Reading Borough local election candidates

I note with some interest the list of Labour candidates for the forthcoming local elections in Reading.  I note the list of candidates for other parties with some interest too, particularly in Battle ward, where not one but two candidates for other parties were formerly Labour:

Battle

Conservative – Ali Asghar

Labour – Sarah-Jane Hacker daughter of former Labour mayor Chris Maskell, a thoroughly odious creature who nearly went Independent but was bullied by Martin Salter into staying Labour.

Lib Dem – Uda Chalk  Uda is a good person who used to be active in the Labour Party in Katesgrove and left in some disgust.  Battle is the ward in Reading with the largest Afro-Caribbean population, but Labour has never selected a candidate from such an ethnicity before, white boys only for them up to now - so Uda may find she picks up some support, and in any case there has always been a vestigial Liberal vote in Battle which never went away.  Also, those who would have wished to vote for Cllr Tony Jones, formerly Labour and now Independent, who is not standing at the local elections, need somewhere to go

Green – Alan Lockey former Labour organiser in Church ward and I believe Labour candidate on occasion, widower of former Labour mayor Maureen Lockey.  Maureen's funeral had not even taken place when the boys were meeting to impose a candidate on Church ward.

The Roman Party – Jean-Louis Pascal

Commonsense Party – Michael Diamond

2008 Result: Lab 911 / Cons 486 / LD 253 / Green 219

I notice also that the Labour candidate for Caversham (which used to have three Labour councillors and now has none) has been swiftly despatched, being from an ethnic minority and we can't have THAT now can we, to be replaced by Lesley Owen, nice woman who is unfortunately a stooge when required and has checked in her integrity and most of her brain on the boys' instructions; I also notice that the Green candidate for Thames is Danny McNamara, a good man who used to be a splendid Labour activist and very nearly got elected in Minster at least once but who refused to check in his integrity and thus departed.  The Greens are lucky to have him.

At least one commenter has wondered who I am going to write about now that Martin Salter has departed - they have it wrong, this blog is not about Martin Salter.  The commenter suggests I might wish to write about the parliamentary candidates for Reading West at this election.  Er, no.  I have mentioned the Green candidate, Adrian Windisch, whom I do know slightly and who I think is a very good man and deserves your vote if you live in that constituency, but I do not know the others personally and I have little interest in the constituency.  All the interesting things in Reading happen in Reading East.  As they always have.     Up to now.

Kyrgyzstan and Sudan

are places not in Poland where interesting things are happening.  Assiduous readers of the world's media (not the Guardian) will know that elections are taking place in Sudan, and that these are very important for the country's president, Omar al-Bashir, who needs a democratic mandate now that he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.  When I was in London I took part in demonstrations against al-Bashir and his murderous genocidal regime.  Parties opposed to that regime are boycotting the poll because of suspected fraud.  Undoubtedly there is fraud, but I think boycotts are always a mistake.

Readers will know that there has been a coup d'etat in Kyrgyzstan, and that one of the new regime's first acts has been to state that the US will be allowed to use a base on its territory. So a clear (and welcome) message there.  Demonstrations by keffiyah-wearing juveniles, waving copies of the Guardian, against "US occupation"?  Anyone?  (sound of tumbleweed)

Here is the BBC on the subject:

The US says Kyrgyzstan's interim leader has promised to honour key security agreements, days after she came to power following a bloody uprising.

US officials said Roza Otunbayeva had vowed not to interrupt operations from a military base the US uses to supply troops and supplies to Afghanistan.

The US stopped troop movements from the base, near the capital Bishkek, last week during an anti-government revolt.

Protesters overthrew the president last week but dozens died in the uprising.

As for Poland, I must say I was puzzled as to how such a thing could happen.  If a pilot is instructed by air traffic control to divert to another airport because of fog then the pilot does just that, I thought, it has certainly happened to a plane I was on at least once - and I should not think the president's plane would be piloted by amateurs.  A correspondent suggests that the president himself was unpleased at the notion of diverting to Minsk and coming back to Smolensk by road and overruled the air traffic control instruction.  Well, he's not around to ask.  My tendency to look for conspiracies (after all President Kaczynski was very anti-Russian and there are those in Russia who were making political capital from the "concession" on Katyn) has fortunately been exploded by this book, see below, which I would recommend to all interested and thoughtful readers (I am sure there are some).

a vexatious complaint

is what Mr Salter tells us he has been the victim of, see below:

There is a concern, to which I hope Members will turn their minds, about complaints to the Standards and Privileges Committee. I have been the subject of a vexatious complaint and ended up having to take legal action-I made history by being the first person to sue a sitting Member. It is awful for a Member to have an unresolved complaint having over them. Where possible, I hope that the Commissioner will resolve complaints or publish interim findings so that Members who are the subject of vexatious or politically motivated complaints do not have them hanging over them as they face the electorate, because we all know how easy it is to imply ill of people purely on the basis of an unproven accusation. Furthermore, on the other side of that concern, there are three or four complaints against Members still outstanding because they have failed to co-operate fully with the Committee and the Commissioner in the hope that judgment can be deferred until after the election. That is also wrong, as those matters should be resolved.

There are some factual inaccuracies, to put it kindly, in the above.  Mr Salter may well, as he tells us, have been the subject of a vexatious complaint, but he did not "make history" by suing a sitting Member.  He sued the chairman of the Conservative Party and a person who was at the time a prospective parliamentary candidate in the Conservative interest, and who subsequently became a sitting Member, which position he is likely to resume at the forthcoming general election.  The evidence for that complaint was supplied in part by me.  The evidence supplied by me was factual.  Mr Salter knows that.  I supplied the evidence publicly, and have repeated it a number of times since.  He has not sued me.  And I find it interesting that Mr Salter uses his last opportunity to speak in the House (an opportunity of which he rarely availed himself over the 13 years he held office, never even having spoken on a major parliamentary occasion at all) to call for Members to be spared "politically motivated complaints".  Poor little loves.  This is the same Mr Salter who spoke in impassioned language for protection for MPs from public scrutiny and from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.  The government told him to piss off on that occasion.  

