As previously reported, Labour’s Vauxhall MP Kate Hoey endorsed Boris Johnson for Mayor and has subsequently took up a post as a sports advisor. 

Hoey, who has quite clearly broken party rules, faced a de-selection challenge in the week which unfortunately failed.  As one local member has commented, this saga is over now, lets unite around this Labour MP in the hope that she will do her job and unite around the Government.

It’s really good to see John Prescott fit and well, he makes some excellent points in this short interview from this morning.

Advice from experienced former-ministers like him is going to be invaluable over the coming months.

This is an interesting speech from Brendan Barber the TUC top-cheese, it’s been around for a few days but I wanted to share it on here so you all had a chance to read it.

It’s a really spot-on analysis of what’s wrong with the party and its good to see someone at the top of our movement making the case for change in a sensible and reasonable way.  Have a read of it here.

In the last couple of days we have had two resignations from Labour MPs, who say they won’t fight the next General Election.  Chris Mullin and David Taylor.  Chris Mullin’s seat of Sunderland is famous because it always wins the rather ludicrous counting contest.  For something like the last 4 General Elections, Sunderland Central has declared its winning candidate before any other constituency.  The Tories have been making in-roads into his constituency on new boundaries since 2004.

David Taylor has seen his majority slipping greatly since 1997, to little over 4000 now. 

With these two resignations, do you think there are many other Labour MPs with that sinking feeling?  It reminds me of a great bit of the Alan Clark diaries, our hero Clark, Tory MP during the Thatcher years, decides to leave his seat for fearing of becoming opposition in 1992.  As we all know, his judgement was wrong, and the Tories went on to wreck everyone’s life for a further 5 years.

There have been many blogs in the fallout of the elections last week that all give many ideas as to what we need to do to turn the fortunes of this party around.  My question now is, whether we can actually do it?  Have we not ventured too far into the political abyss, so as to render our efforts useless?  My very simple answer is, somewhat reluctantly, no.  There is still hope for us.

What we have seen in the first 10 months of Brown’s leadership are the sort of problems that occur with any new premier.  These related to PR, style or even problems climatising to unfamiliar surroundings.  Brown spent over 12 years in one policy area.  We have also seen a massive cut in the number of special advisers around the PM, the circle of influence has become much too small, almost to stifle any outside criticism.  That is evident with Frank Field’s attempts to de-rail the budget, apparently he was agitated with the lack of contact he was having with senior ministers.  All the issues above are very easily rectified.

The real issue is with trust, that comes into our message crafting which over recent months has been shocking.  There is almost no communication between the party and members as to what the overall message is, thus rendering it incredibly difficult to get passionate about the Government, especially on the doorstep.  This can probably be put down to the slow pace of the policy groups.  The next General Election manifesto will start being written over the summer and I bet we will not get the usual quiet “silly-season” instead we will probably hear new and exciting ideas coming from the Government over the summer months in a kind of “road-testing” session. 

So I remain optimistic as well as firm in my belief that millions of real families benefit from a Labour Government everyday.  Those families would not benefit from a Conservative Government.  That is what we all fight for in our movement, the problem is communicating that belief to the people it benefits and other voters.  That has been easy up until now, so we’ve entered the hard-long slog to the next General Election which will be tougher and closer than ever before!!

I have to say I’ve been quite impressed by the non-partisan tone of some of the discourse in the aftermath of Thursday’s elections, particularly the Mayoral election.  Anyone who has actually been an active candidate or a community campaigner in local elections (as opposed to a party-aparatchik, navel-gazing, prediction-making, strategy-forming “campaigner”) has some appreciation of what we’re all really in this game for.  It’s not to win one over the other side, although that must be how it appears to most.  It is entirely about positively influencing the lives of the people who live in our communities.

In reality, that positive influence can come in many forms, and almost always you can make the impact without needing the Councillor’s allowance or the vote in the council chamber.  I stood for Council last year, and whilst I knew I would make a better councillor than my opponent, I also knew that all was not lost from my defeat.  Running a high profile campaign and being good at doing it almost invariably helps not the politicians, but the electorate.  I left the count last year knowing that by calling my opponent publicly to account with high-profile and aggressive campaigns, I had probably changed the quality of life of hundreds of people in that ward.

The same applies to a number of wards this year, where some results appear to be just completely unjust to anyone with a grasp of either the intellect, capacity to work, or community involvement of the defeated candidate relative to the victor.

But we’ll carry on fighting, remembering that our democratic system trumps it all.  This year hasn’t been “bad,” it’s been disastrous.  What we need now is not idiotic and patronising soundbites about how we’re all going to start “listening” – everyone knows our grassroots campaigners have done exactly that for years – even if the conduit to the leadership for those views has been far from a path of least resistance.  What we need is to remember why we’re doing this in the first place.  If we carry on the fight, you can rest assured that before too long, circumstances will have us back in power locally, but much more importantly, will have us making the positive changes our communities deserve under Labour, and are always left wanting under the Conservatives.