Although there is widespread recognition that Ellesmere has been a good opposition leader there is a worry that his talents are as limited as his looks.  With the departure of Andrew Cann he could be the only thing that keeps a Tory Liberal coalition going if there is a repeat of his poor performance last year where the Labour Party essentially sacrificed the Parliamentary seat to win wards in North Ipswich but still fell short on the council.  It’s fair enough to fight the Liberal Democrats hard in the election, the Tories do that in St Margarets, but not treating them as human beings in peace time has been a big mistake which has given Ipswich at least one and, arguably, two more years of Conservative leadership than it would have otherwise had. 

The rather prominent football hooligan element within the Labour group still love Ellesmere and there’s a lot of, out bound, support for him even from the sort of Labour councillor who have never felt the urge to issue drunken death threats (they do exist).  However these things can change remarkably fast, as Jeremy Pembroke could attest (the fact that Ellesmere would never talk to the Suffolk leadership may also be a mark against him, but rather oddly it’s not a complaint I’ve heard.)

I have had wind of a bigger story but frustratingly can not find any corroboration on it.  If I do, it will run.

I wonder if this is a relation to the Bryony Rudkin who poured scorn on the film theatre in the letter pages of that same newspaper a few months ago when Ben Gummer praised the enterprise? 

Flip flopping faster than a Ukrainian gymnast is a desirable quality in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

However there are others, and they are the (mostly Labour) politicians who scrupulously avoided the violence but whipped it up, and as “collateral damage”  ruined Edward Woolard’s life.  Among the guilty men are Aaron Porter who put out literature for the demonstration saying there will be a “riot” and calling for a “Demo-lition”.

To get some flavour of the Ipswich Labour Party there was John Cook who said during the demo “Challenge to Nick Clegg: Come outside and say that! Tuition fees”.  This is the former councillor and agent for Ipswich Labour Party who has some undefined role in the Ipswich Labour Party now.

Now I’m sure that Edward Woolard didn’t ruin his life because he followed John Cook’s Twitter account, but it was the stupid over-excited “by any means necessary” rhetoric that did drive him to do this.  People like John Cook have responsibilities.  I have no doubt that John Cook would do nothing in this sort of event, just encourage others and if something did happen explain it as a “joke”.  The weasel.

That he would encourage students, who would otherwise have a far more glittering career than his so far, to ruin their lives gives you the full measure of the man.  If Labour allow him to stand as councillor that will give the full measure of the Ipswich Labour Party.  Resentful, bitter and not too bright failures, and that’s before we get to John Cook.

Related articles

• Student guilty over violent demo (bbc.co.uk)
• Teenager admits throwing fire extinguisher during tuition fee protest (dailymail.co.uk)
• TUITION FEES PROTEST: Teenager Edward Woollard admits throwing fire extinguisher (dailymail.co.uk)
• Protester admits Millbank disorder (mirror.co.uk)
• The protester who ‘threw fire extinguisher at police’ in student tuition fees riot (dailymail.co.uk)

Not a single Labour politician slapped Ed Balls down, although in private both Alastair Darling and Ed Miliband have argued for a rise in VAT in cabinet.

Now Councillor Phil Smart – the Holywells Resident Councillor for Bridge Ward –  thinks we have another reason to tax those just above the minimum wage. He wants shop assistants to pay higher income taxes  to lower the train fares that people like myself and Phil Smart pay to get to work.  Both of us commute, both of us are stung by the higher fares and both of us earn above the average wage – like most commuters.

I don’t like paying higher fares, but I recognise that to get Gordon Brown’s deficit down I have to.  I also think that people like me and Phil Smart are better placed to pay to get this deficit down than a part time working mother struggling to pay child care or a pensioner with a few thousand extra a year in their work provided pension.  Phil Smart thinks that they should pay before he does.

Labour have for years been a party of white collar public sector middle managers who think that the rest of the country should revolve around them.  Phil Smart is a white collar public sector worker on an above average salary who thinks that you should continue subsidising his rail fares.

