Next Thursday, our wonderful coalition government will experience its first electoral test at the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election. This election has been precipitated, you may recall, by the sacking of the previous MP Phil Woolas, who, allegedly, made untrue statements in his General Election leaflets about his Lib Dem opponent. It all seemed pretty mild stuff to me and hardly damning. At the General Election Woolas won by 135 votes over the Lib Dem candidate. The Lib Dems then objected and an electoral court found against the MP, banning him from parliament for 3 years. Thus, a bye-election was precipitated. Why did the Lib Dems take this course? Phil Woolas was a popular local MP and any attempt to replace him via an action of the London based political establishment was bound to be a hazardous endeavour. Polls in Oldham indicate that any candidate wearing a Labour rosette will romp home on Thursday with more votes than the Lib Dems and Tories combined. The only slight fly in the ointment is the presence of the Labour leader in the constituency. Ed Miliband has the charisma of a shopping trolley combined with a London-centric outlook and a lack of any radical policies to distance him and his party from the chaos, profligacy and incompetence of the Blair/Brown years. He will do best for Labour if he disappears and allows Lib Dems and Tories to lose by themselves.
I tend to feel pro the coalition government and David Cameron is doing better than I expected - of a rich Old Etonian. But there are a lot of things not right - and I am not just thinking of student tuition fees - a fall-out from Labour incompetence which brings millionaire students in £2,500 suits out rioting on the streets complaining about their inability to pay the fees. I am concerned that the government is not getting to grips with the debts. Local government - as well as government service providers - are telling us all the things that they cannot afford now while keeping armies of bureaucrats shifting paper about and indulging in orgies of political correctness. This is well illustrated by recent nonsense about the non-emptying of dustbins - or more correctly in these days, of emptying wheelie bins and collecting black domestic rubbish bags. This is a priority service and must be maintained come ice, snow, hell or high water - it was alwys possible in the olden days! Some towns have not had the bins emptied for 4 weeks. In Birmingham they had the nonsense of bins on one side of a road [in Solihull] emptied every week and bins on the other side [in Birmingham] untouched for a month. The roads are not mended; education is a mess; pensions have to be sorted; above all the government has not even begun to tackle the obscene pay of the bankers. The NHS wastes buckets of money - again, it's the bureaucracy. I will ignore other nonsense for the time being - like the housing minister's suggestion that he is going to stabilise house prices. How? He has got a good sound bite but nothing will happen because any action will be resisted by the bankers and the Tory faithful. They shot down Vince Cable's mansion tax fast enough and they will do the same to any process that could eliminate house price escalations.
Back in Oldham the Lib Dems and the Tories have a struggle and I think that not even Ed Miliband will be enough to lose it for Labour's Debbie Abrahams. Nick Clegg's path in government is going to get a whole lot harder.
Peter McHugh, reporting for Channel 4 News reminded us that all by-election results are protest votes. The first problem in Oldham & Saddleworth is that you have to work out what is the protest, who are the protesters and what are they protesting about? The next problem is that there is no one answer to any of these questions.
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