So David Cameron is going to sue the Lib Dems about a leaflet we’re putting out in Henley? Well, I haven’t seen the leaflet, and I don’t know whether what it says is true or not. I certainly don’t know if it’s actionable, but I suspect there are lots of Tories who think it is, and lots of us who think it’s not. Chances are it’s neither absolutely true or absolutely false, which is why a judge somewhere might get to decide. Whatever it is, there are so many borderline lies that inhabit election leaflets from every party, and they’re the types of thing that drives me mad and makes me wonder why I’m doing this kind of thing at all.

It’s no surprise that temperatures are running a little high down there. This is a by-election on top of another by-election, right after the local elections. There are some people who’ve barely slept in three months, and I’m surprised they still remember the candidate’s name let alone write only lovely things about his opponent.

But it’s pretty rare for any leaflet to be greeted with cries of “See you in court!”

Maybe the threat of legal action might reign in some of the more outlandish leaflet claims from all sides, and maybe it will cascade down to the lowly likes of us campaigning in local elections. Because even here our leaflets can sometimes go way over the top. And screeching half-truths about opponents makes us all look like bickering idiots with nothing positive to say.

Political leaflets are odd. It seems as if we consider it unacceptable to think the same as our opponents on any issue, even though we do think the same thing on many especially at a local level.

If there’s a hospital to be closed, we’re against the closure and we strain every sinew of our being to find even the most tenuous reason why our opponent might not be. “The government of his party wants to shut hospitals” is reasonable, if there’s evidence to back it up. But is it fair to say “The Council run by his party 150 miles away shut hospitals”? Or “25 years ago his party shut another hospital”? I don’t think that it is. But if there was the chance to write it then I can bet my bottom dollar that somebody would.

And we do it all the time – all the parties do it all the time. I don’t even care if it works to win votes, because if it does it also works to convince voters that we’re all drones incapable of doing anything but degrading our opponents who are, on the whole, perfectly decent people who wouldn’t want to shut hospitals in an ideal world.

Even at my most local of levels, at the last election we screamed at Labour and they screamed at us on things that, really, we weren’t miles apart on. Rainsough for instance. So much was made of the failure to renovate the shops. We blamed Labour and Labour blamed us, when the truth is that it’s neither of our faults. It’s a symptom of neglect caused by people who’ve long since retired or died and who could’ve been wearing any colour of rosette under the sun back in 1981 or whenever the hell it was. Luckily for us it was a red one so we could blame them. But I don’t think it was fair to, because they’re not standing now and the guy who is seems a perfectly nice chap with a brain in his head and some good ideas.

Of course, there are times when we genuinely disagree. When there’s clear space between us. And we should let every voter know where both sides stand on these issues. But even here there’s surely a better way of doing things than we manage in our elections. We paint ourselves as haloed saviours, and the opposition as salivating attack-dogs ready to rip communities to shreds simply because they’re too stupid to see the obvious solution we’ve seen.

Neither of these two personas is right, yet why do we treat the voters as too ill-informed to recongnise that issues are nuanced and that there rarely is a black and white solution? Surely we can’t believe what we’re saying?

Is it any wonder that people are disengaged, when what we give them to be engaged with is a cartoon version of the issues which they probably already know isn’t very well connected to reality? In a by-election, whoever wins will have been called a bumbling buffoon by his opponent in at least half a dozen leaflets on every doorstep in the constituency. This hardly does much to help with a respectful society, does it?

I know that there’s an end game to campaigning. I know that the more Councillors we elect, by fair means or foul, and the more MPs we get by tipping the swing our way through no-holds-barred campaigns, the more likely it is that one day, one day, we’ll have the chance to put our policies into practice and make a real difference. But do those ends justify the means that we sometimes use? And would it only be a pyrrhic victory if we obtain power and influence by shouting down our opponents with smears and out-of-context quotes? How can we strive to be leaders when our journey to leadership is marked with such questionable moral judgement?

We should all try and do something different, I think. And it’d have to be all of us at once, because if we alone became the party of nice leaflets I suspect we’d get truly panned.

