Fighting for everything he has got?

No early election, screams BBC News 24. And then you look at what Gordon Brown said. He expects a Labour budget. That was the basis for the no early election claim. Whilst 6th May remains the most likely date, nothing he said rules out 25th March, the date that would allow Labour to go to the polls without having a budget. Still, I would put my money on 6th May, were I a betting person (which I am not!)

One interesting point I heard Brown make on the Andrew Marr programme was his claim that he had always had to fight for what he has. That isn't quite how I remember the Labour leadership election in 2007. That was a Stalinist triumph of an unopposed coronation. It happened because Brown's opponents had previously been bullied and brow-beaten into inaction and because Labour are stuffed full of spineless jellies looking for a place in government. But Brown hardly had to "fight" for the leadership. A little bit of rewriting of history is a favourite activity by Labour!
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My less-than-happy highlights of 2009

I could not think of 10 but I do have 8, and they are not in any order:

Shock of Paris prices: I went to Paris in June, the first time in 7 years. Last time I was there, the Europhobes were rubbing their hands at the thought of the Euro doing badly and the banking system was sucking vast amounts of money into the UK with the result of the pound going sky high in value. How times change. I was horrified at how expensive Paris has become. Even a cheap meal cost an arm and a leg.

Death of Freda: Freda was my cat. She was nearly 21 years old so in cat years she was super-elderly. Nevertheless, her going in October was still a shock.

Death of Margaret: Margaret was my aunt, Dad's half sister. There is a great family history to be told, and I will tell it soon, but the key feature of the story is that Dad and Margaret did not meet until 7 years ago when he was 72 and she was 89. Alas, Margaret died in October.

Missing the heatwave whilst in Norway: the heatwave that was predicted to last for ages in the summer lasted a week. Typical that I should be in Iceland and Norway when it happened! Still, I got to experience daylight at midnight. And that was spooky!

Wrecking hard drive: October was a really shitty month for things going wrong. Having experienced the loss of Margaret and Freda, I proceeded to drop an external hard drive on which were stored thousands of documents, photos and videos. Fortunately, the vast majority of documents were back up copies. But not all of them. Most I have now recovered from other sources but not all.

Wrecking the video camera: as if wrecking the hard drive was not enough, I followed it up the next day by dropping the video camera. With the camera wrecked, and a trip to Morocco coming up, I had to do an urgent search for a new camera on the internet. And in a sense, the accident turned out to have a silver lining. I had planned to buy a new, professional camera at some point and set up a small business to make videos (mainly for Lib Dem candidates and for small businesses). As a result of buying the camera, I am now in business earlier than I expected! The amusing point about all this is that the new camera arrived just in time for me to take to Morocco (one hour later and I would have missed it.) And when I got to Marrakech and made my first visit to my first location on my first day, I wasn't allowed to bring in the camera. The guards thought I was from a tv company and despite protestations to the contrary, they were convinced that the camera I had was only used by professional tv programme makers! So I put the camera away and got out a small camcorder I had borrowed from a friend and which I had brought along as a backup.

Shambles of Sunniside junction traffic lights: we are now into our third year of promises and deadlines from Gateshead Council over proposals to put in traffic lights on the busy Front St/Sunniside Rd junction in Sunniside village. Three years ago we got the council to agree to put them in. And we are still waiting. Every few months we get a new deadline and none have seen the lights introduced. The last deadline was December. We are of course in January and there are still no lights. What a shambles by Labour Gateshead.

Remaining beds in allotment: my plan for 2009 was to bring the remaining uncultivated beds on my allotment into use. We got two of them going but two still remain. So lots of hard graft still to do.

So that's the not-so-good side of 2009 for me personally.
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My top ten highlights of 2009

Happy New Year everyone, including all my avid Labour Party readers in Gateshead! I thought that I would bring you my personal highlights of 2009 whilst sitting at Crystal Palace station waiting for the train to arrive to take me to Westminster

So here are the top 10 positive highlights, in reverse order:

10)Reaching the milestone of 750,000 viewings on YouTube. I got there at the end of June. The even better news is that I am now approaching one million viewings. Give it 6 weeks or so and I reckon I'll be there.

