Monday, April 23, 2007

Tales from the campaign trail no 3: Labour hands over power to Lib Dems in Gateshead

If only it were true! But reading Labour's leaflets in Lib Dem held Crawcrook and Greenside ward, you would be forgiven for believing the Lib Dems ran the council. And what makes the situation even more amusing is that Labour are backing a petition against a decision taken by, errrr, the Labour Party!

It all comes down to a road junction in the village of Greenside. It's not the happiest of junctions and needs something doing to it to improve road safety. Our 3 councillors there have been trying to get the Council to look into the matter for some time. All the Labour cabinet would consider were traffic lights which they were happy to vote through and allocate £40,000 to installing them.

But the moment there was a bit of public discontent, the Labour party put out a leaflet claiming the scheme was nothing to do with them, it was all agreed by the Lib Dems and Labour were backing a petition against the proposals! And for good measure they accused the Lib Dems of spending 2 and a half times the actual money Labour themselves had agreed for the scheme.

Never let it be said that Labour ever allowed hypocrisy to get in the way of a well spun story!

We are finding more and more that Labour will say anything to get elected in the wards they don't hold in Gateshead.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting that Labour is handing over power to the Lib Dems in parts of Gateshead - because they clearly don't know who is in charge in Birtley!

Residents are currently being bombarded with letters about a household condition survey (which is extremely worrying even by the description in the sitting Labour councillor's letter) and yet all each side can do is slag each other off and not inform us of what is really going on.

So when even members of the council's controlling group don't know the facts who can voters turn to?

Perhaps the problem is that Lib Dems have abandoned Birtley and won't even put up a candidate.