I doubt it will ever happen. Campaigning is so targeted and sophisticated now that before too long the likes of Mosaic and hacking into the Tesco Clubcard database will mean we can just leaflet half a dozen swing voters until they collapse under the strain of it all, and then fill in a proxy vote for them at their hospital bedside.

But I just wish we would all take a breath, lose the tunnel vision and remember why we’re in it in the first place. It’s not to hire lawyers and fight over leaflets full of mis-quotations in the High Court. It’s to spread our good ideas and change things for the better.

Rick

Another deeply malicious article in the Advertiser this week on the elected Mayor.

Voters in Bury will be asked on July 3rd if they want to have an Elected Mayor running the Council. The referendum has been called because 10,000 or so signatures were collected, allegedly in favour of a Mayor, but in reality in opposition to congestion charging. Those behind the petition have linked the two issues without a single fact to back them up, and are continuing their catalogue of lies in the run-up to a vote which could forever damage the relationship between Bury and its local leaders.

The article “Vote to veto the toll tax” in today’s paper is hugely misleading, and potential voters should be very wary of the claims made within it from both the author and pro-Mayor campaigner Geoffrey Berg.

Mr Berg is right that this congestion charging is a massive issue. But the Mayoral referendum will make absolutely no difference to it at all, and voters should be made aware of what will and won’t change if they vote for a Mayor.

The article says “if Bury votes for an elected mayor who is opposed to the congestion charge in the July 3 referendum, the borough could become exempt from the charge.” But this is simply not true. The two issues are absolutely un-connected. It is as simple as that.

At present Bury Council has made it very clear that it opposes congestion charging. When the issue comes to a final vote at the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA), the Leader of the Council will vote against the charge. Replacing him with a Mayor can do no more than bring exactly the same result. The only difference will be that it will be the Mayor voting against the charge, not the Leader. The vote will carry exactly the same weight.

And remember of course that there is no guarantee that an elected Mayor would vote “no” at all. An elected Mayor won’t be bound by the will of the Council, and if we elect a maverick then he can vote how he wants and we’re stuck with him for four years. Putting that much power in the hands of one person is dangerous. Add to that the cost of a Mayor (£100,000 for the referendum, same again for the election, another £100,000 annual salary and maybe another £75,000 salary for his deputy), and over four years we’re looking at nearly £1m taken out of front line services like caring for the vulnerable and cleaning the streets.

I have personally led the fight against congestion charging in Council. In council, I proposed the amendment opposing the charge, and this opposition was adopted as Council policy. I remain stridently opposed to the planned charge. But I will be voting “No” to a Mayor in the referendum because I see absolutely no connection between the two issues. I urge my fellow voters not to fall for Mr Berg’s lies. A Mayor would be bad news for Bury. So would congestion charging. So we should reject a Mayor once and for all, and pull together to oppose this charge.

Rick

I am at a bit of a loss at the moment, and I wonder if I’m the only one feeling the pain of election cold turkey. This is an odd time of year when the elections are finished and the Council has yet to kick off. A kind of hole in the political space-time continuum that sucks people in at the conclusion of the count, and spits them out at annual Council with nothing in between except for a black and empty week and a half.

I do miss the campaign though, despite disliking every minute of it. I don’t have a mother-in-law, but I suppose if I did, and she came to visit for an entire horrific and unendurable month of ceaseless horror, before abruptly leaving, I’d feel the same kind of confusing sense of loss. I’d have done anything to end it sooner, including acts of criminal violence, but now that it’s gone away and left me with nothing to think about but the good bits, I wonder if I wasn’t just wasting time complaining instead of appreciating it. It’s not often a team comes together to achieve something that is genuinely good. It’s even less often that I am a part of it.

For weeks on end I was immersed in the election – leafleting all day every weekend, canvassing every night, and thinking of little else but how much I wanted to win a contest which, it turned out, even fewer people cared enough about to vote than last year. In the last week I was literally doing nothing but sleeping and election-ing, and in the last 24 hours even the sleeping was jettisoned in favour of about 5,000 leaflets and lots and lots of knockabout knock-up fun. It is not the nature of elections to have soft landings, but I wish there was some way of scaling down activity gently, rather than ramping it up until the last minute and then just stopping.

