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GE 2017: Local Elections Loom In UK
Topic Started: May 1 2017, 09:32 AM (18 Views)
Webster
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Wasatch Storyteller & Resident Forum Curmudgeon
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(The Guardian) Good morning and welcome to elections week. Not that one – you have to plough through another month and another bank holiday before 8 June is upon us – but this Thursday’s trip to the ballot boxes. With all 32 Scottish councils, all 22 Welsh councils and 34 English authorities up for grabs, along with eight mayoralties (six of them spanking new), 4 May will be a dress rehearsal for the gala to follow.....

What’s happening?
--Twenty years ago today, the Labour movement had rather a jolly May Day. This morning, it’s a tad more fractious. As the leadership continues determinedly to try to steer the campaign towards policies – today it’s tackling bad landlords, before that ousting zero-hours contracts – others argue the focus should be elsewhere. Saboteurs or democracy in action? So hard to tell these days.

First up, here’s Tony Blair, announcing, as if we’d perhaps failed to notice, that he is back. A rash of anniversary interviews (here’s the Observer one) spreads to the Mirror today, where the former PM says he’s not angling to return to Westminster. But there’s a but: This Brexit thing has given me a direct motivation to get more involved in the politics. You need to get your hands dirty and I will… I am going to be taking an active part in trying to shape the policy debate and that means getting out into the country and reconnecting.

Also seeking reconnection today is Scottish Labour, which in 1997 scooped 56 Westminster seats to the SNP’s six and the Conservative’s round zero. But that was then. Today Alistair Darling will man-mark the party’s sole Scottish MP, Ian Murray, as they try to elbow their way back into the game with a reminder of Labour’s record on tackling poverty.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) What is Tony Blair actually proposing to do to “get his hands dirty” in the campaign?

You can read the full interview in the Mirror, and many of his comments are in line with what the former PM has been saying over recent weeks and months: he’s concerned about Brexit, we know: This Brexit thing has given me a direct motivation to get more involved in the politics. You need to get your hands dirty and I will.

What he’s not doing is standing to be an MP again or – though some are reading this into his words – setting up a new party. Not quite: It is not frontline politics in the sense I am not standing for parliament. I am not sure I can turn something into a political movement but I think there is a body of ideas out there people would support.

And he says he knows he won’t be welcomed with open arms by many people: I know the moment I stick my head out the door I’ll get a bucket of wotsit poured all over me, but I really do feel passionate about this…

People on the right are desperate never to have my politics come back to the Labour party because they know it can end in a Tory defeat. And then unfortunately it has always been the way of the left that it tends to attack its own.

-Read more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/whats-happening-britain-worries-me-10331148
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Webster
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(The Guardian) We still await formal manifestos but today we have a new pledge from Labour, aimed squarely at renters.

John Healey, shadow secretary of state for housing, told the Guardian: Our homes are at the centre of our lives, but at the moment renters too often don’t have basic consumer rights that we take for granted in other areas. In practice, you have fewer rights renting a family home than you do buying a fridge-freezer. As a result, too many are forced to put up with unacceptable, unfit and downright dangerous housing.

Healey says Labour’s manifesto will include new legal minimum standards for rented homes.
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/01/labour-housing-pledge-bad-landlords-renters
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Theresa May is due to be out meeting voters again today, repeating her insistence that her favoured campaign method is door-knocking. But that insistence is looking thinner following multiple reports that the PM’s appearances so far have been heavily stage-managed.

On Saturday, a “rally” in Aberdeenshire was held in a in a tiny community hall with such poor communications coverage that live reporting of the event was impossible.

The Independent reports that the event was booked at Crathes village hall as a “child’s party” (insert your own witticism), a not entirely encouraging invitation to local voters.

