be dream jobs but they still pay good money.

So where are Labour on this? Well it’s electorally popular to bash economic development, and this is what Labour did – they voted against it. This included Bridge Ward councillor Comrade Philip Smart. This was even though the planning committee is not allowed a party whip, so there’s no excuse there. And this development disproportionately helps Bridge because a major employer is opening on our doorstep and we have some of the worst long term unemployment in the country.

No, simply put Phil Smart thought that the people who were rightly worried about an increase in traffic down Belstead Road were more important than those worried about their home being repossessed because they didn’t have a job, or those who’s sense of self respect was going one slow drawn out day after the next. The people, I would have thought, that Labour was designed to protect and advance – the people that Phil Smart, who is a decent man when you strip out the partisanship, joined the Labour party to help.

Maybe the people worried about traffic volume are more likely to switch their vote (and to vote at all) than people who are being encouraged to go on one scheme after another to get them off Jobseeker’s allowance. Perhaps.

But we need the jobs. Every day spent canvassing in Bridge means that I will meet at least one more able bodied person who wants a job but has through some sleight of hand been taken off the unemployment register. Tesco offers a way out for some of them.

They may not vote. If they do vote they may never consider voting for a Tory. But I didn’t go into politics to make their life worse and if there is an opportunity to make it better I will take it. Labour will only do so when the votes stack up. That’s why they need a rest.

I’m going to spend most of this post annoying my Labour supporting readers, so I might as well start by annoying the Tories.  The worst election for the Tories was not 1997, but 1992.  They needed a time in opposition and the win in 1992 convinced them that they were invincible.  The lost their humility, and when you lose that you start to lose a grip on your humanity as well.

Labour’s at that point.  If they scrape a win this time they could finish their party off They have lost their humility and humanity and are not fit to direct a parking bay let alone the country.

This little gem from Ipswich Spy shows why we need to have another turn of the wheel.  Labour clearly think government is a freehold rather than a leasehold position.  Not in a democracy it ain’t.

Let’s miss the brouhaha about whether the Labour were at a group meeting or leafleting, it’s perfectly possible to be doing both.  It’s hardly relevant.

What is that there seems to be no humility in their response.  It is possible for both sides to make mistakes.  The Labour councillors for Bridge ward clearly made a mistake here.  Three councillors aren’t needed at a group meeting when two could go.  Councillor Philip Smart would have been told about this meeting as he was a member of the Ipswich Transport  Society, as Ross seems to admit to Ipswich Spy (if either Ross or Ipswich Spy want to send a copy of the email I’d be glad to publish it here).  Did he not see the importance, did he forget?  Who knows.  He made a mistake.  He should have fessed up.  I hope I would have been a big enough man to do so.

But no, it was spin instead. 

Now they claim (or Ipswich spy claims that they claim) that members of the public could not go along to the meeting with First Eastern.  But I was a member of the public.  I was there.   I paid £2.50 to get in.  So did the Wherstead Road residents.  What Alasdair Ross claimed was not true. It was the direct opposite of the truth. What is true is that the councillors made a mistake.  It’s not the original mistake that kills you, it’s the cover up.

This is boring.  Trying to spin your way out of what was clearly a stupid mistake born of complacency, a mistake that Labour has made time and again with Bridge is why we need a real alternative in Bridge.  The fact that the Labour party from the lowliest councillor to the Prime Minister himself need to simply learn humility shows that they need a rest.  It’s time to go in opposition and let the Tories get complacent, forgetful and rusty.

I was at the Wherstead Road Residents Association reporting the committee on what I’ve been doing on the buses and the noise yesterday and having almost got run over crossing the road it seems clear that the road needs a crossing.

This is something that the committee are clear on, in fact the Association has been requesting that since the 1970s (they’re not quitters).  This could, if sited in the right part of the road also slow down the traffic and discourage the lorries that Ipswich Council when under the Labour party encouraged when they stopped the roads being built for the east bank.

The tragedy is that if Bridge was a ward that was marginal when the council were looking at the decision then the interests of the ward would not have been so cavalierly overlooked.  There are only three people who benefit from Bridge being a safe ward, the councillors, and two of them don’t even like Bridge enough to live in it.

The Lib Dems are a strang bunch, but this is probably odder than normal.  A Lib Dem councillor in Hampshire has seen aliens, in the local shopping centre (thanks to Paul Staines for that little gem.  Believing in aliens in your back garden is fairly odd, you’d think.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall you’d also think that it was odd to believe that the Soviet Union was better run than Britain, but as recently released Soviet archives now show a whole swathe of senior Labour Party officials did, despite what they said at the time.  To get on in the Labour Party in the late 1970s and especially after the SDP left in the early 1980s it helped to be either pro-Soviet or ambivalent about the crushing weight on the human spirit that was expansionist communism.

So which political figures in Bridge Ward did well in the loony left early 1980s.  Why step forward Councillors Jim Powell and Phil Smart who first became councillors in 1982 and 1983 respectively, the time when the Labour Party was clinically insane (and it turns out a large chunk of its leadership, including the genial liar Michael Foot, were treating with the enemy). 

It would be interesting to know who they thought was worse, Thatcher or Brezhnev.

The Bell Inn had the most Labour posters (3) of any building in Bridge Ward at the County Council elections.  That’s a sad fact that I suspect a lot of people don’t know.  A sadder fact is that we had as many Tory posters up.  Two of the ward’s Labour councillors have larger houses than I do, and I’m sure they’ve put up loads of posters but as they don’t live in the ward they can’t enter this rather nerdy competition.

I wondered why this soon to be derelict pub would do that.  I still don’t know.

However this ia a more interesting fact.  The Bell Inn will be gutted and is applying to become a Sports Bar.

Bridge has Labour councillor Phil Smart on the planning committee.  It will be interesting to see if he feels that he can vote on whether one of Labour’s biggest backers in Bridge should be able to gut the oldest pub in Ipswich to provide some godawful copy of the Drum & Monkey.

Just finished the noise meeting which was quite productive.  There were about 150 people there.

Some of the highlights:

• No one from Southern Cement wanted to speak or identify themselves, which was expected.  No one from the Port of Ipswich did either, which was disappointing.
• There are plenty of people outside the Noise Action Group who are very angry.  If Southern Cement and Uniland think that these people won’t cause problems if they’re snubbed, then Associated British Ports after the animal rights protests will have a different idea.  Dialogue with the Noise Action Group will keep hot heads cool.
• It was nice of Chris Mole to turn up, but he gave a poor speech.
• Phil Smart gave a better speech than Chris Mole, and had the germ of a good idea with getting residents to talk to the port in general.
• There were lots of ideas for quietening the operation, some better than others.
• Nadia Cenci, who suffers from the noise, gave a great speech, asking not why, but how, to sue Southern Cement and Associated British Ports to close them down.  Again this is another worse alternative than dialogue.
• There are people miles away who hear this.  We knew that, but we found more.
• The dust is an emerging issue which is angering a lot of
• Council officers sounded well and truly peeved with Southern Cement’s refusal to talk to residents.  After all at times they were being abused because Southern Cement won’t talk.
• Only one person refused to give their contact details at the end of the meeting.

So Southern Cement, I know that you read this blog, and I know you want a way out.  It’s d-i-a-l-o-g-u-e .  It’s better than being shut down.