I have blocked a number of comments following my recent posts about Mr Salter and Mr Howarth.  This is a family blog.  However I wonder how common it is for a single blog comment to include the words "girlie" and "cunt".

Nice people, those Reading boys.  Not.

His Master's Voice

reports Mr Salter's final speech in the Commons (one of not very many all told) in its usual uncritical fashion.  Here is an excerpt from its report (with a little fisk from me):

Suggesting setting a maximum age limit for MPs no he wasn't, he said: “I am leaving this place because I vowed not to be rattling around the house in my 60s. he is leaving because he knows he would lose if he stood and does not want the electorate to give its verdict on his tenure.  He told then Labour councillor Tony Jones before he made that decision that only he Jones or John Ennis would be candidates who would get his support, 

“That is not to say that people here in their 60s do not do a fantastic job, but I became a councillor 25 years ago when I was 29-years-old that makes him 54.  In fact he will be 56 on 19th April. and there are other things that I want to do with my life.” he previously told us he would be working for a national charity.  Nothing more has been heard about that since.  Now he is off to Australia to smoke dope with former Reading Labour chums.

He raised concerns about the new rules which have been brought in since expenses scandal.

He said: “The travel arrangements say that my constituency of Reading West can be commuted in one hour. I have done that commute for 13 years  - I have never had a London flat no but you claimed 1000 quid a month for a non-existent one for four years - and I have never ever done it in an hour.”

And he added: “The idea that a minister can deliver that job and the ministerial requirements as well as be an effective constituency MP while commuting during all those crazy hours, as I have had to, is for the birds. a minister gets a driver - you never got to be a minister despite years of toadying

“If we in our politics undervalue, underpay and under-resource ourselves, we undervalue our democracy and our political system.”

He mentioned the Reading Evening Post I bet he did, he owes them big for their lies which have protected him and its role in his campaign with Whitley mother and Reading East resident Liz Longhurst to get downloading violent internet pornography outlawed.an extremely stupid law which is unenforceable and will protect precisely nobody, as Mrs Longhurst herself has acknowledged

This election campaign is not going to be dull, as I feared it would be.  It is going to be FUN.

and while we're on the subject

of Public Impact (prop. former Cllr J.Howarth, remember "Your Better Off With Labour"?), Guido has this on the dodgy expenses of Sadiq Khan MP:


This morning’s Times is reporting that the Met are considering an investigation into the Transport Minister for a very dodgy receipt. Khan had his expenses claim rejected for birthday cards after the Fees Office  told him in no uncertain terms that his claim was against the rules.
Khan’s printing company Public Impact, run by former Labour Party staffers, then sent another invoice which Khan submitted to the Fees office. Crucially this one did not identify the bill was for greetings cards, the Fees Office coughed up for it the following month.

they talk of little else

or so we are told.  Spot the deliberate mistake:

I must admit I’m really concerned, like many thousands of others, about the big tax issue of the election so far. It has become a clear dividing line between the parties and a matter of concern during the death throws of the House of Commons. There can’t be much doubt that it will hit the least able to pay hardest, is disproportionately targeted at a disadvantaged segment of the population, penalises industry and will affect recovery.  On park benches from Taunton to Truro the talk is of little else.

The above was written by former Labour councillor John Howarth, prop. Public Impact Ltd (remember "Your Better Off With Labour"?).  Yes, he is pretending to be as out of touch with Real Life as he is trying to have us believe the Camerons are.  Cider (for it is this of which he writes) is drunk, not on park benches, because in well-managed parks this is not allowed, but in licensed establishments and homes by a variety of people who, er, like cider.  Elsewhere in his "blog", which astonishingly has been updated several times since last Tuesday, cannot imagine why,  Mr Howarth informs us that the Camerons have the same table he has.  Mr Howarth will be wearing a ring with a coronet on it next.  Once upon a time Jilly Cooper wrote rather a good book about the English class system, which Mr Howarth would do well to read despite the passage of time since its publication.  Where was I?  Ah yes, cider.  I am at present on holiday in Brittany (Saint-Malo since you press me to be more specific) where cider is enthusiastically consumed by people of (almost) all ages.  My two-year-old granddaughter, who is with us this week, will not be having any, but I shall, despite an unfortunate incident when I was 15 which involved the consumption of inordinate quantities of Woodpecker (slogan of the time, "Yes I would", so let us draw a veil).

But what's that you say?  Ah, I see.  You thought the deliberate mistake was the reference in the piece to "death throws" which of course is a mistake which renders the sentence it includes both meaningless and laughable.  No, that wasn"t a deliberate mistake.  It is a form of mental illness.  He can"t do a thing, in this case write in English, so he keeps on and on doing it, never asking a literate person to help, and driving himself deepr into a spiral of madness and despair.  Does the heart good really.

And this is the man responsible for Labour literature in Readings East and West.  Poor Anneliese.  Poor Naz. 

nice one Chron

yes I know today is 2nd April, but it made me laugh.  Yes, that's right, the Reading Chronicle has reported that a 20-ft-high statue of departing part-time boat-owning MP Martin Salter is to be erected in Reading (East, obviously), and the story concludes with these words:

It is understood the idea was put forward by a former Reading MP who wants to remain anonymous but has suggested cash from Strasbourg could be forthcoming to help boost the public donations.