Freesteel Blog » What a goddamn nightmare that was

What a goddamn nightmare that was

Friday, May 7th, 2010 at 4:52 pm Written by:

I was in the count from 10pm to 5am. The results were bad. Very bad. In terms of matching the quality of the campaigns and the candidates to the electoral outcome.

There were two serious blows.

The first is depicted here on the St Michael’s Ward count. The middle guy is Warren Bradley, the LibDem council leader who parachuted an unknown candidate of the name Sharon Green into the seat a few months ago. The guy to his right is Tom Crone, the Green Party candidate who has campaigned solidly for about two years for this election.

You can check out Sharon Green’s extensive “Fact File” here:

  • Born and raised locally
  • Youth Worker
  • Campaigned to FREEZE your Council Tax
  • Works hard for local people
  • Cares about local issues

Quite. I’ll be taking a feed from the OpenlyLocal website to see how many meetings she attends. It’s not actually known whether Ms Green ever wanted to be a local councillor as she has never spoken at a public meeting or a hustings.

Now the grown-up thing is to respect the will of the people as expressed in the vote, but I don’t think there is anything to respect in that. The process of choosing who to vote for is probably not rational and is certainly based on shockingly little thought and information. (The point about the leaflet website is to record the level and quality of information that is obtained by the voters in order to substantiate such criticisms.)

The other serious political set-back occurred in Liverpool Wavertree which I could see had gone bad as soon as the first box had been tipped out on the table.

The LibDem candidate Colin Eldridge had mobilized a huge team of workers, had run in the same seat in 2005, had the experience of elections, and two high profile visits from the party leader Nick Clegg during the campaign.

He was wiped out by the 28 year old, favoured, privileged Luciana Berger who is being allowed to cruise right up into Parliament like some kind of young pop idol star. The sick bit is that while pop stars only wreck their own lives with their foolishness, an unqualified character such as this who rises up the systems of power are useful idiots who can be appointed to positions of incompetence where they can do the intentional damage.

For example, she would look really good in charge of regulating hedge funds, now that she is qualified by virtue of being an MP. Nobody wants an effective character working in that job… at least nobody in the system who has a say in who gets appointed to the job.

But she would not be put in charge of something that interested parties depend on working, like election campaign. Not even her own campaign, which was partly supplied with leaflet deliveries from Joe Anderson, who is as of today the new Liverpool City Council leader.

Uh oh.

I covered some of his leafleting in this blog post.

I emailed Luciana about it following her statement at a hustings that she was not running a negative campaign, and she denied that the leaflet was connected to her. It’s Councillor Joe Anderson’s, she said. And don’t you know there is a local election going on too?

Colin Eldridge was not standing in the local election. Only in the Parliamentary election as her opponent. I could not believe Luciana was lying trying to deceive me over this when I had made it abundantly clear that I know exactly what I was talking about.

Not a good sign.

I cornered my MP Louise Ellman for an interview during the count. I wanted to know if she would support proportional representation, as I have had just about enough of this electoral system where my vote does not count ever.

She’d have to look into it, she slithered. But she would be against losing the the MP/constituency connection. The problem with proportional representation systems, she added, is it’s based on party lists. And unfortunately those lists are set by the party machine.

She walked away leaving me as stunned as I was when she said during the hustings that there is no blockade of Gaza.

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