Workers of the World - Subsidise Me

It’s not only the Conservatives.  Labour thinks that the Customer Services Direct contract has absolutely nothing to do with them, as shown by the purple prose apologia from a Labour supporting writer in Ipswich Spy.

Naturally the tin foil hat brigade lapped it up with Ken Bates and Alasdair Ross retweeting the Labour defence.

The current administration have serious questions to answer on the conduct of this, and at least in Jeremy Pembroke’s case there is also the question of what role did he play during the contract negotiations and whether this blunted the opposition scrutiny that this deal clearly needed.  But this does not mean that the Liberal-Labour administration should be beyond scrutiny.

There is also a genuine concern about the general role that BT seems to play in local politics, in 2004 both the Labour leader of Suffolk Council and the MP very well disposed towards them due to personal links (not helped by an uncritical attitude from Jeremy Pembroke and supine Liberal Democrats).  This soft cross-party corporatism is never going to turn out well.  Why are Labour supporting websites such as Ipswich Spy so keen to shout down such concerns by alluding to a “right wing blogosphere”?

“If I can get the service delivered for less money…”

“No ifs”

“But what if preserving union staff means cutting frontline delivery?”

“No buts”

“But people are hurting at the moment and will vote out anyone proposing a council tax hike and a rise in council rents just to save a couple of council middle managers from manning a call centre.”

“No public sector cuts.”

This chant works well when talking about “education cuts”.  After all you can say that media studies courses are in the same class as primary schools, hospitals and foreign aid.  Or you could say that teaching Tamara Art History is an investment in our future.

You can’t say this about the whole of the public sector.  It’s moronic.

It is about the only strategy that Labour could follow in mid term that could set them back in council seats.  In the 1980s and 1990s the only time and places where the Tories would win significantly on a local level would be when they proposed significantly lower local taxes than their rivals, even if that meant that the tax rate would be the same.  I suppose Miliband could privately raise the money for a task force to take the Falklands in order to hand them back to Argentina, that would be less popular than the raising council tax to pay for street football co-ordinators, but only marginally.

The Conservatives on Suffolk County Council have set a trap for Labour locally, portray them as the party of irresponsibility and special privilege.  Labour is walking into it as long as they are merely the political arm of the unions.

Would the Labour Party have fallen into this trap if Dame Bryony were leading either the Borough or the County group?

Of course as he’s a man of the left there will be some problems with what Suffolk county council are trying to do.  That’s fine.  The ideological attachment to the command and control model of council services is barmy, but it’s understandable, has some resonance and the subject for another post.  The problem is that he’s allowed the opposition to be led by the unions, when there’s simply no sense in it.

The case from the Conservatives, which has the benefit of being accurate, is that there is going to be less money coming from central government, the council tax payers will not put up with massive and regressive tax rises at this time and that the only alternative is to cut the administration or the front line services.

So if the alternatives are cutting the administration or the front line services, the unions say don’t cut the administration.  Which is their job.  However it is not the job of the Labour Party to say cut the services to preserve the union members.

The public sector unions are like fox hunters are to the conservative party – a great source of activists and funds but an utterly dependent source.  The fox hunters have no sizeable set of political friends outside the Conservative Party and the Conservatives and the fox hunters are quite aware of the damage that the fox hunting issue could do if the public actually voted on it.  The Labour Party is going to learn this lesson about the public sector unions in a far more brutal way.

Labour in Suffolk can’t afford to let Jeremy Pembroke say that his way is the only way to preserve services.

So on to party donors, and why this demonstrates my point.  A fascinating piece on Conservative Home shows the issue for Labour:

Total donations (cash and non-cash) received by the main parties between July and September were:

• Conservatives -  £3,695,947
• Labour – £2,317,723*
• UKIP – £454,234
• Lib Dems – £350,645

* £1,903,949 of Labour’s funding came from trade unions, of which the bulk came from four unions:

Now on one level that doesn’t matter as Labour are coming a respectable second to the Tories in the brute fund raising.  It’s an important number, but it shows Labour in a different light if the union donations are stripped out (I’m also stripping out the Tory donation from David Rowland):

Conservatives -  £2,629,980

Labour – £413,774

UKIP – £454,234

Lib Dems – £350,645

That’s lower than UKIP (and Tories should watch UKIP closely, as they ain’t taking Labour votes and donors).  That’s a worrying weakness.  But it’s not my main point.

