To no-ones surprise, least of mine having received a possibly drunken indiscreet message from a member of the Labour party, we have an election in a few weeks.
My dabbles into politics via Beestonia have been pretty glib, but then again, Guido Fawkes or Iain Dale never dip into drunkenly duping Malaysian scammers . Its important though, Beestonia has changed massively through MP intervention, so daft to ignore, despite my relative ignorance. So, with a sigh, and an apology to all regular readers (me mum, and an Estonian with fat fingers) I am going to do some blogging about the May 6th where-do-you-place-your-x?-factor.
Here is going to be a key battleground, hence the appearance in recent weeks of both Brown and Cameron. Expect Beestonia to be crawling with journalists and camera crews soon, trying to probe the hive mind, from which they will attempt to extrapolate the future. Joy..
So lets line up the candidates. First up, is the challenger:
Anna Soubry.
Yeah her! That lady who used to do the news!
Soubry is a true lover of Broxtowe, to the point she can only feel the love from a distance, so doesn’t actually live round here. Her devotion to here is such that at the last election she stood in Gedling, and on losing, was parachuted here. But Broxtowe was always her first choice, I imagine, and Gedling was only a practice run.
Her campaign is being bank-rolled not just by tax-exile Lord Ashcroft, but also by some shady far-right characters, notably the pro-hunting lobby, but also by a London-based Multi-millionaire derivatives dealer to the tune of £55,000, funding the big blue billboards springing up all over town right now. This seems to me hardly fair, legal, but not fair.
The Tories have been uniformly crap round here anyway. Their opposition to Tesco was rather undone by their willingness to accept a pot of gold for their club premises, which means that they are either very stupid, or very greedy. A unkind friend pointed out that ‘very stupid, very greedy’ is a pretty succinct way of describing the Conservatives, but I will not be so severe.
The Conservative County Council have managed to make quite massive tits of themselves since they took power, back peddling furiously on promises when they realised they were either unrealistic or not properly thought through. Its an embarrassment to watch, and a warning that soon such incompetence could be the norm for here. Remember Jim Lester, the last tory to grace Parliament for Broxtowe? Bumbling wasn’t the word. The man was so hands-off he practically forgot he had constituents, and needed an A-Z to find his way to MP surgeries.
Nick Palmer
I make no secret that I have connections toDoctor Nick. Hes been a supporter and fan of this blog for some time, and Ive done a bit of voluntary work for him in the past. I’m not naturally a Labour person-Im not naturally any party, us potential benign dictators tend to be like that- but Nick has been an attentive, hard working, decent representative. Transparent in his decisions, he has not always made the right decisions (I was annoyed by his support of ID cards, though he has recently bcked down on this stance due to cost issues). But the primary reason I am a fan is his lack of talking shite. He is bizarrely self-effacing, straight talking and almost masochistically keen to throw himself into lion’s dens, all qualities missing in modern politicians.
Plus, he drinks in the Crown (or at least holds meetings there), so a man of taste too.
David Watts
I like Watts, and not just because every time I say his name I get a blast of the Kinks dash into my mind… which is always nice. And smooth.
Its a terribly awful thing to say, but David is rather superfluous. There is a two horse race here, not a three. The Lib Dems are fervently trying to deny this, but even their own supporters are realising this and drifting into a Pro-Palmer group called ‘LibDems for Palmer’. It did seem at one point that they might not actually put up a candidate so as to scupper the tories, but after a bit of a falling out with Labour they are now snapping angrily around at Nick’s heels. This has led to a schism within their own local party: ex-counciller Adele Brunton has broke ranks and lent her support to Nick.
Chris Cobb
Great name, terrible party. Cobb is standing for UKIP, the party for people who think the Daily Mail is too liberal, hate ‘Health’ and ‘Safety’, howl in horror that political correctness has gone MADDDDD! at any perceived slight , and secretly would rather eat a rotted donkey than have their daughter marry an ‘ethnic’. He won’t get in, I doubt he’ll get his deposit returned, but may slice a few votes on Soubry, so good luck to him.
So who to vote? Obviously you aren’t going to make a decision off a rather rubbish blog, so thats between you and the ballot box. But if, on May 7th, this sliver of red turns blue, then my planned peaceful revolution may become armed insurrection instead, Beestonia being established with a forceful take over of the Town’s major seats of power (possibly the Last Post).
For proper political comment, read this instead: http://alanadale.wordpress.com/ and be assured that my next post will be about stuff I do know about, pubs, glorious pubs.
Beestonia 