Surreal

Originally posted @ 1:16 pm, Fri 24th Jul 2009

I've just watched the declaration for the Norwich North by-election - one of the surrealist I've ever seen.

- the Labour candidate's wife spoke cos the Labour candidate has swine flu;

- the Tory candidate praising the former Labour MP who had resigned his seat cos the Labour party thought his conduct over the sale of his London home cut across the new and high expectations of public office that they thought the public now had;

- the Greens coming 5th despite my understanding of the subliminal messages from the BBC coverage being - vote Green in this election, cos there's lots of Green Councillors in Norwich.

The BBC had only just finished interviewing an Oxford don, prompting him with the line that 'the Gov't losing by-elections was typical was just a cover' - only for the don to point out it was a fair point.

Labour members of course know -

- we'd rather not lose by-elections;

- the public will have expected us to act on parliamentary standards;

- what matters is doing all we can to help people and business from the economic recession;

Doing all we can includes not throttling any recovery with the kind of ideologically driven cuts in public spending we saw with Thatcher.