UKIP to win Eastleigh?

Today is a very strange day for me. If I had not got so disillusioned with the Lib Dem leadership I would be down in Eastleigh helping to get the vote out. As it is I'm sitting at home and wondering how it will all pan out, and I've come to a rather odd conclusion.
If I was in Eastleigh I would probably have voted NHA Party as a way of protesting about the privatisation of the NHS. However the by election has come too early for them and they are not likely to win it. Bizarrely as a life long Liberal and pro European I want UKIP to win and think they might actually do it. Let me explain.
I have hated this coalition with a passion since its inception. A UKIP win tonight could deal a fatal blow to it. If as seems likely the Tories come third it will throw the party into paroxysms, with the backwoodsmen braying that they have to steal UKIP's clothing. They might even be brave enough to mount a coup against Cameron. A more right wing leader would be very difficult to work with even if Clegg managed to survive.
If the Lib Dems lose the seat, I don't foresee an immediate coup, but when there is another wipe out in the County Council elections in May and the relationship with the Tories becomes horribly fraught, a lot of MPs and councillors are going to be looking for another solution other than the disastrous Clegg regime before 2015.
A UKIP victory will not mean a new dawn for them. I've had 40 years of being on the wrong side of that argument. But it could mean the end of the coalition and hopefully the beginning of the end of the Orange Book experiment in the Lib Dems.
So swallow hard, put on a Polly Toynbee clothes peg and "Come on UKIP!"

Fawlty Towers or Chelsea Football Club

Two descriptions this morning of Tory controlled Surrey County Council. An ex councillor from Guildford, Chris Ward coined the first witticism and the second was tweeted by the Chertsey Herald. Why? you may ask.

Well they're at it again. When the opposition councillors on SCC want to wind up the front bench (ie the Cabinet) they shout "look behind you," that's where the real opposition lies. Childish I know but...

3 years ago, just before the last SCC elections, Andrew Povey led a palace coup against the then leader Nick Skellett, who had previously stabbed Mr Povey in the back when he was leader. They've got nothing on Macchiavelli these guys. There were wholesale changes to the front bench. Two years on Mr Povey's deputy David Hodges led a revolt that saw him elected as leader, and more wholesale changes. Now less than a year on Mr Hodges has sacked 2 of his closest allies, Cllr Ian Lake and Cllr Denise Saliagopoulos.

 It seems they had started a company called Charterhouse Chancery to offer hospitality during the Olympics

Charterhouse Chancery can arrange packages for visitors to the UK in particular for the London 2012 Olympic Games. The Company is based in Surrey which has excellent connections with London Heathrow and London Gatwick Airports. Surrey's strengths for London 2012 are its proximity to London and the Olympic Park, closeness to Wimbledon for Tennis, it is on the route to the South Coast for the Olympic Sailing and the rowing at Eton Dornay near historic Windsor Castle.

A good bit of Tory enterprise you might say, except that they forgot to declare it as an interest, despite the fact that Mrs Saliogopoulis is Cabinet member with special responsibility for the Olympics and the £750 million of contracts that will be generated in Surrey. Mr Lake said it doesn't matter because the company hasn't traded yet. Hmm.

Full report and interview with Mr Lake on BBC Surrey.

Vote Labservative!

Great new website http://www.labservative.com/

Our re-election pledges

• We promise to be dishonest about the spending cuts required to fix the deficit.
• We promise to spend billions of pounds on like-for-like replacement of nuclear weapons despite Russia and the U.S. reducing their own stockpiles.
• We promise to saddle students with debt for their university education.
• We promise to guard our ‘safe seats’ by blocking electoral reform.
• We promise to protect corrupt MPs from public accountability.
• We promise to accept funding from Unions and Big Business in exchange for political influence.
• We promise to make environmental policy an afterthought.

Michael Gove demonstrates how good Tory education policy is.

Michael Gove, shadow education spokesman and MP for Surrey Heath made a bit of a fool of himself on the Daily Politics yesterday. From the Guardian

Luckily some people can't be bullied. Alas for Tory education shadow Michael Gove, Andrew Neil looks like one of them. "You want to bring in elements of the Swedish school system here?" jabs Andrew lightly on the BBC's Daily Politics show yesterday. Oh yes, agrees Michael. "Why would you want to bring a system which over the last 15 years has plummeted in international league tables in maths and science," says Neil, by way of a right hook. "Well England has plummeted in international league tables," says Gove. "We're still ahead," says the questioner. Ding, ding. It gets worse. "You shouldn't have people in teaching who have third class degrees. You have to have at least a 2.2," says Gove. "So why do you have a maths adviser who has a third-class degree?" counters Neil, referring to Cameroon recruit Carol Vorderman. "Under your proposals she couldn't be a teacher." A straight knockout. Next!

