Labour losing touch?

Neath MP Peter Hain has been pontificating at the Labour Conference this weekend.

According to the BBC Mr Hain said: "We have got to be constantly on guard to make sure we don't repeat the disease which afflicted us in Westminster - which is the more you stay in power the more managerial you get and the more you lose touch with your supporters."

Maybe he could pop up and have a bit of a chat with his mates in RCT.  He could start with dear Leighton, although in his case maybe arrogant is a better word than managerial.  Now there is a man who has lost touch not only with his supporters but with reality.  He knows best, and he doesn’t care who disagrees with him, he is not for turning.

Then there is the loveable bunch of rogues in the Council Chamber.  Well, ok, maybe not so loveable, but again completely out of touch with the people they are elected to represent.  They announce a Council Tax increase of 2.5% so they can continue to protect public services.  Well how much more could they protect them if they didn’t spend £65K on their ‘Outlook’ magazine – nothing more than a Labour propaganda rag.  Then there is the £85K on newspaper advertising  - which they think buys them the right to dictate to the press what they can and cannot print.

The £1million they spend on salaries in the Public Relations and Strategy department could be tailed back.  But then what would there be for Mr Hanagan to manage?  Who would take the photos that are then used by Labour on their website?  Nice that, wonder if they would acre to send a photographer out to take some for us?

Their supporters don’t have chauffeurs to rely on to run them around to free events – at the taxpayers’ expense.  It turned my stomach to see Russell Roberts and his wife along with the then Mayor Simon Lloyd quaffing back large quantities of free booze at the inauguration of the Llantwit Fardre mayor last year.  Especially when two chauffeurs were hanging around all day waiting to take them home.  Taxi not good enough for our Russell. 

The problem is that there are still too many people who allow themselves to be taken in by the veneer  - the outward gloss that says Labour is the party of the working class. They vote Labour because they have always voted Labour, as did their parents.  They rage about the waste of money and the laziness of their Councillors and the state of the streets, but many of them won’t do the one thing that would make a difference – don’t vote for them!

Tango man trying too hard to make political capital

Some people really will do anything and take advantage of any tragedy to make political points.

Like Tango man himself Peter Hain who this week made a bit of  a fool of himself calling for better funding for mines rescue following the Gleision colliery incident in which four miners were killed.

He said

‘"The Gleision mine tragedy in September 2011 identified a potentially lethal flaw in the resourcing of the Mines Rescue Service and the South Wales Police Authority which the Government needs urgently to address.

‘Otherwise, should there be another tragedy, both the rescue and investigation could be badly compromised: only goodwill prevented that happening at Gleision’

Mr Hain claimed the rescuers, and later police and health and safety inspectors, ‘depended upon the release by other mining companies of their part-time mines rescue staff as well as other key mining personnel’.

Indeed no-one would disagree that the Mines Rescue service as always did a remarkable job and it is a service well worth the investment.  However thankfully such tragedies are now rare.  What exactly does Mr Hain want? 

The Mines Rescue Service said that finance in no way compromised the rescue and it was commonplace for other mines to help out.

Tango man is out to get us

Tango man Peter Hain flush from the success of holding on to his Shadow Wales post is urging his party members to set their sights on ridding Wales of those dreadful Liberal Democrat types at next May’s Council elections.

Apparently they are not so bothered about taking Conservative seats – we must really have upset them somewhere along the way, can’t imagine how, I mean we love the Labour party here in RCT.

The Western Mail reports

‘Hain said that for the first time Labour candidates at next May’s council elections would be asked to sign contracts giving undertakings about their future commitment to community engagement: “They will be set targets by local parties based on achieving good levels of doorstep contact with the public.

“It’s very important that we have excellent candidates who will make first class councillors able to gain respect in their communities.

“Many of our current councillors work very hard and are first class, but in the past we have had our fair share of councillors not delivering for local people – and they have lost.” ‘

Even more unfortunately for the residents of many Valleys communities they have their fair share of Councillors who are not delivering who keep on getting elected.

Nice to see the same old, same old from Labour though.  Forget about local politics and what the election is actually about, just have a go at those nasty liberals.

Hain's been out in the sun too long

Perhaps Peter Hain’s tan is real after all.  I mean he’s obviously been out in the sun too long hasn’t he?  He is now starting to hallucinate and it seems he believes  in his little fairytales

Peter Black AM has, as he often does, hit the nail on the head with this blog post.  Yes there are people unhappy with the coalition we have even lost a few members over it.  But the vast majority of Liberal Democrats in Wales and across Britain are supportive of the Westminster coalition and there is certainly no indication of the sort of splits Tango man Hain sees.

It is indeed yet another example of labour’s arrogance – their belief that they have a right to rule and anyone who cannot see that must be blind.

Well as the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see.  It’s time Labour woke up and took a good look around.

Playing the blame game

As if the sight of looters and rioters wreaking havoc on the streets of cities across England isn’t enough, the situation is being made all the more sickening by the rush by politicians to alternatively wipe their hands of any blame / attribute blame to someone else.

This situation is not the result simply of anything that has happened over the past fifteen months of coalition Government.  Mistakes have been made by successive Governments and politicians for years.  They have failed to connect with a substantial number of people in this country.  Just look at the number of people who are completely disengaged with the democratic process, the process by which they should be able to bring about change.

No political party is managing to successfully engage with the poverty stricken and disadvantaged communities they all claim to care so much about.  And the worst offenders are the party who was supposed to be there for the working class, who were originally all about communities and socialist principles – the Labour party.  They don’t want to lift people out of poverty, they don’t want to get people off benefits, because then they will have nothing to blackmail them with.

And so what are they doing now? Are they making any serious effort to suggest solutions?  Of course not – they are far too busy trying to lay all the blame at the door of the coalition Government.

Peter Hain has a pop in the Western Mail today at the ‘savage cuts’ (what a ludicrous and overworked phrase) affecting the Police.  The Government must change its mind immediately or how will the Police cope with situations such as the current riots in the future?

As a Wales Office spokesman said:

 “Peter Hain appears to be conveniently unaware that his own shadow cabinet colleague Yvette Cooper has said the police would not be immune from cuts under Labour. He also seems to have forgotten that in Government the then Home Secretary Alan Johnson said he could not guarantee that police numbers would not fall, or that under Labour in January 2010 all police forces were expecting significant spending cuts in the 2011-2012 financial year.”

 “Despite Labour spending record sums on policing and record police numbers, only 11% of police officers are available on the streets at any one time.

“We must focus police resources onto the frontline. We have said we won’t do anything that will reduce the amount of visible policing on our streets.

“The effectiveness of a police force does not depend on the number of staff but on the way police officers are deployed. Police forces must focus on driving out wasteful spending and increasing efficiency in the back office so that they can save jobs.”

I have written previously about the new policing plans for South Wales Police and the assurances given by Superintendent O’Neill that this will be precisely the case in RCT – stations may close, methods may change, but there will be no loss of front line policing.

Peter Hain told the Western Mail that people in wales should not ‘crow’ over the fact that the riots have been confined to England, and that we are not immune to the ‘family breakdown which brought disruption to the lives of young people across Britain.’

He said: “We have a stronger family and community tradition to underpin our society but it’s being eroded year by year.”

Yes – that is maybe the case, but who then is to blame for that?  Devolution means Labour have been in power here over the last fifteen months of the coalition Westminster Government.  What have they done to help the situation?