Email newsletter just done

I suspect my email account at the Lib Dems nearly burnt a hole in the Cowley St server tonight. Firstly, my Gateshead colleague and regional Euro agent Frank Hindle wanted me to send a message out to everyone on my North East Democrat list. Then I sent out eFocus, my email newsletter to constituents which had additions only minutes before I hit the send button. So a four figure number of people who got emails from me this evening. Next week brings the North East Democrat (publication hopefully on Tuesday) and more eFocuses. What did we do before email?

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No BNP candidate in Chopwell and Rowlands Gill

I have just received notification of who isn't standing in the Chopwell and Rowlands Gill By-election, the ward next to mine in Gateshead. And the BNP are not standing. I know we are. I know Labour are (they are defending what is one of their afest seats in the area). Not sure about the Conservatives though I guess they will fly the flag. The BNP didn't stand here last year but they did in a previous contest. I guess they think western Gateshead is rather barren territory for them.

The byelection is on 14th May. It's all hands on deck now. With nominations closing today, I can blog a bit more about the contest. I have personally delivered 1000 leaflets in the ward over the past month or so. It tends to be done on Sunday afternoons when I enjoy a walk around Rowlands Gill watching the red kites swooping above me.

Meanwhile, my spies tell me that Labour aim to be out and about in Chopwell on Saturday morning.

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New facilities for councillors?

I was sent a survey yesterday by officers in the Civic Centre asking my opinion on facilities and accommodation for councillors in Gateshead Civic Centre. Was I satisfied with what we had? Were improvements needed?

Now is hardly the time to be considering investing in better accommodation for councillors. This should be at the bottom of the list of priorities. I wrote back:

Given the current financial circumstances, the demands on council resources and rising unemployment in the borough, I feel it would be very inappropriate at this stage to refurbish members' accommodation.

I'll keep you posted on whether or not my views have any impact.

Polls and by-elections analysis March - April

I wrote the following article for Parliamentary Campaigner but thoguht it useful to post it here as well. The analysis covers polls and council by-elections from 1st March to 9th April.

If Labour had hoped for a G20 'bounce', all they got was one very short lived blip. On 4th April YouGov put them at 34%, with a Conservative lead of 7%. Two days later, Labour were back down to 30%.

The range of shares of the vote from 1st March to 6th April are as follows:

Conservatives: 40-44% - but 7 out of the 11 polls put them on 41-42%
Labour: 28-34% - but 7 out of the 11 polls put them on 30-31%
Liberal Democrats: 14-20% - but 8 out of the 11 polls put them on 17-19%

In effect the polls have been steady for six weeks. Blips have happened but they were small. This means that the Conservatives, who need a 10% lead in the popular vote to win a majority, are only scraping along at the lower end of what they need to win. When the general election comes, that lead, enjoyed whilst Labour are suffering from the recession and a strong dose of midterm blues, is not large enough to give them the cushion they need to be assured of victory.

The Conservatives cannot afford any slip up in the General Election. They need to gain over 130 seats so with such a huge challenge, failure to capture any individual seat on their target list will make it all the more difficult to win with a majority.

Council by-elections

The Conservatives' performance in recent Council by-elections has not reflected their opinion poll performance. Whilst patchy, it nevertheless makes uncomfortable reading for David Cameron's party.

They were 4th in Manchester, Redcar and Cleveland and Dundee and 5th in St Helens.

In a seat in Camden they held til 2006, the Lib Dems saw their majority rise from a handful of votes to a 3 figure sum.

In Calderdale, they held on to the seat but their share droped from over half to just over a third.

They lost 3 seats: to Labour in Redditch and North Warwickshire and to the Lib Dems in Broadland (where the Lib Dem share increased by 50.4%)

In the 30 by-elections fought by the Conservatives from the start of March up to Easter, their vote went down in 20 (9 of them by over 10%)

In conclusion, whilst the polls are showing a Conservative lead, they are only at the fringes of the comfort zone. When faced with voting Conservative in real elections however, the Conservative performance fails to hold on to the gains made in local election votes that have come their way since the 2005 general election.

Marley Hill's missing banner

Sunniside History Society have been in touch with me to ask for my help in tracking down a missing Victorian miners' banner. Marley Hill is a small, former pit village just up the road from Sunniside where I live. As well as being the location of Dad's allotment (!), it was also the last, non coastal deep mine in the region, closing in 1984. It was also the last pit in the region to use pit ponies, and once the pit closed, the ponies went into retirement.