The main point is that the unions have been treated reasonably shabbily by Red Miliband since he came in with their votes.  Not dreadfully but rather shabbily.  And yet they still give money.  As they did through the Blair years, when they were treated shabbily in the first two terms.

The Labour Party can take the unions for granted, the unions can – and from a political point should – be treated like dirt in the next few years.  And they will learn to be grateful, as they’ve got no where else to go.  The fact that Sandy Martin is treating the unions as masters and not servants is a catastrophic lack of judgement.  And one that will mean that Labour could still have a minority from the Ipswich delegation at the next County Council.

Related articles

• Suffolk council plans to outsource virtually all services (guardian.co.uk)
• Council to ‘outsource everything’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Len McCluskey’s election strengthens both Labour and trade unionism | Seumas Milne (guardian.co.uk)

A conservative councillor has emailed me disagreeing with my contention that John Cook has given up on Norwich North and is aiming for the Labour nomination in Ipswich pointing to this video from Ed Balls:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRmQrDRMQdg

I discount this because Ed Balls is a bit of a prat.  After all despite the fact he’s lived in East Anglia until he started boarding at public school (common ground with Chris Mole) he still put Colchester in Suffolk – 3 seconds into the video.  John Cook’s face is a picture when he hears that.

The contest is obviously hotting up as I had another email from someone who’s on better terms with the Ipswich Labour party than most Tory councillors who’s pointing to Sandy Martin as the black horse in this campaign.  He didn’t even mention John Cook, or for that matter Chris Mole.  David Ellesmere is apparently the front runner (why? he’s like Sandy Martin without the charm) and Bryony Rudkin running second or third according to where you view Councillor Martin.  I think ruling out either Mole or Cook is foolhardy.  Although if Ipswich Labour Party does go into special measures then this could be a way to bring in an outside candidate.

Speaking of rubbish, I was pleased to see the election court in Oldham and Saddleworth find Labour’s Phil Woolas guilty of lying.  Not that he saw fit to apologize.

True, politicians are not famous for giving straight answers.  But they should at least apologize when they are proved wrong.  For instance, at the last election, thousands of leaflets were put out in Ipswich scaring some very vulnerable people about what a Conservative government would do.  None of them had even a glancing relationship with the truth.  One of the most effective was the “warning” that we would cut the Winter Fuel Allowance for pensioners.  I know how this worried people, as I had to answer concerned pensioners across the town who brought the issue up on the doorstep.

Well, just as we promised at the time – repeatedly – the Allowance has stayed.  Will Ipswich Labour apologize?  I won’t hold my breath.

I’m certainly not putting the previous article up “Time we learned from Europe”.  Harrumph.  It was about leaning from Germany.

(There is a massive issue of political free speech in the Woolas judgement, and it was the wrong judgement.  But politicians such as David Ellesmere and John Cook do need to stop lying so much.)

Related articles

• Oldham East & Saddleworth: It’s already on (libdemvoice.org)
• The JC and the Phil Woolas affair (thejc.com)
• Woolas loses seat as MP in ruling (mirror.co.uk)
• Phil Woolas: what the judges said (telegraph.co.uk)
• Woolas rival ‘risked everything’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Phil Woolas is Labour’s fall guy | Dan Hodges (guardian.co.uk)
• Phil Woolas to launch legal challenge next week (telegraph.co.uk)
• Court to rule on Woolas election (bbc.co.uk)
• “+++Breaking News Woolas election declared void – new election in Oldham East and Saddleworth” and related posts (carons-musings.blogspot.com)
• Phil Woolas: ‘Gone but not forgotten’ (bbc.co.uk)
• 7 in 10 voters back decision to unseat Phil Woolas (newstatesman.com)
• Labour ‘had to act’ over Woolas (bbc.co.uk)
• The Phil Woolas affair is about the soul of the Labour party | Sunny Hundal (guardian.co.uk)
• Phil Woolas guilty (sluggerotoole.com)

"Right after you comrades". Incitement to violence by the NUS. From Guido Fawkes.