9)The Government's defeat over the Gurkhas: I was there to witness it. Well sort of. I got a call in Cowley St when the vote went against the Government. "Get your butt over to Parliament and get some photos and video done!" Being in the crowd outside Parliament was quite something. And seeing the line up of snivelling hypocrite Labour MPs who had signed the EDM calling for the Gurkhas to stay only to vote the opposite way shortly afterwards was quite something as well.

8)Visiting Morocco: I was there for two weeks in November. Facebook friends have already had to endure my photos, as have visitors to my Flickr site. The videos will be coming soon!

7)Being the victim of attacks carried out by Cllr Mick Henry: this really was fun! And thanks to the Labour Leader on Gateshead Council, who spent a large part of the council meeting in October attacking me, and constantly interrupting me, my profile and standing in my group went up significantly. Keep up the good work Mick!

6)Whale watching in the North Atlantic: early July saw me in the North Atlantic armed with binoculars to spot whales, east of Iceland.

5)Building the greenhouse: we built it on the allotment in January and February and immediately saw it go into crop production. The video I made about building it has been an incredibly minor success on YouTube in the US, for some odd reason.

4)Fiona Hall's re-election: I attended the Gateshead count for the Euro elections and we were all nervous about whether or not Fiona would hold on as Lib Dem Euro MP for the North East. I drove home after the count and waited only a few minutes for the result to come through. The UKIP surge we had feared had not been enough. And happily, Gateshead saw a higher share for the Lib Dems than the average across both the region and the UK.

3)Stokkur geyser: a must visit when in Iceland so I visited it in July. Don't worry if you miss it going up when you first arrive. It goes off every five minutes. Quite an amazing natural feature.

Joint first)Leaving Cowley St/Crops from allotment: these two are actually closely linked. I loved my job at Cowley St but I also had a long list of other things I wanted to do. June was, I felt, the right time to leave. Now I am heading for self-sufficiency, though we have plenty still to do. We are looking for more progress in 2010. And leaving Cowley St also means that I am able to put much more time into battling Labour in Gateshead!

Coming up soon, my negative highlights!
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Heading south

We are currently in the car at the moment heading to London and just passing the Nene Valley Steam Railway. We will be in London and Kent over Xmas. Andrew, my older brother is temporarily moving into our house in Sunniside over the Xmas break as it beats sleeping on Dad's floor whilst he is up visiting the rest of the family over Xmas.

I am also doing a bit of photography and video in London whilst I am down for candidates.

The car is packed full of home grown and wild foraged food. Our aim is to have as near self-sufficient Xmas dinner as we can get. More about that later.

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Christmas has hit my radar

Bahhhhh humbug and all that. Christmas has now hit my radar screen. I'm off to Newcastle now, on the bus, to do some Xmas shopping. Thank goodness for vouchers. They make much better presents than actually buying something for someone that they don't want.

I did however spend a hour on the allotment in the snow this morning. We are aiming to have a self-sufficient dinner on Xmas day. So I picked cabbages and sprouts, dug up ready frozen leaks, and harvested some plump parsnips of which I am, sadly, rather proud.
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On equal terms

Very good news - debates between all three party leaders will take place at the general election on tv. This immediately removes one of the disadvantages under which the Liberal Democrats operate. The three leaders appearing together should help alter that perception. We will be on an equal footing with the other two.

The agreement on the leaders' debates is also a last throw of the dice for Brown. With little else to lose, the debates could be the boost Brown needs, at least to salvage something from the election. The biggest threat is to Cameron. His vacuous statements and shallow policy pronouncements may not stand the scrutiny of the leader debates. Interesting times ahead, me thinks.
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A view inside Lib Dem conference centre 2012

Lib Dem conference is coming to the Sage, Gateshead, in March 2012. The building is one of the best music halls in the country and on Thursday it celebrated its 5th birthday. I filmed the following video at the celebration. For Lib Dems it will give a taste of the venue for conference though I did not film inside any of the performance halls.