Members of the history society are concerned that the banner, which has enormous historical value to the former miners of the area and to the local community, has gone missing from the NUM Headquarters in Durham. Enquiries have so far failed to locate it.

If you know of its whereabouts or any information that could help us locate it, please get in touch with me on cllr.jwallace@gateshead.gov.uk.

Wandering around the sewage works

No, not a video about Downing St as someone suggested to me on Facebook the other day! This is me with my historian's hat on, wandering around the derelict sewage works that up to 60 years ago served one of the villages near to where I live. The plant is long forgotten but I rediscovered it again 3 weeks ago. I returned over Easter to filmed and photograph it.

Weekend round up: planting potatoes and investigating sewage works

Four days at home. Bliss! The time seemed to be split between the allotment, making videos, trying out new wild foods recipes and visiting local places of historical interest.

So, I am now the proud owner of 4 furrows of potatoes on the allotment. In total that's 20 metres of spuds growing. Following the disaster of our crop last year, this time we meticulously planned what we were doing. So hopefully, this year we will have potatoes galore.

Local historical sites of interest visited were the Tanfield Railway, the world's oldest steam railway, which happens to be within walking distance of my house. And yesterday, we walked down to some woodland near our village where, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered a large set of foundations. A bit of research and I discovered the building was the sewage works built by Chester le Street Rural District Council in the early twentieth century. Maps suggested the site was out of use by the early 1950s. Since I had come across no references to the site in any histories of the area, David and I decided to explore the site a bit further and took cameras and video with us.

A weekend wouldn't go but without my coming up with new recipes for wild foods. I produced two. The first was a wild leaf salad consisting of dandelion, wild parsley, bramble shoots and hawthorn leaves, with a dressing made of raspberry vinegar. Very nice! The second was a wild garlic loaf. That's in my bag now, heading to London, along with two fillets of smoked salmon. I was give a food smoking kit for Christmas and we tested it out last night on a couple of piece of cheap salmon. The results are encouraging.

No weekend can go by without a Focus delivery. I did two patches.

And finally, back to food. We did a full check on the contents of the freezer. Quite why we have frozen tarragon, best before 1999, is a point we can't answer. I made a note of all the contents, though the really old stuff we decided to put out for the birds or put in the compost bin. Now I have to plot a series of meals to get the food used up. After all, we'll need the space soon for our first crops (and the ice cream we are planning to make).

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The Monday morning blog on Tuesday - time for a Tory apology now

The Tories are demanding an apology from Gordon Brown over the Damian McBride affair. They are owed one but don't wait by the phone. As we all know, neither Brown nor Labour do apologies. I'm still waiting for an apology from Labour 17 years after they ran a pretty vile campaign against me in Hexham in the 1992 general election.

Yet there is something missing from all this. The Tories themselves owe the Lib Dems an apology. For years their candidate in Watford conducted a campaign of criminal damage and smears against Lib Dems in the constituency. The candidate ended up being found guilty after a long running police investigation and a major court case. The candidate has since gone but there has not been a word of regret or apology from the Tories. Watford was, at the time, a target seat for the Tories. The chances are that the criminal behaviour of their former candidate has sealed the Tories' fate of coming 3rd in Watford.

So, David Cameron, despite repeated requests for an apology, nothing is forthcoming. It would appear that, like Gordon, you don't do apologies.
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What I was doing yesterday - the Tanfield Steam Railway

I went to the world's oldest steam railway, the Tanfield Railway, which also happens to be on the edge of my village of Sunniside in Gateshead yesterday. It was like a giant trainset for boys who haven't grown up! Great fun. Enjoy the video.

The Emily Thornberry television car crash

I have just watched Labour MP Emilly Thornberry being inverviewed about the Damian McBride affair on News 24. It was a car crash of a performance, claiming she couldn't care less about whether or not this civil servant Labour hack should be able to stay in his job. And she even tried to blame the whole mess on right wiing bloggers who, she claims, are much more keen on running smear campaigns against their opponents. Hardly makes it okay, does it?

Whilst I don't expect attempts at running smear campaigns to be an institutional decision within Labour, the fact that someone so senior and close to the centre of power has been caught red handed highlights the depths of despair to which Labour have sunk as they see their hopes of winning a general election outright slipping from their grasp. What it suggest is that the next election will not necessarily be a clean campaign.
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What possessed me to get this train?