The full interview can be seen here.

The Tories really haven't thought this through at all. Where's the money going to come from?  How do you stop determined parents with an agenda from trying to take over a school? I can see situations where resources are going to be drained from local schools to satisfy some strange Tory agenda, when most of the Tory potential ministers and their kids are safely tucked up in private schools.

New Tories, different colour, or am I prejudiced?

Following my previous post about the Tories disarray in East Surrey, the fact that they have chosen a black man of African origin has given me pause for thought. You see, shocking thing for a very liberal chap to own up to, I am prejudiced. I've always felt that there was an undercurrent of "only white, straight, chaps from the right background need apply" in the Tory party. This prejudice has now been sorely tested. Not only have the Tories selected Sam Gyimah for East Surrey, they have chosen Kwasi Kwarteng for Spelthorne. This along with Adam Afriye from Windsor means there are three people of colour in very winnable seats in the local area. Interestingly all these guys are of Ghanaian origin, the Guardian speculation (in the Diary, so tongue in cheek) is that it is coming to rival the Labour Guyanese "mafia".

In the recent past Labour has drawn much talent from what has been known as the Guyanese Mafia (David Lammy, Valerie Amos, Trevor Phillips, Lord Alli, Lord Ouseley). With the selection of Gyimah, Tories appear to be constructing a Ghanaian equivalent. Adam Afriyie, the son of a Ghanaian father, has already made it to the Commons via Windsor. Kwasi Kwarteng, whose parents are ­Ghanaian, has got the nod in Spelthorne, Surrey. And ­Gyimah, who some predict will make the cabinet someday, was born in the UK but grew up in Ghana. He returned at 16.

Shame there isn't a Lib Dem equivalent. It's another of the problems of our FPTP electoral system that makes it much harder for minorities to be elected.

Incidentally in that same Guardian piece, talking about East Surrey, Hugh Muir says

......it's bad, bad, bad for Tory sage and blogger extraordinaire Iain Dale, who lost out to Gyimah. We have already recorded his previous ­election setbacks. Norfolk North in 2005, when he lost by 10,500 votes, and his failure to win the nomination for Maidstone, when he didn't make it past the first interview. Explaining the latest reverse on the digital station Colourful Radio, he said: "These selection contests – they're a lot like The X Factor. There's a lot of pressure ... and I blew it. Normally, when I give a speech, I just think about what I'm going to say, then go in and say it. On this one I wrote out a full text and tried to memorise it. All the words came out, but not necessarily in the right order. It's a bit of a lottery, and it really depends on how you perform on the day – and I didn't perform, so I couldn't expect to win." He is being magnanimous. That's his way. But it is inexplicable, and we worry that there is something more to this.

The only thing I can think that Muir means by the last comment is that he believes Dale is failing because he is openly gay, and since then Dale has failed to get the nomination for Bracknell, the seat of that arch Cameronite trougher Andrew Mackay. It's difficult to judge on this one as there are openly gay Tory MPs like Alan Duncan and Nick Herbert, but my prejudice feels there's probably a good strain of homophobia still at the grass roots of the Tories. And racism? During the recent mayoral election in Bedford the Tories had a virtual civil war which had some barely disguised racist undertones. From Bedfordshire on Sunday (Mrs Attenborough was the Tory leader of the Council, and a candidate).....

But, in what might be read as a reference to the large number of people who attended from the Asian community, she says, in an email to Conservative Party chairman Eric Pickles: ‘From where I was sitting, I could see the Liberal Democrats on the front row, Labour on the back row and a sea of faces who couldn’t even understand what the candidates were saying.’

Mr Parvez romped home on the first vote to enormous cheers at Dame Alice Harpur School, leaving supporters of his opponents stunned.

In Mrs Attenborough’s email, copied in to Tory chief David Cameron and leaked to Bedfordshire on Sunday, she says: ‘Exactly why should anyone become a member of the Conservative Party when they can walk off the streets into any selection meeting and choose the most unsuitable candidate, if they want, without knowing anything about them, or go to a meeting with the leader without having to pay £20 for the privilege.

‘It is my opinion that Monday night was quite disgraceful. The members, who had been told to get there by 7.30pm, were left sitting there for two hours and the candidates locked in one nasty classroom for two hours and told nothing.

‘When I protested at the shambles that was occurring outside, I was told by our minder, ‘you can always go home’.

This has echoes of the election in Cheltenham in 1992 when a local Tory called their then candidate "a bloody nigger". In both elections the Tory shambles led to a Lib Dem victory.

