I had planned not to indulge you any more Robin but these latest observations of yours actually border on the sensible so they do deserve some encouragement. I would respond to the three main premises of your posting as follows:"Are you seriously suggesting that that tactic brought about the two BNP victories? If yes, then I'll have to withdraw the previous comment I made about you having a clever strategic mind: the tactic would have made only the tiniest difference either way (and any slight difference would probably have been in Labour's favour)."Let's remember that the "tactic" we are discussing here was lying to your own potential voters that the only way to prevent BNP candidates from being elected was to vote Labour.The "tactic" only needed to make a slight difference. Five thousand more votes for the Greens in the North West - less for UKIP - would have kept Griffin out. The situation in Yorkshire & Humber was not dissimilar.In a climate in which voters were disinclined to vote Labour the predictable outcome of such a "tactic" would have to have been to persuade many voters who might otherwise have voted Green, or for UKIP that matter, to stay at home instead. Whilst neither you nor I will ever know the precise number who did so in those two regions, on the balance of probabilities I would consider it more likely than not that the "tactic" was directly responsible for the election of at least one and probably both BNP candidates to the European Parliament."I believe that your obsessive criticism of the Labour Party over this issue is a left-over of the bitterness you still feel towards the party over events on the Ivybridge in 1987...I wish you could take a step back and try to re-evaluate this issue."Not in this case it isn't, though the essence of the point you make is reasonable comment - but how about doing something to persuade me, and far more importantly the rest of the community which consistently elects and re-elects ICG councillors, that the mindset has changed since those days? The fierce opposition I encountered from Labour when trying to introduce a united association on that estate less than three years ago would suggest to me that it hasn't changed (and this time there was no "NF man" to provide the justification and thus the sheer unreasonableness of the whole approach was there for everybody to see). This goes a long way beyond Ivybridge. Why did the Labour Group oppose the release of £4m funds for tenant-led initiatives throughout the borough, for example? Why did the same Group speak against, then abstain from supporting, my announcement at Borough Council last year of a proposal to make resident engagement more central to the philosophy of the council?"The Labour Party is not in its 'death throes' - it is having a bad time. Eventually it will re-emerge, re-group and win again. It always has done in the past. People said Labour was finished in the 1950s and 1980s. They were wrong."Whether you choose to believe it or not, I actually hope you are right. Our politics needs a Labour Party of sorts and would be the poorer for its absence. But do you honestly believe that your present "bad time" is solely down to cyclical political ebb and flow and that all you have to do is remain as you are and there will be soon be a clamour for the return of Labour in its current form?When the Conservatives were hammered at the 2007 General Election it was generally recognised that they needed to go away and think about why they had lost so much support, with a view to re-emerging at some later time in a different and hopefully better form. Whether they have succeeded in doing that or not is of course a moot point - I personally believe that the current resurgence in the Conservative Party's political fortunes is almost wholly a manifestation of anti-Labour sentiment and that there is no overwhelming enthusiasm for the party to compare with that enjoyed by New Labour in 1997 - but the realisation was at least there.My personal dislike of Labour in its current incarnation may be an untypical and extreme example born of personal experience, but I am certainly not the only person who feels that the organisation has become arrogant, remote, self-righteous, detached and - worst of all - completely unscrupulous and devoid of even a rudimentary sense of right and wrong.I walk around the Civic Centre and I speak to individual Labour Group members (at election times or in the glare of publicity I am still officially a fascist, but in private the pretence is not persisted with) and they are to a man and woman decent, reasonable, rational, dedicated, genuine human beings. Then a day or two later I will read something in a newspaper or on a leaflet distributed by the exact same people making some completely outrageous or fictitious claim, sometimes about myself. I am aware that you consider this "politics". To me it just illustrates the problem.I believe the Conservatives will win the next General Election, as I suspect you do also. I also believe that Labour will fail to regain Hounslow in 2010, indeed I am aware that your party does too as - incredibly - it is not included in its list of target boroughs. There are rumours doing the rounds that Labour in Hounslow intends to roll over without a fight in the hope of assisting the election of a Conservative majority administration in preference to a coalition which might include the ICG. I cannot say one way or the other whether there is any truth in them - if there is it provides an interesting insight into the party's political priorities.But assuming Labour aspires to regain administration of the borough one day, just as it will hope to form a government again in the not-too-distant future, I sincerely hope that it uses its time in opposition to reflect deeply upon where it might have gone wrong. Locally at least, the current approach of preference would appear to be simply to blame the electorate and to reassure itself with the knowledge that the voters are not worthy.
Phil Andrews ● 6191d