I guess the answer to my own question is the availability of tickets. Normally I try to avoid getting the 10pm train out of Kings Cross to Newcastle. I have been quite successful at avoiding it for the past year or so. But not tonight. I guess there has been a rush of people to get tickets on the earlier trains due to the bank holiday tomorrow. The additional drawback with this service is that we all have to change at York. Literally, everyone on the train, including the crew, transfers across the plaform at York station, and then waits of the other train for about 25 minutes until it is scheduled to leave. For this frustrating activity, I am not going to blame National Express. GNER used to do the same thing.

I am not expecting to get home until about 2.30am. I have a weekend of allotment gardening and video making but tomorrow morning I am having a lie in!

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Early spring on the allotment

Just in case anyone is interested, here's the latest video about what I get up to on my allotment!

Red faces as Labour councillors forget words to Red Flag

Thursday 26th March saw the final meeting of Blyth Valley District Council. The decision to consign the authority to the history books had been controversial, but nevertheless, as the ruling Labour group gathered to rule for one last time, the tones of "Red Flag" started to pour from the lips of the "socialist" brethren.

Alas, this last act of defiance against the new Lib Dem run Northumberland Council (or was it against their own government? - both are viewed as the enemy by the departing brothers and sisters) turned out to be a bit of a disaster as so few of them knew the words!

Apparently many of the red hot socialists had to fill in their gaps in their knowledge of the lyrics by singing "la la la". No one had thought to download the words to this Socialist singalong favourite from the internet.

I guess they won’t be keeping the Red Flay flying there anymore.

2nd video with 100,000 viewings

Thought I'd post this video I filmed on the London Eye to celebrate its becoming my second on YouTube to reach 100,000 viewings. My top video, "Inside a former secret Soviet submarine base", is on 109,000 but London Eye is closing fast.

Weekend round up

Quite what possessed me to get the 7am train this morning to London is beyond me, but at least National Express has been kind enough to avoid cancelling the service. Whether or not they cancel the 7.40am, their favourite candidate for the chop, is something I don't know.

Anyway, seeds was the theme for my weekend. We must have planted thousands on the allotment. Peas, beans, chard, parsnips, courgettes, carrots, leeks, you name it, we probably planted it! And three videos made as well, about the allotment and wild food foraging and cooking.

Screw up of the weekend was to forget to go to the Saltwell Park Fair, despite its being in my diary. But at least I got my weekend allocation of focus newsletters delivered.

Anyway, we have just passed York. Next stop is Kings Cross. Wake me up when we arrive.

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The Monday Morning Blog: General Election Predictions

I haven't seen any polls over the weekend so I don't know if Brown has had a G20 bounce. My feeling is that, whilst it no doubt helps to restore some degree of success to Brown's image, the gathering itself was largely irrelevant to the day-to-day concerns of the majority of ordinary people. That is not to detract from what the conference achieved. Oiling the jammed up wheels of international trade will ultimately benefit all of us.

The resulting spring in the heals of Brown won't tempt him to go for an election this year. Whilst these may be famous last words, Brown knows that recovery and a feeling that the economy has turned a corner and things are improving are what Labour needs to stand any chance of winning an election. With the Chancellor already claiming that there will be no recovery this year, Labour's window of opportunity is now just a very narrow slit in an imposing wall.

So come the next election, what are the possible outcomes? Polls currently suggest a Conservative victory with a comfortable majority. Polls mid term however tend to do just that: show a lead for the opposition. I am not convinced however that the Conservatives have what it takes to win a majority next time round. To scrape in with a minimal majority, they need to gain 130 seats. That means there is virtually no room for any individal constituency cock ups. Every single seat on their hit list has to be won. The evidence suggests that that is going to be extremely difficult to achieve.

And look again at what the polls are showing. Look at the Conservative share of the vote. It is, with a small number of exceptions, in the low 40s. That compares poorly with the Labour performance under Blair in opposition in the 1990s (and Kinnock's Labour Party often had much higher ratings in 1991, only to lose the election a year later). The reality is that whilst Labour are unpopular, the Conservatives have not yet reached the critical mass of public support that will be strong enough to propel them into government in one leap. There is no public burning appetite for them like there was for Labour when Blair led them through the final years of the Major government.

Whilst it is fair to say that Cameron has successfully decontaminated the Conservative brand, there is as yet a failure to present an alternative vision other than "We are not Labour." That is not enough to ensure a groundswell of support sufficient to win an election.