I miss it now, despite wishing the whole thing over throughout. It’s the people more than anything, of course. Although I wanted to commit an act of savage harm on the person who asked me to go knocking up 100 more people at 20:00 on election night, I’d really quite like to be back there now with the rest of the team, knowing that he was as tired as I was and that we were both going through it together. Thankfully my sleep-deprived and leaflet-addled body couldn’t muster the beating I so longed to meter out, because if it had then I probably wouldn’t have been invited back.

I spent the weekend away from Prestwich. In Cumbria, at a hotel I am loathe to call “my favourite hotel” because I think it makes me sound worryingly middle-aged. Is it right for me to have a favourite hotel when there is 99.8% of the world left to explore? People retire to their favourite hotels. People my age should have favourite bars or something. Is it wrong that mine is becoming the one at Bury Town Hall?

Well, I suppose this hotel is my favourite one so far. And in it I returned to normality, of sorts. It’s a “foodie” place, and whilst on six nights a week the menu is more or less normal (with only one or two dishes that I am not cultured enough to understand), the Sunday night tasting menu involves bizarre dishes which this week included filet of python. There were only about six guests, and one man declined the python on animal welfare grounds, only to tuck in with gusto to the replacement course of veal. I can only hope he didn’t vote.

But throughout the weekend, where I did normal things like sleep in late and watch TV and drive off to see attractions that weren’t related to local pot-holes or derelict shops, there was something missing. It is depressing to think that I am almost certain it was a pack of leaflets and a canvass sheet.

Rick

Last night’s results were a triumph for local Lib Dems in Prestwich, and my thanks goes to everyone in the ward who helped and supported us through a long and tiring campaign. Congratulations to the newest Lib Dem Councillor in Bury - Mary D’Albert, who joins Donal O’Hanlon on the St Mary’s team. Re-election for Vic D’Albert in Holyrood and Ann Garner in Sedgley means that we now have all 9 Councillors in Prestwich, the culmination of work that started in Holyrood 22 years ago when we had no Councillors and not much else either!

I am very tired this morning. Yesterday could not possibly have lasted a mere 24 hours. It felt like it lasted about a fortnight. The count alone seemed to drag on for days. If I had the strength or inclination I would investigate the clear flaws in the space-time continuum that affect campaigners on election day. But, perhaps to the relief of us both, I don’t.

In the end the result was a good one for us, and I hope that the good work we’ve started locally will continue now that we have 9 Councillors out of 9 in Prestwich. We are moving forward now in Whitefield after an excellent second place in Besses.

I am taking a couple of easy days now where I will not cast eyes on a single leaflet, and then it’s back to work with a full team of Lib Dems in St Mary’s. I will write more then. At the moment my eyes are heavy.

Thanks again for eveyone’s support. And well done Mary.

Rick

The rain battered me this morning when I was leafleting - I have taken the week off work for the conclusion of the campaign, and our candidate Mary D’Albert and I were out in the storm this morning. Mary is obviously significantly cleverer than me, and had remembered a coat. My t-shirt did not take kindly to the soaking it received.

Remember, there’s only two full days after today, and then it’s polling day, when the people of St Mary’s get to choose who will represent them on the Council for the next four years. Will it be the local hard working Lib Dem who has lived in Prestwich for years, understands the issues, and whose party campaigned to save our local school and who started the Village regeneration at last? Or will it be the Labour Party insider who has moved to the area to replace the Labour councillor who proposed the school closure, who represents the party bidding to close local post offices, and whose party let Prestwich decline over 21 long years of maladministration?

It’s as simple as that, and I believe that the evidence speaks for itself. We’ll be out on the streets of St Mary’s more or less non-stop over the next 72 hours, so if we see you, do stop and say hello. At busy times like this it’s always nice to stop and chat to the local people we hope to serve in the future.

