They Blog For You

Today, the Labour Party has launched an interactive map showing local police job losses resulting from the Tory-led Government's 20% police cuts.As you can see, the Metropolitan Police - which covers Edmonton - has already announced 2,337 job cuts that will take place over a timescale of three years, taking [...]

  The Newport Chartists would have said ‘Yes’ to AV. It was in my constituency in 1839 that 20 Chartists were gunned down. They were marching for democracy. All the points of their Charter were achieved – except annual parliaments.  They were impassioned because of the gross injustices of the franchise of [...]

It’s difficult to get excited about the AV referendum.   It will probably be won not because of the merits of the AV system, not even because most people necessarily understand what it means, but because by 5 May the Tories, who are campaigning hard for a ‘no’ vote, will be very unpopular.   However, [...]

  No party ever prepares for opposition. Even predictable defeats are a shock and a trigger for prolonged misery. Nigel Fisher’s book ‘How to be in opposition’ is a tale of years of arid futility occasionally enlivened by minor triumphs. Heroes of past oppositions are described for our admiration and encouragement. Neil [...]

Having come down from my Oldham constituency this morning, I joined the march in ‘Whitehall at at 1.15pm, about an hour and a half after the vanguard had begun the march to Hyde Park.   After hearing the speeches I returned along Piccadilly where people were still marching towards Hyde Park [...]

The news from Fukushima is dreadful. But some of the honeyed words and contrived deception persists. 'Smoke' is reported from an unknown source. No radiation measure is published. There is no smoke without fire. Here there is smoke without a radiation leak. What is burning? Spent fiercely contaminated fuel rods are [...]

Continuing with my post from a few days ago about trying to get London Mayor Boris Johnson to actually get a grip on all the tube delays and stop making Londoners' lives a misery, I went to a fundraising dinner for Labour's London mayoral candidate, Ken Livingstone, a couple of [...]

CARDIFF West MP, Kevin Brennan, has congratulated Riverside's newest councillor, Iona Gordon, after she won the Riverside By-election for Labour.Councillor Gordon polled 1,700 votes creating a 14.7% swing from Plaid Cymru to the Labour Party in the Cardiff West ward.“Iona Gordon has run a fantastic campaign and struck a real [...]

    An eerie silence from the farming  lobby hides a new denial of information. Not only are there no cuts in the sumptuous farm subsidies but they might even get a handsome increase in the 2.9% increase in EU payments. No-one is saying. There is media omerta on the worldwide increase in [...]

This is ironic. Before the election David Cameron accused the Labour Party of unforgivable scaremongering when we pointed out that his plans would damage Sure Start. He emphasised that it was a disgrace that a Prime Minister - namely Gordon Brown - would frighten people in this way. He said [...]

What I have tried to do is to identify where the parties stand on AV. For example the Tory Party is mainly against it, but there are some tories that support it. The Labour Party are split, but probably more support it than oppose it etc.I have then [...]

LOCAL MP Kevin Brennan and Rhodri Morgan AM have welcomed the selection of 'committed community candidate' Iona Gordon to stand for Labour in the upcoming Riverside by-election on March 3.Iona is the Chair of the Cardiff Cycling Campaign and is the person behind such fantastic local schemes such as English [...]

In the end I did not support the government in the vote although I did oppose the Labour Party. I opposed the Labour Party because in power they sold 25,000 acres of forest land without any protection for public access. The first time people realised that Labour [...]

Yesterday was a day of shame, the day they denationalised the NHS.   Yet at the second reading of the Bill in the House of Commons the main line of defence of the increasingly isolated Andrew Lansley, who is clearly out of his depth, was that the Tories are only carrying on [...]

  Where are the sharp tongue barristers with their forensic barbs? Why did we not have a Michael Mansfield or a Bob Marshall Andrews cross-examining Tony Blair on the Iraq war? The powder puff questions put to him at the Chilcot Inquiry were incompetent and obsequious. It proves once again that Prime [...]

Vital date tonight in the Tory heartland. I wrote to local MP Tony Baldry who lives in the village of Bloxham to tell him that I was tonight addressing the inaugural meeting of the Bloxham Chapter of the Peoples Socialist Commune of Banbury. He was probably trembling with fear in the knowledge that a group of subversives were [...]

It seems that Alan Johnson has resigned for genuine personal reasons, and we must wish him well in handling whatever those personal reasons (unspecified) are.   His successor, Ed Balls, is the right person for the job on several grounds.   He has great experience and a long track record in finance [...]

  Who are they kidding? Tough on crime Tories turn a blind eye to wide scale  'controlled' drug and alcohol use in all our prisons. Just testing I asked the Home Secretary last month to list all the prisons that are free of illegal drug use. She could not find one.  But [...]

The latest figures (from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation) now show there are 3.7 million children in Britain today living in poverty.   This is conventionally defined as living in households with a total income of less than 60% of the national median income, in other words with less than £230 a [...]

Well their readers are. As two of my correspondents reveal, 70% of Daily Mail readers and 90% of Guardian readers back Bob Ainsworth's call for legalisation of all drugs. Public opinion is far in advance of the shared cowardice of political parties. My own advocacy of pragmatic drug reform has helped me [...]