I am sure the Conservatives have moved on since those bad old days but how far?

Interestingly the Tories have not chosen any women for the safe seats in and around Surrey except for the incumbent Ann Milton in Guildford, despite the fact that there were senior women councillors involved in all of them, such as Lynne Hack, Sally Marks and Phillipa Broom. As it is, the Tories should significantly increase their number of women MPs but not in "safe" Surrey where it would have been absolutely logical for them to do so.

My wife is a wise lady. Discussing this issue with her she said it's not an issue of race, gender or sexuality but more "PLU". People like us. (She comes from a Tory background). She could be right. Kwarteng went to Eton and Gyimah worked for those agents of God Goldman Sachs.

My prejudice is definitely under threat and I hope that soon we will cease to worry about any of these things because all parties will just choose the best people from a list of excellent diverse candidates.

I think the Tories have moved from the party of Tomorrow Belongs To Me and are probably closer to Neil Kinnock making sure he mentions black people and nurses all the time.

As a footnote Spelthorne could be an interesting seat to watch at the election. Lots of interesting new dynamics, a disgraced incumbent Tory, an ethnic minority old Etonian Tory candidate, Labour collapse and Lib Dem rise in the county elections last year and a UKIP candidate to take a decent slice of the Tory vote. Could be set up nicely for the election after this!

Surrey East Conservatives in selection chaos.

Call me Dave has spent a lot of time over the last few years talking about re-empowering local people, councils etc. It seems this only works though if you're not a Conservative member. In the selection process for the new Woking candidate last year, local Tories were overridden and to my knowledge at least one long standing councillor didn't even get a rejection letter to his application. They were just ignored.

From Conservative Home

some local activists were annoyed at being told local candidates would not be considered under any circumstances if they hadn't already been through a parliamentary assessment board by April - only to now be asked to delay so that people with no record of involvement in the party whatsoever can put their names forward. 

And this from the comments

CCHQ are probably right to delay selection in the case of most safe Conservative seats that have come up for grabs. However in the case of Woking, this cannot be regarded as a solid safe Conservative seat.
Humfrey Malins' majority is laregly built around a personal vote and the Lib Dems are a real threat here. If a CCHQ favoured candidate is parachuted in late, the local Lib Dems will have a field day in proclaiming that an outsider has been imposed on the local Conservative Association and the citizens of Woking, in which case we will probably lose the seat.
CCHQ should let Woking Association resume their selection schedule asap, and accept that the PPC will need as much time as possible to get locally established and see off the Lib Dem threat.

So much for local accountabilty. And today in the Daily Mail we have a fabulous article about Surrey East and the shenanigans there.

there is uproar because David Cameron has personally decided the six people who will be interviewed for the post by the association in a local school hall.

This draconian  measure has incensed local party members up and down the country, triggering a wave of protests and resignations which is in danger of spilling over into a civil war with devastating implications for Mr Cameron.

Interestingly one of the complaints of local Tories is that there are no heterosexual white males on the list.

Richard Butcher, a retired solicitor who has been a local Tory councillor in Surrey for more than 50 years, is outraged.
‘We are all very, very disappointed. We have had only two MPs here in the past 35 years. It should have been a privilege for us to be able to choose our next one, but that right has now been taken away.
‘Why does Mr Cameron think he knows better than us what we want for our constituency? He doesn’t live here!

And gain from Conservative Home

So much for new politics. It looks like executive patronage and party control are here to stay. Peerages for dead men's shoes are the political equivalent of the long service company silver carriage clock and look very dodgy.
As long as things like this happen, voters will continue to see politicians as a club who carve up the top appointments among themselves.

Of course there have been other major internecine spats including many mentioned in this article. War in Westminster North where one of Dave's Etonian mate's wives is the candidate and she got the local, hard working chair sacked. Nice.

The farcical scenes at the smart Commander gastropub, close to David Cameron’s Notting Hill home, dramatically exposed the faults in the Tory leader’s modernising project.
Miss Cash, a libel barrister, educated at an Ulster state school and Oxford University, is the archetypal Cameroon candidate. Like so many A-listers, she has never served her time as a local councillor.

But she had gained the support of party chairman Eric Pickles as a move was made to oust her nemesis, Mrs Sayers, as chairman.

In an unprecedented move revealing the importance of Miss Cash’s candidacy as part of Cameron’s modernising plan, Pickles turned up to the meeting in person, as did some of the Tories’ most influential movers and shakers.

During an astonishing evening of internecine warfare, which represented a battle for the soul of the Tory Party, a chaotic and packed meeting heard Miss Cash declare: ‘I have an announcement to make. I am standing down immediately.’