So John Cook says on Twitter “Challenge to Nick Clegg: Come outside and say that! Tuition fees, #demo2010#pmqs” and is, as far as we know, unmolested for threatening physical violence to the deputy Prime Minister (I know it’s not a serious threat, in John’s current physical condition he’d lose to Nick Clegg – in fact he’d be out fought by a toothless declawed cat).  However Paul Chambers has lost an appeal after being convicted on anti-terrorism charge for “threatening” to blow up Robin Hood airport and Gareth Compton has been questioned under caution for calling for the stoning of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a prosecution egged on by liberal journalists.

This was a specious lead.  I don’t want John Cook in prison, no matter how foul and thuggish his utterances are.  There are two reasons I wanted to bring this up.

Firstly it’s not yet clear whether “John” is “4NorwichNrth” or “4Ipswich”.  His loyalties seem divided, as I predicted they would be.

Secondly, and more importantly, the links between Labour and the riots should not be underestimated.  The NUS is run by a coterie of student politicians who, like go on to become Labour MPs.  Just ask Jack Straw, Phil “send ‘em home” Woolas, Stephen Twigg, Lorna Fitzsimmons and Jim Murphy (who in my Labour Student days I remember being told was very, very thick – and in Labour student politics there’s not exactly a high bar).  Those names were on the top of my head, I’m sure Google would find a clutch more.

The NUS leadership, chock full of Labour would be politicians, has approved literature calling for a “Demo-lition” and a “riot” yet when their rhetoric comes real, encouraged by NUS stewards, the NUS president simply says that he abhors the violence and that’s it.  No questioning of him or his executive for bussing in 50,000 students (telling the police it would be 15,000) and then calling for a “riot” in their literature.  In Parliament he is defended by thuggish Labour MPs like Ed Balls.

Yet in the meantime there are a number of lesser, poorly connected students, who’ve been encouraged into this criminal behaviour.  Their pictures are blasted over the internet and many of them will probably end up with criminal records.  In some cases their life will be  ruined due to this Student Grant type posturing of these want to be MPs.  Is there any sympathy for this human tragedy, and any anger against the pathetic people such as Aaron Porter and John Cook (4NorwichNrth) who whipped them up and then slink away saying “we didn’t mean THAT”?  Of course the vandals should be investigated, but so should the NUS leadership.

No.  In Parliament the sympathy is for the student leaders, with Ed Balls talking about “a small minority of thugs” while missing out on the NUS leadership calling for a “riot”.

It’s time for the Labour leadership to suspend all NUS NEC members from the party and to launch an investigation.  While they’re at it, people who are publicly identified with the party and who endorsed student violence, even if its a rather pathetic tweet, should also be suspended and investigated.  If Labour do that then we know that they are serious at dealing with physical violence against their opponents.

If they don’t, they are endorsing it – just like John Cook did.

Related articles

• You: Tory councillor arrested over tweet (guardian.co.uk)
• Twitter ‘stoning’ jibe from Conservative MP to be reported to police (guardian.co.uk)
• Legal system cracking down on Twitter use (v3.co.uk)
• Don’t arrest me! It’s only a tweet (guardian.co.uk)
• Labour ‘had to act’ over Woolas (bbc.co.uk)
• Phil Woolas to launch legal challenge next week (telegraph.co.uk)
• John Rentoul: Lies, damned lies, and Phil Woolas (independent.co.uk)
• We don’t need the law to tackle Twitter bigots (newstatesman.com)
• Tory councillor Gareth Compton arrested over Twitter ‘stoning’ tweet about Yasmin Alibai-Brown (telegraph.co.uk)
• Labour’s neanderthal tendencies (newstatesman.com)