Rick

I am a bit damp at present, having just returned from leafleting in a downpour. Obviously now that I am back inside, the sun is shinning, but that’s just the typical fun God likes to have with me.

With just three days after today left until polling day, it’s full pelt for the Bury Lib Dems as we campaign for the local elections. As well as Mary D’Albert in St Mary’s, long-standing and hard working Councillors Ann Garner and Vic D’Albert are standing for re-election in Sedgley and Holyrood wards respectively, and we have candidates in all the other wards across Bury too. So there are soaked Lib Dems up and down the Borough right now.

My finger is still attached to the rest of my hand, which is an unexpected bonus given the amount of blood pouring from it on Friday night. I nearly lost the plaster in someone’s mailbox this morning, but managed to retrieve it despite the overwhelming temptation to leave it on top of the Labour leaflet which it had fallen on to. So right now the wound is being given a chance to breath before this afternoon’s leaflet-fest.

I am not sure how frequently the blog will be updated in the coming days. My fingers should be doing things involving leaflets, envelopes and doorbells, rather than typing, I suspect. But I will try to make it every day nonetheless. It’s important that we remember the key choice for Thursday - between a Labour Party imploding across the country and trying to make poor people poorer still, whilst shutting down schools and post offices here in Bury, and a Lib Dem candidate in Mary D’Albert who campaigns for stronger local facilities, a better Prestwich Village, and really gets things done locally.

Rick

My leafleting excursions over the years have had me face to face with various excitements - wild dogs mainly, with the occasional even-wilder local resident not overly keen on St Mary’s Focus. I have grappled with gates so complicated that their design owed less to B&Q and more to the CERN Institute. And I have taken on every type of weather imaginable. I have fallen over, accidentally kicked cats, got stuck in hedges and had a memorable encounter with a goose. Once I ended up consulting health professionals after an untoward incident with a (now deceased) dog. But tonight I was almost murdered on the streets of Prestwich by an errant letterbox which, on reflection, I am sure was made entirely of razor blades and barbed wire.

My hand went into it with the same composition as normal - four fingers and a thumb, protected by skin. I am not sure what happened during the depositing of the leaflet, but my middle finger clearly got mauled by an alligator or something because when I removed it there was a chunk of skin missing the size of a 10p piece, and I was spurting blood like a macabre comedy clown. Honestly, it was like Apocalypse Now.

The blood-letting was concerning for a number of reasons. First, because I am told that copious blood loss is never a good sign. But mainly because at this time of year I don’t want to be dropping leaflets into people’s porches asking for their votes whilst at the same time staining the leaflets with threatening droplets of blood. “Vote Lib Dem or We’ll Kill You” is not the message we want to get across. Although, having seen the general direction that the local Labour leaflets are heading, I wouldn’t be surprised if their view of this tactic differs from mine. Anyone on the receiving end of my bloodied hand reaching into their hallway must’ve thought they were starring in a re-make of The Shining. If anyone was scared, I apologise. But after 15 minutes of unceasing bleeding, you probably weren’t as scared as I was.

So, in short, I was alarmed. I staggered on for a few houses, all the while dripping into a tissue that my mum (leafleting with me) provided. But once it had turned from white, through “raspberry ripple,” into pure red, and the blood still hadn’t stopped, I thought that some emergency help was required before I dropped dead on the street.

Step forward Kindly Local Resident.

My Mum approached a lady innocently filling her wheelie bin, and asked if she could spare a dying boy a piece of kitchen roll. Kitchen roll was just the start of it though, as I was led into the lady’s kitchen, past her startled husband in the lounge, and into a downstairs toilet where I was ordered to wash the wound whilst it was inspected, accompanied by worried intakes of breath and mumbled words like “deep” and “stitches.” Obviously the seriousness of the situation hadn’t occurred to the lady - in election week I am going to carry on leafleting even when I put my hand into a letterbox and a dog bites my arm off. “Deep” and “Stitches” mean nothing to me. 