Pandemonium followed and David Cameron’s office frantically tried to persuade Miss Cash (who has been described by Tatler magazine as ‘Tory totty’) to rescind her resignation.

Eventually, she agreed to remain the party’s candidate and sent a message to the social networking site Twitter saying: ‘I did resign. Assoc did not accept. CCHQ has resolved specific issue so I am not leaving. It’s official DC [David Cameron] has changed the party!!!!!!!! I love Twitter. Normal business has resumed and am back online. Lots of rumours flying around distracting from business of electing a new govt! Go go go people!! We have work to do.’

Well done Dave. Your belief in local democracy is par excellence. Perhaps one Etonian one vote might be a better slogan.

MPs expenses. Tories win first prize!

I have wondered ever since all this stuff broke how the Tories have managed to spin  this as more of a Labour issue. One of the first things to come out of the Legg report is that 5 out of the top 6 amounts to be paid back are from Tories.

1. £42,458 by Barbara Follett (Lab, Stevenage), 
2. £36,909 by Bernard Jenkin (Con, North Essex), 
3. £31,193 by Andrew Mackay (Con, Bracknell), 
4. £29,398 by John Gummer (Con, Suffolk Coastal), 
5. £29,243 by Julie Kirkbride (Con, Bromsgrove) 
6. £24,878 by Liam Fox (Con, Woodspring).

Its also intersting that despite Cameron's protests  that nobody should appeal some of the more egregious abusers still did. From the Telegraph

The appeals list naming current and former MPs seen by The Sunday Telegraph includes Vera Baird, Stephen McCabe, Dan Norris, Frank Roy, Claire Ward, Phil Woolas and Michael Foster — all of whom are current ministers or government whips. They are joined by two Tory frontbenchers, Ed Vaizey and Julian Lewis, and Michael Howard, the former Conservative leader.
Others who appealed included:

• Sir Peter Viggers, the Tory MP who included with his expense claims the £1,645 cost of a floating duck house at his Hampshire home.
• Kitty Ussher, who resigned as Treasury minister when it was found she avoided paying up to £17,000 in tax on the sale of her constituency home.
• Douglas Hogg, the former Tory minister, who included with his expenses claims the cost of having his moat cleared, piano tuned and stable lights fixed at his country manor.
• Andrew MacKay and Julie Kirkbride, the Conservative husband-and-wife MPs who made claims that meant they effectively had no main home but two “second homes”, both funded with public money.

The release of the names of those who have fought the process is significant, not least because David Cameron, the Conservative leader, told his shadow cabinet not to lodge appeals because to do so would anger voters.

More to come when I've had a chance to read it all!

Love this

Steve Bell

As a Guardian Reader (yeah fill in your own jokes) for more years than I care to remember, I must say I love Steve Bell's cartoons. They just seem to get inside the person they are lampooning.

Hello

Hello. Been meaning to do this for a while. The New Year and an imminent election seem to be good reasons to get started. As I say in my profile I am disillusioned with party politics in the UK at the moment so I will be musing on ways to improve this and hopefully some of the opportunities that may come up during the election. I am worried about some of the right wing tendencies in the Lib Dems at the moment so will be exposing those where necessary but also praising them where appropriate e.g. the new tax policy.

"We propose to raise the threshold at which people start paying income tax from current levels to £10,000, cutting the average working age person’s income tax bill by £700 and cutting pensioner’s income tax bills by £100. These plans will mean that almost 4 million people on low incomes will no longer have to pay any income tax at all."

I am however most worried about the Conservatives winning the next election. I am old enough to remember how awful the last Tory government was and never want to see its like again.

A good place to start then is something that Lord Tebbitt said this week. (I cannot believe that the first post I make on here is going to be quoting that old expletive deleted). On his blog he said

"And I hate to say it, but only one party leader seems to have grasped that, if you construct a system where unskilled people are worse off by taking a job than by staying on welfare, they remain trapped in poverty – and that is Nick Clegg. Lord knows, Frank Field and Iain Duncan Smith spelled it out in words and figures that only a simpleton could fail to understand, but the two main parties are unwilling to bite on the bullet and commit themselves to raising the income tax threshold from £6,475 to something like £10,000 or £12,000."

One of the biggest mistakes Labour made over the last few years was to get rid of the 10p tax band. This policy immediately reverses the damage, gives lower paid people more incentive to work, goes some way to alleviating poverty and gives loads of middle income people a shot in the arm in these difficult times. Well done Nick and of course Vince.

I will also be posting about the environment and transport as they are two of my passions at the moment and they are inevitably intertwined with each other and of course politics.

Any feedback, even if negative gratefully received.