May has also faced accusations last week that she spoke only to a handpicked crowd of Tory activists at a Leeds community regeneration project – and not to the workers there, who had all left for the day before she swooped in.
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Webster
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--Been out all day on the campaign trail in Mansfield. Can someone please explain to me why our Prime Minister is hiding in a forest? (John McDonnell, Laboour Shadow Chancellor - 29 April 2017)
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, one of the signatories to this letter calling on Labour to step aside for the Greens in Brighton Pavilion and the Isle of Wight, has more here on what she sees as the benefits of a progressive alliance:

Labour, Greens, Liberal Democrats, SNP, SDLP, the Women’s Equality party, all of these are on the same path. Those of us who bounce between them, sometimes joining, sometimes lapsing, are on the same path. Apparently intractable constitutional disagreements – membership of the EU, Scottish independence – sound important in the mouths of people who talk about national destiny, but are not important set against core political beliefs: that climate change is real, but human ingenuity can stop it; that pooling resources for world-class education and heathcare for everybody is not a drag or even a duty, but an honour; that if you can’t afford food and shelter on a full-time wage, you’re not the problem; that everybody will spend some part of their lives economically unproductive, and it’s better to support rather than blame each other.

All progressives believe these things; the Conservatives and Ukip believe the opposite.

-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/01/sneered-but-progressive-alliance-win-election
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Kicking things off with candidates for the West Midlands mayoralty speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning - Labour’s Sion Simon and the Conservative’s Andy Street.

Asked what the role of the mayor will be in the region, Simon says he will lead the process of “taking back control” to run the West Midlands. Street, fundamentally agrees, but there’s one other aspect - representing the West Midlands, acting as a spokesman for the region.

The rival candidates are asked what they disagree on.

They take public ownership of the M6 toll road as an example of a point of dispute.

Simon wants to take the M6 toll road into public ownership, Street is against nationalising. “It’s not the right use of the money,” Street says.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) Simon stumbles a little when he refuses to throw his direct support behind Jeremy Corbyn for prime minister.

Asked who would be better prime minister, Corbyn or Theresa May, Simon at first dodges the question. When pressed, he says he believes it “will always be better for the West Midlands to have a Labour government” and he will be voting for Labour.

But he refuses to explicitly back Corbyn. It’s pointed out that Simon doesn’t appear to want to even mention the Labour leader’s name. “All my efforts are on this crucial election,” he says.

Street, who used to run John Lewis, is challenged over his campaign spending - with some local reports suggesting it has been in the region of £1m.

Street says he hasn’t spent £1m but concedes he has spent “more” than his rivals. But he says this is fair because the unprecedented nature of the election and the volume of the electorate justifies greater spending.
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Webster
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(The Guardian) The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has started his bank holiday Monday campaigning with a tweet drawing attention to a Labour pledge that we can probably expect to see in its manifesto on the rental housing market...

--Under Labour, tenants will have security & a home fit to live in because we're standing up for the many, not the few (Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party Ldr. - 1 May 2017)

Labour’s shadow secretary of state for housing, John Healey, said his party would commit to new minimum standards to help renters “call time on bad landlords”.

According to research by the party, renters in England are paying £800m every month to live in homes that are classified as “non-decent” by the government. It finds that 400,000 families with children are among those living in 1.3m substandard private rented properties with problems including unsafe wiring, severe damp and vermin infestation.
-Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/01/labour-housing-pledge-bad-landlords-renters
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Webster
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(The Guardian) The Conservatives’ candidate to become West Midlands mayor has defended spending up to £1m on the campaign, dwarfing his opponents’ spending power.

Andy Street, the former John Lewis boss who quit to run for the role, said that targeting voters before spending rules begin can be justified because the role is vital to 2.5m people in Birmingham and the surrounding area.

The comments come ahead of a tightly-fought race and a string of mayoral contests to be held on Thursday. Many council elections are also happening that day.

There is a strict spending limit of about £130,000 during the final five weeks leading up to the May 4 election but there is no cap on spending before that, and most of Street’s material was distributed during January, February and March.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Street said: “I haven’t spent quite a million, but I have spent a substantial amount more than my opponents and actually I think that’s ok, and I’ll tell you why.

“This is a very important election, a new start in democracy for this region. It is 2.5m people and so it is absolutely appropriate. We have worked within the rules, which are that if you raise money you can spend it.”
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