Don't walk away, make it the start

Copenhagen's outcome is a huge disappointment. The stakes are high and the cost of failure is enormous. Ambitions before the conference were very high. But we must not stop now. We may not have got the binding treaty we need but we have the foundations for an agreement that cannot come too soon. So whilst Copenhagen is very disappointing in what it has produced, we can build on the agreements we have reached.

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Visiting the Gibside Farmers' Market

Gibside is a National Trust property in my ward in Gateshead. It is the former home and estate of the Bowes-Lyon family, of Queen Mother fame. Once a month a farmers' market is held here. It is on now and I am currently having a coffee in the cafe waiting for the final trader to arrive. Despite the snow the event is going ahead but the final trader is the one who sells the exotic gins (which we want to buy as presents for people as well as compare with our own homemade fruit gins.)

And from here I will be going to Rowlands Gill to deliver a few Xmas cards and Neil Bradbury annual reports. I say a few. I actually have 800. That's what happens when you volunteer to deliver!

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Exclusive news on 2012 Lib Dem conference

I am at the Sage in Gateshead, the fantastic new music hall on the banks of the Tyne. And I can exclusively reveal that Lib Dem spring conference will be held here in March 2012. Fantastic news. Really pleased. I knew conference office were interested in coming here and when I was at Cowley St I was constantly plugging the location as ideal for conference. So come to Gateshead in 2012 and enjoy my home town!
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The Sage 5th birthday

The Sage is the concert hall on the Gateshead Quays. It was opened 5 years ago and is today celebrating its 5th birthday. Thanks to the short-sightedness of the then Labour run Newcastle Council, Gateshead got the Sage, rather than it going north of the Tyne. Nevertheless, we are all proud of it on Tyneside. I am on the bus heading to Gateshead now to go to the Sage birthday party.

I had thought I could get through this year without a cold or any other illness. Alas, as I sit here on the bus, I am experiencing a cold, my body defences having let me down at the 11th hour! And it's cold outside as well, though we are on lower ground than Sunniside and therefore the snow has not been lying.

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Voting to jump off a cliff

The demise of Flyglobespan yesterday should be a timely warning shot to cabin crew at British Airways. The airline industry is in a perilous state and companies such as British Airways can either get their costs under control or collapse. Given the former is the lesser of the two evils, the decision by BA cabin crew to strike over Christmas seems like little other than a vote to jump off the top of a cliff with no safety net to catch them.

I wonder of there is a growing trend of industrial and commercial irresponsibility and suicide on the go at the moment. The postal workers were on strike despite the devastating consequences to their own under-threat Royal Mail. BA cabin crew vote themselves a long Xmas break that could crash land their company. Management are just as wreckless. Bank bonuses on a massive scale have been paid when the banks themselves have been bailed out by the taxpayer and are still on a commercial life support machine.

It waits to be seen what impact this sort of suicidal behaviour has on the economy as a whole.
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The Xmas card stuffing party

Whilst Labour council cabinet members get an officer of Gateshead Council to send their Xmas greetings by email, Lib Dems in Blaydon had a Christmas card stuffing party in my dining room last week. Here's the proof:



The cards have now been delivered in a number of wards in the constituency (Labour will have to ask around as to where but most houses will eventually get a card) but more are still to go out. We have another stuffing party tomorrow evening.

By-election alert in BNP target seat

There is to be a by-election in the Primrose ward of South Tyneside following the death recently of Labour's Cllr Barrie Scorer. The ward is not one that necessarily appears on the radar screen of closely fought battles and therefore normally does not generate a level of interest in the way a marginal seat would do so. Except now is different. The result last time put the BNP on a third of the vote. The result in May 2008 was:

Labour 1005
BNP 681
Conservatives 382

Turnout was 33% which for local council election is (relatively speaking) not that bad. I can't imagine for a moment that the BNP are going to let the opportunity pass. The question is, are Labour going to remain asleep and let the BNP have a go at wresting this ward from them?

