Randomly Selected Article or Link

It must be getting close to local elections time. The disingenuous and downright dishonest are creeping out of the woodwork to try to make themselves seem better than prospective opponents. Last night, labour's Councillor Maureen Christian took her shot. Oxford is going through a sensitive time with the county trying to implement residents parking in many areas and Maureen was trying to make a big fuss of who might and might not support charging for the idea.

In a written amendment to a motion on the subject in council, she accused, by name, a local Lib Dem councillor as being in favour of charging. Now, whether she is or isn't in principle in favour of charging (as the duplicitous Greens are I gather) I have no idea, but I do know that she is against charging for these city schemes and has said as much publicly and in written material distributed amongst her constituents.

Of course way back when a previous Labour run city council was in charge of these sorts of things there was a general feeling, perhaps especially amongst Labour and Green councillors of the time, that charging was desirable or inevitable if only there was a way of making it fair to those in multi-occupation housing who may not have any way of reducing their several car households.

So times have changed, and for whatever reason Labour and the Greens are now, it would seem, against charging. I have no problem with that. It is presumably, as is the case with the Lib Dem councillor quoted in this amendment, representing their constituents which is what they are elected to do.

Too bad however that the very reason why most of Headington needs residents parking now is that Councillor Christian and her Labour colleagues, cow-towing to government policy and threats, were so keen five years ago to foist an ill-considered and hasty hospital development on the area without ensuring that the money would be forthcoming to fund such ameliorating measures in the local neighbourhoods. Those earlier decisions happen also to be screwing up our health services in the city having placed on them huge burdens of PFI debt.

I know - it's a week late. But I picked up a snippet the other day that tells you why Labour lost in Glasgow East...

Apparently voter contact had been absolutely zero for years. David Marshall had done virtually nothing for years (apart from perhaps collecting money from us for his carefully chosen constituency staff). He supposedly didn't even venture into the constituency much and held few if any surgeries. When they started the by-election campaign they were starting voter identification from scratch with no reliable previous data at all.

Utter bonkers. They absolutely deserve to have lost with the level of contempt towards the constituents that smug inactivity over the years demonstrates.

On the other hand, it puts the SNP victory in some context - were they any better than, say, the IWCA in Oxford whose only reason for existing as a force on the council was Labour's contemptuous attitude in their "safest" wards.

UPDATE: And I see from Dan Paskins that there is a motion in to conference saying much the same .