Two bloodied kitchen towels and four plasters later, this domestic adaptation of Holby City was over and I was released back into the wild with only minor faintness, to continue my leafleting. I didn’t apologise at the time, but if the lady is reading this, please let me say sorry for dropping blood on the rug by your sink. It was an accident.

I don’t know who the lady was. Or her husband. They told me they were Lib Dems though, which was nice. I can only thank them for their genuine kindness. They could’ve sent me on my way with a couple of sheets of polyroll, but they didn’t. They welcomed me into their house without a second’s thought, and made sure I was alright. Joking aside, it was very kind indeed of them. And the gentleman’s remark that I should sue the owner of the letterbox has resonated somewhat with me and my still-stinging finger!

And such a brush with death makes me glad to be alive! It is only when one comes face to face with mortality that one truly appreciates the most important things in the world - like the dazzling revelation that I mustn’t die yet, because the last thing we need now is a by-election.

Rick

Last night was a special meeting of Full Council to approve the constitution which will be used by the Council in the event of us electing a Mayor. And it was as thrilling a ride as that introduction suggests.

Neck bottle of Lucozade, and proceed…

At present the Council is run by a Leader and Cabinet. The Leader is the leader of the political party running the Council, in our case the Bury Conservatives. Later in the year the people of Bury will be asked if they want to get rid of this way of running things, and instead have an elected Mayor, who will be elected every four years by everyone in Bury and who will wield lots of executive powers.

Obviously if the people say “yes” then we have to alter the Council’s constitution. And last night was about approving what we’re going to alter it to. Although, for lots of Councillors, particularly on the sparsely populated Labour benches, last night seemed to be about not going to the meeting at all and spending the night electioneering instead. Which is fairly disrespectful in my book. And a bit illogical, if the point of winning the election is to serve on a Council which you then choose not to attend…

The meeting itself was fairly mundane, as most of the recommended changes were approved without great debate. I suppose the whole thing is academic at the moment, and may indeed never come to be important at all – that depends on the referendum result later on in the year.

But it was interesting to see my fellow Councillors all looking as harassed and stressed as I am at the moment. This election lark may be the life we’ve chosen, but at times it’s not enormous fun!

Rick

The election is a week today. In St Mary’s it is a two horse race between local Lib Dem candidate Mary D’Albert, and Gordon Brown’s Labour Party candidate. The Conservatives can’t win here. The results last time show them way off the pace. This year, canvass returns are showing that people sick of Labour lies know that the best candidate for Prestwich is the Lib Dems’ Mary D’Albert. There are seven days to go, and here are seven reasons why Mary D’Albert is the only choice for St Mary’s:

Only Mary D’Albert has lived in the ward for years. The Labour candidate is a former Labour Party big-wig who knows lots about polling data but little about community issues in St Mary’s. Vote for the local candidate.

Only Mary D’Albert campaigned to stop the closure of our local school. Labour PROPOSED the closure, but were defeated when Lib Dems joined with local people to stop them. Vote for the candidate who sticks up for St Mary’s.

Only Mary D’Albert is campaigning to stop Post Office closures. Labour PROPOSE the closures, and won’t come clean about which ones will close until AFTER the elections. Vote for the candidate who values community facilities.

Only Mary D’Albert and the local Lib Dems have secured extra money specifically for street cleaning and youth facilities. These are what YOU said you wanted when we asked you in our surveys. Labour’s solution was to earmark vague funding “for Prestwich” by CUTTING services to children and vulnerable people across Bury, and emptying Council emergency funds. Vote for the candidate who listens to what local people want.

Only Mary D’Albert and the Liberal Democrats are campaigning to stop the unfair Congestion Charge. Since this LABOUR PROPOSED TAX on local people was first suggested, Bury Lib Dems have led the fight against it. It isn’t right for Bury, and the Council have now backed the Lib Dem position after an amendment put forward by us. Local Labour sit on the fence. They can’t support their own government’s congestion tax because they know that local people don’t want it. Vote for the candidate sticking up for your right to get quality public transport before even thinking about congestion charging.

