Sorry to go on about this but the Customer Service Direct contract is looking more expensive every time it gets revisited.  Just to put it in context the overspend is more than two times this year’s savings.  Some of that overspend may genuinely be extra services that weren’t envisioned at the time that the council signed it, but few people who were not tied to it think it makes up the majority of the overspend.

As Ipswich Spy have proved the remnants of the Suffolk Labour led regime are remarkably complacent about this.  Paraphrasing former senior comrade Julian Swainson, Ipswich Spy said “As our eagle eyed reader from up Norfolk way pointed out, the big problem with the CSD contract is the lack of scrutiny of the contract since 2005.”  Even as partisan sniping that fails, as a Labour opposition would be a crucial part of that scrutiny.

And that’s before pointing out that despite Jeremy Pembroke’s other failings, at least he made sure a County Councillor was named to the board, something that doesn’t seem to have been a priority when the red flag was flying over County Hall.

As Ipswich Spy has pointed out Ben Gummer has made his maiden speech. Having been scooped on this I thought I could at least point everyone to the video here of their MP’s speech. It is 19 hours 38 minutes and 40 seconds into the debate, and the text is here. He’s also starting to intervene, as this clever contribution shows.

It’s a far more spiky maiden speech than you would expect, partly because instead of attacking the Labour Party he’s attacking those with reservations about cutting back on short sentences, who are in both the main parties. He says “I hope that those who wish to oppose the reforms that are necessary understand that to do so would be to condemn families, victims, perpetrators and communities to the repeated misery that we now have a golden opportunity to prise ourselves away from.”

I’m not sure that this is the intention of people as far apart as Michael Howard, Ed Balls and David Davis. Prison keeps bad people off the street, something that penal reformers have never really addressed convincingly. When they do they will win the argument easily. And they’ve not been winning the argument.

UPDATE: Conservative Home also have a piece on the maiden speech, with trenchant comments

[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.

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.

The former National Socialists of the BNP are attracting a lot of excitement. The courageous anonymous bloggers of Ipswich Spy have openly stated that they will censor any mention of the BNP and their candidate (except that a few posts later they didn’t) and Andrew Coates accuses Ben Gummer, Chris Mole and this website of the crime of understanding.

Both of these strategies are based on encouraging ignorance and that’s probably not going to work.

The first thing is that the people who vote for the BNP are in most cases not members, activists or even core supporters. The voters have to be engaged. Andrew Coates has a strange view of the working class when he reads himself in as a member and he reads out anyone who has ever voted for the BNP.

The BNP voters that I’ve met are largely people who believe that they have been hurt by the increased job competition, increase in house prices and rents and the crowding out of public services that have been bought about by immigration. And in most cases they have. Until recently both parties, for different reasons, largely avoided this area while it shot to the top of people’s concerns. It was this avoidance of the topic that fed the rise of the BNP.

Is Immigration too high? Asking that question is not playing to the BNP. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.

The Rock Against Racism and Blair Peach demonstrations of the 1970s did nothing to combat the National Front who grew throughout the high point of activity and everything to boost the esteem of middle class leftists. It was Maggie Thatcher’s “swamped” comments and some actually reasonably tough immigration policies that broke the back of an emerging fascist electoral force. Chris Mole is right to emulate Maggie.

The BNP can’t be beaten by an appeal to ignorance. The fact that two left leaning blogs think that it can says more about the poverty of their world view than any facts on the ground or light of experience.

Alasdair Ross and Bridge Ward News have competition for partisan spite, and this time from a supposedly non partisan source. Ipswich Spy have come all guns blazing at a Social Action Day because it was picking up litter and wasn’t at a soup kitchen. As Ipswich Spy are supposed to be anonymous then we’ll have to assume that they were out manning the soup kitchens on Good Friday themselves barely leaving them to post five (yes, five) times on Good Friday.

Personally I didn’t take part in this because as a Catholic I tend to get all Sabbatarian on Good Friday and try to avoid anything that doesn’t make me a bit miserable. That’s why you got no blog posts yesterday However any other day of the year and I would have been out. These things are important. Only a Banksy buying Guardian reading Labour activist wouldn’t understand how dispiriting graffiti and litter are in their own street. And only that sort of person would think that taking care of the urban environment is not “truly worthwhile”.

EDIT: A keen eyed reader has pointed out that Ben actually has been helping with the soup kitchen (one occasion was on 28 October). So inaccurate as well as mean spirited.

When I said that I always get a reaction when mentioning Mama Rudkin, that was a hint to, well, stop reacting. Hints aren’t always taken, apparently.

One reasonably funny one that came through was “How about an April Fool: Bryony Rudkin to move on to the Maidenhall Estate. Or… Chris Mole backs constituents against government’s plans.”

