<blockquote> red blockquote thing </blockquote>

There are Downing Street people actively canvassing this conference for John Reid and Alan Johnson (I don’t think they can make their minds up). They are also able to tell you in intimate detail why Brown should not, in their opinion, be allowed anywhere near the top job. Three times, I kid you not, I was regaled with the facts and figures from Monday’s edition of Newsnight, where a rather wacky focus group went against the chancellor. Now, you would have thought Blair’s people would have had better things to do before his big speech but actually, they don’t.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/derek_draper/2006/09/the_enemy_within.html

GB is a about as inspiring as…. well…. my bank manager. If anything, his recent backstabbing antics are a sure sign of things to come for the Labour party, and for Britain.

I agree with Leon, but I’d go further by arguing, if you think TB was terrible, GB will be far, far worse. There’ll be more managerialism instead of visionary ideas, more privatisation, more intrusive interference from the state, and more wars of intervention – all that, and no inspiration whatsoever.

As it stands, New Labour are bankrupt financially, and the problem just keeps getting bigger and bigger – state funding for such bankrupt parties offers no real solution to that, in fact, it will only make matters worse – and no amount of ‘blogging’ communication by Labour MP’s will solve that problem.

I used to live in the old Hendon South constituency. I have never been a Tory supporter (these days to be honest, there isn’t a party I could legitimately suppport), but our MP for many years was John Marshall. My politics were not his by any means, but I was always impressed by how hard he worked for his constituents, and how hard he tried to improve their everyday lives.
That is an MP’s first task, and I feel that GG fails dismally in that area. Were I a supporter of his foreign policies, which you know I am not, and a resident in his constituency, where no Newton has lived since 1940, I wouldn’t vote for him because he doesn’t do the boring bits.

I’m glad he replied to your emails, although I bet the subject was close to his heart, and you are obviously both educated and articulate, but I wonder if he also peronally replies to Mrs Jones, with her long-running battle with Thames Water/British Gas/BT, who can barely string a sentence together.

We will never know.

BTW can someone tell me how to do the italic thing. I’m too embarrassed to ask Katy. Thank you.

I think that open-ended access is pretty unique in itself, I mean if I wanted to catch him and ask him a question, I could probably do it…. though I am not defending his lack of show at home, he should be obliged to attened the home meetings. They are very important, but didn’t the residents also vote him in to be a ‘global’ mp that raises the publicity for Human rights affairs too? isn’t he doing that by going to Lebanon etc? maybe he’s doing what a lot of his constituents want him to do.

Heh, stranger things have happened! In all seriousness I take it as a good sign.:)

Nyrone – Leaving aside GG’s politics, and the fact that he’s a self-serving publicist, he’s an appalling consituency MP. He hardly ever attends the House of Commons, his voting record is abysmal, and he’s too busy cosying up to foreign worthies to attend to the day-to-day problems of his constituents.

Whether you like it or not, he is the public face of Respect, and it doesn’t matter in real terms what their policies are, because all anyone sees is ‘Gorgeous’ George.

However, if you’ve read their manifesto, and find that their policies are in agreement with your personal philosophy, then of course you should support them. Perhaps you could become their second MP.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourconference2006/comment/0,,1881895,00.html

He seems to think that Ruth Kelly is into double devolution, but I think that she isn’t anything like as interested as Ed Miliband. But anyway it would only be towards a settlement for local government power like the early 1980s.

Well, still not a bad thing. And a manifesto for strengthening local government power seems like the one thing that can unite Amir, me and Gordon Brown(!) But I doubt giving more power to town halls has much resonance in an election. Telling foreigners they aren’t wanted is a much bigger vote-winner, so I assume he’ll play that for the election.

But it is now thanks to the Citizenship Test – what are politicians not aware of this?!

and the Lib Dems have done themselves out by electing that old fool Ming. Whereas they could have really gone somewhere with Simon Hughes.

Amazing how these parties don’t seem to understand personality politics much.

this idea of britishness – who said there was no common british identity? in any case a common identity is not dependent on nationality. Localness is a pretty strong factor. Hence slogans such as ‘We live London’ and ‘We are Londoners’ or ‘One London’ are pretty powerful and probably do a good job of encouraging people to think about how they share the same environment. You can do that without resorting to focusing on nationality. It’s hardly as if in this global age people who share the same environment are going to share the same nationality is it? what an old-fashioned view that is – it won’t be very popular. Hardly progressive. it also hints at the global problem of generally only citizens are able to vote – so effectively local democracy isn’t particularly democratic – and ‘classes’ of people. Like Athens back in the day – slaves and women didn’t vote. but they weren’t considered ‘citizens’ so in many ways things haven’t changed much.

so how this Britishness thing is going to deal with not seeming to exclude those residents of Britain who aren’t British? i’d like to see how that’s managed

He’s some interesting rhetoric but then so did Blair when he was first leader. They are both Neo Labour with all that entails. Brown is stuck in the legacy of Blairs triangluation; he can’t differ too much from Blair otherwise the Tories will take the centre and if he sticks with Blairs vision there’ll be no change.

That said, it will be interesting to see him wiggle and squirm in that bind attempting to make the Premiership his own…