Only Mary D’Albert will stop a return to Labour’s neglect of Prestwich. Labour controlled Bury Council for 21 years, and look what happened to Prestwich – the Village was crumbling, the traffic was terrible, they closed three local libraries and tried to close the school. Since you first elected a Lib Dem in St Mary’s in 2006, the school is saved, the Village regeneration project has begun, we are taking out some of the troublesome traffic lights slowing down traffic, and we’re trying to stop Post Office closures. We’ve also started the Clough Day as a celebration of all that’s good in Prestwich. Don’t let Labour back in for more of the same neglect. Vote for the candidate who is putting the pride into Prestwich again.

Only Mary D’Albert keeps in touch all year round with Focus. It’s nice that Labour have put out a couple of leaflets recently, although their grasp of the truth is missing in a lot of cases. But where are they for the rest of the year? Lib Dems stay in touch all year round, not just at election time. Vote for the candidate who keeps in touch.

The Labour Party nationally are in a shambles. Led by a man doing more about-turns than a soldier on drill practice, and incapable of making a decision whilst the economy stutters, his own party rebels, and teachers are so fed up that they won’t teach our children.

Send a message that Labour’s neglect isn’t good enough. Remember - it’s a two horse race between Mary D’Albert, the local, hardworking Lib Dem, and Gordon Brown’s Labour candidate taking us back to years of neglect. The Tories can’t win round here.

Vote for Mary D’Albert next Thursday 1^st May to send a message to Labour and to carry on the good work that local Lib Dems have been doing for St Mary’s.

Rick

Last night was what canvassing should be all about. A warm evening, my coat left in the car, a cooling breeze, only the occasional quasi-rabid growling horse-dog charging me, and a great reception from loads of local people on the doorstep.

Unfortunately though, everything warm but the reception has stopped. Spring has lasted all of 18 hours, and today is greyer than a concrete prison cell with only a table, a chair, and John Major in it.

Last year there was only one night in April when canvassing and rain came together in the most ill-advised marriage since Catherine Parr looked at Henry VIII and thought “Well, two beheadings out of five seems a reasonable percentage to me. I’ll take my chances…” Luckily for both Catherine Parr and me, she survived and I got elected last year. But this year, the weather refuses to be quite so kind.

The problem with canvassing in the rain is a biological one. God simply has not endowed us humans with enough hands to hold an umbrella, a clipboard, a pen, some leaflets and a few posters all at once. Attempting to do so means looking like a cross between a one-man-band and a Barnum and Bailey circus act. And adding gate-opening and/or doorbell-ringing into an already complicated equation means that it just becomes easier to stand still, study the house from the outside, and judge voting intention by the colour of the curtains rather than going through the rigmarole of asking.

Yesterday I obtained the dubious distinction of enduring the longest stare-out between Man and beast of the campaign so far. I defy anyone from any other party to have stared at a dog through a letterbox for longer than I managed yesterday at one particular house. The sun moved visibly in the sky, I was there so long, pitting my iron will against the dough-eyed, floppy-jawed, speedboat-sized mammoth dog within. Obviously he won, and I didn’t risk sticking my hand into his lair to deposit both the leaflet and my fingers in his mouth. But, for a time, Humanity and the Animal Kingdom faced-off, right on your doorstep in Prestwich.

The election is a week tomorrow. If you have signed up to receive a postal vote, it should now have plopped down on your mat along with the pizza menus, St Mary’s Focuses etc. So don’t forget to fill it in and return it! It needs to arrive by election day, so it’s probably wise to send it off before the weekend, just to be sure. Or remember that you can hand it in at a polling station if you forget to post it off. If you post it late, it might not arrive in time and it won’t be counted. It’s going to be very close between your Lib Dem candidate Mary D’Albert and the Labour Party candidate, so make sure that your vote counts.

Look out for us on the streets between now and the election. I’ll be the one with the yellow rosette, dropping his leaflets, clipboard  and posters into a puddle, grappling with giant umbrellas, being chased by dogs and shaking my fist at the sky. Come and say hello. It’ll make me feel better.

Rick