As for Labour, the difference between winning comfortably, and losing a reasonably large number of seats is quite narrow. Labour's grip on power is precarious. Their share of the vote at the last election was 36%, the same as they got in 1979 when they lost the election badly to Thatcher. In 2005 Labour were saved by a voting system that looked on them favourably but which can equally give them an absolute pasting and keep them out of power, which it did in the 80s and early 90s.

Labour has three significant systemic weaknesses at the moment: their national organisation is in a mess with massive debts; their constituency organisation is shot to bits; their great selling point - that they are strong on the economy, abolished boom and bust and delivered prosperity - has gone up in smoke. All three of these are needed if they are to win a general election outright.

So predictions on the outcome, whenever the election is called? Sorry, no can do! The next election is probably going to be the most unpredictable for decades. What is predictable though is that the real battles will be fought out in individual constituencies, far more so than across the airwaves. And that could see seats going in all directions.

My advice however is that no one in politics should rely on their opponets to deliver election success for them. That is your job to do that for yourself.

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What's coming up this weekend

I am now on the train heading back to the North East. The weekend will be the usual mix of allotment, Focuses, campaigning and video making plus a hush hush meeting about which I ain't going to tell you anything. We also have to make a visit to B&Q. I don't know what for, I simply got the message from David that we need to go to buy something for the allotment.

Anyway, I need to shoot some video about our drive to self-sufficiency. Surprisingly, my videos about this are getting a healthy number of viewings on YouTube. There seems to be an 'appetite' for them! I never would have guessed so many people would be interested in how to make nettle tea or build a greenhouse! I also need to do some research for some history videos I'm planning though whether or not I'll fit that in is questionable.

I also need to make a start with Parliamentary Campaigner. Publication date is this Thursday so I'd better get a move on.

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The Brown G-string and the smile on his face

The G20 circus has now left town and Gordon has enjoyed himself. I hadn't seen him smile like that since he announced the abolition of the 10p rate and thought he'd got away with it. Pity for him that he has to stop hanging around with his fereign buddies and return to work with all those Labour ministers and MPs who have grown to despair of him.

Trade credits and the decision of the creditor nations such as China to pump a trillion dollars into the IMF is a significant step. No doubt Brown will claim it was all down to him. Perhaps he had some hand in the outcome, or perhaps it was going to happen anyway as world leaders could see the dire consequences of not oiling the wheels of international trade.

Action on tax havens was also welcome and on this, Sarkozy can probably claim more credit than Brown. After all, the latter has, since 1997, been the protector of offshore tax havens. Only recently has be realised he's been seen hanging around with the wrong kids on the financial block and has turned on them to create the impression he's been against them all along.

It appeared yesterday that Brown had pulled a rabbit out of the hat with the agreement. As is always the case with Brown however, wait for the headlines and euphoria to die down and then look again at the rabbit. Too often in the past, the white rabbit pulled out of the hat is little more than the victim of a spin doctoral roadkill which is already reeking and rotting. We shall need to see what the G20 agreement details are before we should make our final judgement.

It could be that Emperor Gordon is posing in his new clothes and until the euphoria has passed, no one can bring themselves to tell him all he is wearing to cover his embarrassment is his G-string.

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The barriers go up at National Express

No, they haven't seen me leading the Charge of the Light Brigade. It's much worse than that! Work is taking place at Kings Cross which looks as though it is to set up ticket barriers. So not only do we have the privilege of having our trains cancelled by National Express, we can add to that the privilege of being delayed at the station as hundreds of people, complete with bags galore, attempt to squeeze through the barriers. It will be chaos. So, are you up to the National Express steeplechase gold cup challenge? Get ready to enjoy the spectacle! As for those of us who will be competing on this obstacle course, have pity on us.

I did of course expect this work to be carried out. Last year National Express announced they were seeking planning permission to install barriers at Newcastle Central. I found out as The Journal phoned me for a comment. Writing blog posts about this bus turned train operator certainly helps to get me noticed, even if it hasn't led to the end of my train service being cancelled.

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Gain from Labour in Redcar and Cleveland

News has reached me of a gain from Labour in the Dormanstown byelection in Redcar and Cleveland yesterday. And yet again, the Conservatives trail in 4th place behind the BNP.

The result is:
Ken Lucas (Lib Dem) - 809
Marion Fairley (Lab)- 667
Lynn Payne (BNP) - 305
Barry Hughes-Mundy (Con) - 125

Labour have had quite a bad time of late in Redcar and Cleveland. looks as though things there for them are not getting any better.