NewcastleGateshead in World Cup bid

The host cities for England's World Cup 2018 bid have been announced and I am delighted to see that NewcastleGateshead is included. I have to confess that I am not a follower of football but I am a very strong advocate for tourism in my region. Anything that brings the visitors (and their money) to our area is welcome.
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My 4th video to hit 50,000 YouTube viewings

Shock news from my YouTube Channel! I now have 4 videos with over 50,000 viewings. The video below is of the Burj al Arab Hotel in Dubai. I visited the emirate state in 2002 (I hasten to add I did not stay at the 7 star Burj) and filmed this short video. I only added it to YouTube last year.

For those who don't know the Burj, it is the hotel built on its own island in the shape of a sail (not a sale which I think Dubai may have to do of its overseas assets to pay the debts built up to invest in buildings such as the Burj.)

Anyway, here's the video:



Meanwhile, I am approaching the one-million-viewings-of-my-videos-on-YouTube milestone.

A significant quantity of constituency Christmas cards

In Blaydon constituency recently we had a significant quantity of Xmas cards produced and dropped off ready for putting into envelopes. The whole lot of them were dropped off at my house and 8 of use worked an entire evening last week to stuff as many of them as we could. There were still lots of boxes left to do when we stopped at 1am. I won't say how many we had delivered - such tactical information is for Labour to wonder about rather than be handed on a plate - but deliveries have started in a number of wards in Blaydon. The Northside estate at Birtley is the most recent to be ticked off the list.

I have been away in London filming videos and taking photos since Thursday evening last week but I have received today an email from Noel Rippeth, my group leader and agent in the constituency, updating me as to how far we have got with deliveries and asking me to host another envelope stuffing party! We have of course increased the pace of the Blaydon campaign in recent months. We have Dave Anderson MP firmly in our sights!

I am now heading home to Gateshead and am looking forward to that joyous task of delivering thousands of Xmas cards.
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A high profile day in the press

I blogged yesterday about the Journal being in touch to follow up some questions I had raised at Council last week. Well, two main articles today in the Journal and Evening Chronicle. It looks from the website (I am in London at the moment so I'm reading material on line) that the Chronicle coverage of the slow progress on the Gateshead Get Carter Multi Storey car park demolition was the main front page story. I'll get the press cuttings when I'm back home tomorrow.

I do however have a priceless gaffe. I got to Victoria Station a short while ago and got on the train. Not my train as it turned out. I casually watched through the window as my train pulled out of the station, thinking to myself, I wonder why the train I am on is not moving. So here I am still on the platform, waiting for the next train to Crystal Palace.
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Another video shoot and some press work

I am off to Parliament Square now. I have another session this afternoon of shooting videos and taking photos for parliamentary candidates. Only one customer today but more on Monday and Tuesday.

I had to deal with an email from the Journal in the middle of filming yesterday. They have picked up on some questions I asked at Gateshead Council on Thursday about funding the proposed conference centre and about the non-demolition of the Get Carter car park. Demolition of this was supposed to have been carried out two years ago. The hideous, concrete monstrosity that looks as though it came straight out of the Josef Stalin Guide to Communist Architecture is still standing. The Evening Chronicle may well carry something on this latter story.

I also gave some comments about the budget cuts Gateshead is facing - up to £60 million. If they are published, avid Labour readers of my blog will be able to read them in the coming week in the Journal.

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He would say that, wouldn't he?

Tony Blair claims he would have invaded Iraq even if he knew Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. He claims he would have deployed alternative arguments but the world was "better off" without him. Well, he would say that anyway, and I can't help but feel he is attempting to smooth the route to the Iraq inquiry which he will face in the new year.

What we already have in response however are MPs rushing to say that they were conned by Blair when the Commons they voted for war in 2003. Had they known the truth about the non-existent WMDs, they claim, they would never had supported the war. I saw Tory MP Richard Ottoway making that claim. Frankly, such people are as bad, if not worse than the likes of Blair. The Tories had the opportunity to question the "evidence" in 2003. They chose not to. Instead, they were the cheerleaders for the war. They put the boot in on those who did question the evidence. It hardly bolsters their credibility now to pose as the upholders of scrutiny and peace.
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