Well they made me laugh, but that probably says more about me. I think the first is more likely as long as we have a Brown government.

Anyway Ipswich Spy have been going for the prize of most obvious April Fool 2010. Clever concept, though I think their prediction that Labour will gain Whitton was far better, not least because I’m the only one who spotted it.

The BNP was never really an issue for me. They were racist and socialist and I was never either (being an hereditary lefty did not make me economically illiterate). Then I got married.

Suddenly I have a stake in the fight. Not a massive stake, after all if the BNP becomes really active in my area and wins a council seat or two I could probably ignore it and if I couldn’t then let’s be honest I could get a mortgage and move somewhere where the BNP were still coming fourth. But it is a stake.

The problem is that the BNP is not simply responding to a perceived failure in the system, they are responding to a real failure.

I’ve had a fairly senior Ipswich Conservative chiding me for saying that immigration was too high. It was something along the lines that people like me had to understand that employers really needed immigrants. I know that this person has since defected and become an immigration reformer, but that’s what the Digby Jones of this world still do say.

And that’s the root of the immigration argument. That’s who’s driving it. Employers, particularly employers who like cheap labour. After all who needs to pay the minimum wage when the reserve army of the unemployed is global?

The big employers also have a whole coterie of useful idiots on the left. I know Andrew Coates would bridle at the term useful, but he does fit the description. His latest post is a call to close down the debate on immigration. Anything that even hints at enforcing border controls must, per se, be “stirring up fear”. Well, no. It’s reflecting that fear, and perhaps hoping that this fear doesn’t go anywhere else. Like the real fascists.

The fear is already here, because getting more people in when jobs are declining will lead to greater unemployment, especially in the short term. Subsidising immigration through benefits, as we are, means that wage earners are subsidising their replacements. It also means that services are crowded out, unless you can afford to go private. And as for rents and mortgages, we all know what’s happened to them in the last ten years, much to the glee of the school teachers and local government middle managers in the Labour Party who had no idea what high rents and house prices did to their most loyal voters.

There is racism among much of the response to immigration, but that’s largely due to frustration. If the attempts to suppress debate by people such as Andrew Coates, or to dismiss it as “nasty” and ignorant by Ipswich Spy (or one head of the hydra), succeed then so will the BNP.

I don’t want that. Neither does my wife. That’s why she appeared on Ben Gummer’s leaflet. If we are to have a tolerant society then we shouldn’t be using uncontrolled immigration as a battering ram to force down wages, crowd out services and force up prices for the most vulnerable.

Both Ben Gummer and Ipswich Spy have it wrong, the problem with Gordon Brown’s visit was not the fact that it was publicly funded (well not entirely the problem), but the fact that it blended the political campaigning in a marginal seat (and marginal ward) together with an official visit.  So the speed limits being broken and the publicly funded outriders made sense when visiting the airmen but not when going campaigning and going to BBC Suffolk.

It was the blending of the two together, or at least blending them together so blatantly, which was so wrong.  But that’s been endemic at least since Chris Mole became an MP.

Ipswich Spy is a good idea, as our politicians should be transparent (Eye Spy is almost certainly where they got their idea from).  However there is a question as to why politicians should be transparent but their watchers should be anonymous with their perspectives and motives un-examined.  There may be good reasons for  anonymity, there may be a whistle blower (Eye Spy again), a victim of a repressive regime or there may be a point of view that should be put across in a purer way than could be done if people knew who the author was.

However anonymity may also be a cover for an unexplained and unexamined agenda.  So if the agenda is unexplained, is it surprising that we look at, say, Alasdair Ross’s post in his “excellent blog” ( (c) Ipswich Spy) who lays out the agenda of Ipswich Spy.  That agenda is to shame councillors who turn up late to meetings, particularly if they are Tories.  Now there are only three local institutions that Alasdair Ross is well plugged in to – the ultra-expensive Ipswich School, the compensatory Ipswich Town Independent Supporters and the Ipswich Labour Party.  I can’t see why Ipswich School would want to set up an anonymous blog reporting on local politicians.

Well we know that the blog is either a group adventure or the author has a seriously split personality and they’ve got good access to the Gordon Brown visit.  So it’s either (1) the Labour Party, (2) some of the local political journalists who’ve not thought out what’s going to happen when they’re identified as the authors or (3) some local non-aligned political anoraks who’ve not previously had any significant on-line activity and somehow managed to get into at least two Gordon Brown events. The last would have had to have an impressive late waking organisational ability and the second would have had to have an impressive disregard for their careers by maintaining an anonymous site without written permission from their employer.  So Labour?  It’s the only one that makes sense.

Plus I’ve got their facebook page (they have invited me), and look who knew first: