Two weeks tomorrow and we’ll be marching up to the ballot box with intent, reluctance, or because it’s en route to the pub.
Letter boxes are taking a severe hammering right now. I’m sure you too have seen an indentation in your hallway’s thick pile shag as missives fro mall parties come vomiting through the front door. Today we take a look at some…
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A weird one that intrigued, and recently made the national media,arrived a fortnight ago and I’ve been meaning to mention it
since then (left). Apparently, it tells us on the reverse that ‘MARRIAGE IS A BIG ISSUE’, which passed me by. Sort of thought the NHS, tax avoidance, Trident and, well, everything else trumped questions about bridesmaid’s dresses, Best Man speeches and getting the DJ not to play any Black Lace. But no. It’s marriage, and the fact that letting all people express love and commitment to each other regardless of their orientation is a mortal sin and will bring down the country.
The Coalition for Marriage is a Christian group, and counts Soubry’s colleague Fiona Bruce MP as one of it’s supporters, which must make tea-room conversation awkward.
Perhaps if the ‘Christians” involved spent more time and energy on stuff that really does threaten the fabric of the UK: the swelling gulf between rich and poor; the use of Nazi rhetoric in the tabloid press; rather than preach hate, division and bigotry, y’know, that stuff Jesus didn’t much like, we’d be getting somewhere.
On this issue, I fully supported Anna’s stance, as I do a lot of her views on social issues. In many ways, I wish she was part of the Conservative Party that wallows and revels in it’s bigotry: then I could be consistent in my general view of her. But Soubz, with her strident anger and refusal be pulled rightwards by UKIP; and her vote to make marriage equal, deserve nothing less than a salute from me. I hope you do as I do if you have received the leaflet, and shred it into confetti to throw at your next gay wedding.
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They sent one round Caroline Lucas’s Brighton Pavilion constituency as well, incredibly. Not really doing their research on that one…
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Justice for Men and Boys, the anti-feminist oddities that are standing round here (well, it’s £500 to the council in free deposit money, I suppose) have a quite nicely printed one, that seems to show Alistair Campbell menacing a child, and is 
full of some rather bogus stats. There manifesto is even weirder, and quite vile and misogynistic: women who have children with anyone else but their husband will be jailed, abortions banned, etc. They’re not really worth getting into a huff about, I suppose, as they’ll just fade away after the election.
Weirdly, at the last hustings I ended up chatting to the candidate, Ray Barry. I didn’t twig who he was for ages, assuming him to be a mainstream party candidate for the Borough elections. When he revealed who he was, I made my excuses.
Frustratingly, he came across as a nice guy. If I’d known his views beforehand, I would have not even given him the chance to show this. Again, that moral oddness: rather like the urbane, amusing, erudite white South African I once met over a drink, who charmed me into rich conversation and the promise of maybe a little more, until she suddenly killed any libidinous thoughts – and desire to talk further -with her sudden assertion ‘Blicks, y’see, not like us. Build different’.
I imagine that underneath all the women-hating bile he totes around, Ray Barry is a nice guy, who, through a combination of some rather crap events in his life, and a certain gullibility, has ended up in a very bad place. Similarly, there probably is a need for reform in access for fathers, but in comparison to the horrendous abuse, daily sexism, and utter inequality that bizarrely still stops over 50% of our population living an equal life….
As for the head of the party, Mike Buchanan, he does come across as a nasty shit. He has made attempts to befriend me on Facebook -I have no idea why – and been obviously rebuked.
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No love is being lost in the big-beast ground war. On Saturday, the Tories got up early and took the pitch Labour usually occupy on the High Road. Labour moved a few metres down, and erected their gazebo as per usual. A few hours later, however, a police officer came and demanded to talk to the organisers. Apparently, a complaint had been received from the Tories that Labour had illegally driven a car down the road to help put up the gazebo (rather than have it carried from their local office, just off the road). After Labour had explained the situation, the police officer was satisfied and apologised.
How weird. Why did the local Tories do this? Not only wasting police time, but outright lying to a police officer?
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More bizarre goings on in Attenborough village, a sentence I thought I’d never get to write. I was on an evening walk round 
there, ostensibly to collect tadpoles for my new pond (I failed: anyone got any spare?) and passed by the Strand, possibly the most Tory area imaginable. It was no surprise to see a blue sign staked into a garden therefore, but on closer approach it became clear that this was not the usual sign: rather a quite nasty, weird parody, seemingly professionally done. I have no idea if the resident had done this, or it had been done without them knowing, but it’s by far the oddest thing I’ve seen this election (and as I mentioned previously, I read the Justice for Men and Boys manifesto).
It seems it might not be the only one. Tory borough candidate Richard Jackson 
and Soubry seemed to suggest several posters had been ‘defaced’ in a Twitter exchange, with them both accusing Labour of being behind it.
A pretty severe allegation, but I’m sure the police will be informed. The Tories and the police are getting to know each other fairly well of late: not just the aforementioned allegation of using a car illegally, but one of their borough councillor candidates has apparently been reported to the police by Broxtowe’s Chief Executive for threatening to shoot a Labour opponent. Nice!
Keep it clean, folks. Two weeks left….
Beestonia 
To put it mildly, you’re a blithering idiot. I. too, have no idea why I’d ever want to befriend you on Facebook (if indeed I did). Maybe we have some mutual friends, though that seems unlikely.
For anyone who wants to discover what’s REALLY in our manifesto:
https://j4mb.wordpress.com/2015-general-election-manifesto/
Have a nice day.
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN AND BOYS
(and the women who love them)
http://j4mb.org.uk
[…] Beeston is a major population centre in the Broxtowe constituency, in which Ray Barry is standing. My thanks to Tim for pointing me to a blog piece by a woman who presumably lives there – here. […]
Your interpretation of the J4MB poster picture as “a man menacing a child” is precisely why J4MB has become necessary. It exposes your protestations about anti-female sexism as the hypocrisy it truly is.
A link to ‘A Voice For Men’ on the J4MB website tells me all I need to know about that party. Ignored.
I could almost like Anna Soubry as a candidate you know. Her stance on social issues is ace and I do quite like the abrasiveness sometimes. Sometimes.
I’ll still be voting for Dr Palmer, though. I prefer my Labour candidates a bit more left than the central party and he seems to be about there. He’s a good, thoughtful candidate that I disagree with on a couple of issues (Trident for one) but he will be good for Broxtowe I think.
Thank god the majority of men aren’t like that pathetic, creepy lot. The whole thing makes me want to shower.
Hi Jon. Have you read the manifesto? In it we outline 20 aras where the state (through its actions and inactions) assaults the human rights of men and/or boys. They include:
– fathers being denied access to their children following family breakdowns
– male victims of domestic violence (40% of all victims) being denied support
– the genitals of boys as young as eight days old being mutilated
– the state education system failing boys since 1987, when the introduction of continuous assessment enabled teachers to preference girls over boys. 60% of university students now female as a result.
– men being discriminated against in recruitment and promotion terms in the public sector, because of the 2010 Equality Act
– five out of six men in British prisons wouldn’t be there if men were treated as leniently as women by the criminal justice system
– as many men die of prostate cancer as women die of breast cancer. £250 million p.a. spent on early detection of breast cancer and cervical cancer. No national screening programmes for any male-specific cancers
– political representation. Gloria De Piero was selected from an all-women shortlist in Ashfield
Does none of this trouble you?
Hi Mike, I have a question. Actually many questions, but this occurred to me most recently. You say you want to force women to work longer than men before they can claim the state pension. Would this mean increasing the retirement age for women (taking them into their seventies before they could retire) or decreasing the retirement age for men? Also, are you aware that since better-off women would retire early on private pensions if they are able, you would be forcing those women on low incomes (e.g. in jobs that are more likely to be manual), and who don’t have supportive family members (e.g. widows etc.) to work into their seventies? Can you reassure us that you would act strongly against age discrimination to ensure that women in their seventies can still find employment?
And we all bow down to the ineffable virtue of Sir Jon, the One Good Man amid a sea of toxic masculinity..
Mike, try this link from the Cancer Research website; there is no reliable test for prostate cancer so it is impossible to screen for it
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/prostate-cancer/about/screening-for-prostate-cancer#why
Thanks Ellie. Along with many men of a certain age, I have annual prostate cancer tests. Along with all cancer tests, false positives and false negatives are possible. That doesn’t result in there being no national screening programmes for breast cancer or cervical cancer. As with support for victims of domestic violence, all funding goes to women.
“women who have children with anyone else but their husband will be jailed, abortions banned, etc. ” – Where did you see that on their manifesto? You are deliberately smearing them and revealing your own bias. The jail is paternity fraud, I.e. knowingly lying about paternity, and as for abortion, their policy would just bring it in line with other European countries.