The Battle for Blaydon Day 2 - the Focuses arrive

If my feet thought they were going to have a quiet week, they were rudely awakened to the reality of a large tonnage of Focus newsletters arriving at lunchtime. 2000 copies of my Sunniside Focuses just waiting to be delivered, sitting expectantly in my living room. It is the first leaflet to announce my selection for the constituency. Labour are missing so much by not bothering to produce newsletters here when we are outside the official election period. They must miss the exercise, the bracing autumn air, the worn out shoes and fingers chewed up by letter boxes! That's their loss!

This afternoon I met up with some of our councillors in Dunston and Whickham. Labour are proposing to make £1 million of cuts to leisure services in Gateshead but a third of these cuts will be in Dunston. This hardly seems fair. Having proposed these cuts, some in Labour are claiming to be opposed to them. This rather reminds me of the anti-cuts protest before the budget meeting earlier this year in Gateshead. Labour councillors were tripping over themselves to appear in photos of the protest to oppose the cuts and then rushed upstairs to the Council chamber to vote for them. Labour councillors in Gateshead regularly inform us in council meetings that Labour oppose cuts, in marked contrast to their leadership in London who say that if Labour were to win the election, the cuts would continue. Quite who to believe is a challenge. The rich, private school educated New Labour snobs of London, or the "socialist" brothers and sisters of Gateshead? Not a pretty choice!