Victoria Ayling, prospective parliamentary candidate for Grimsby announces that a Tory government will end the retrospective rate demands. Hurrah.

 

Victoria may not be the best source of Tory policy. She belongs to a different party to Dave’s Compassionate Conservatives .She’s announced already that a futile motion of regret in the Lords has solved the problem but it didn’t and couldn’t.

 

Great speech from Dave at the Tory party mini-conference. Great feat of memory too.

 

But ominous for Yorkshire Forward which he wants to sweep away with all its spatial plans investment targets bag and baggage.

 

Bad move for Grimsby. Without regional aid we’ll suffer and if Yorkshire Forward isn’t there to distribute we’ll lose out competing against the big battalions. What chance do we have against Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, the coal fields, even Hull?

 

God help us. Cameron won’t.

As I filled out the customary declaration all Labour MPs now have to make:-

 

I, Austin Mitchell, do affirm and swear that I have never been bullied, sworn at, dragged from a chair or pushed out of the way by the man I now know to be Gordon Brown, who I now realise I love in a non-physical way etc etc, I began to think what does it all matter?

CHANGE (Conservative)

MORE CHANGE (Labour)

SMALL CHANGE (Lib Dems)

 

 

 

It would be nice to know what the Tories stand for and what they’ll do if they win the election. They haven’t seen fit to tell us yet because leader and followers stand for different things.

Letters still pouring in to the Grimbsy Telegraph to say that someone who can’t cook or change nappies or who doesn’t know the price of potatoes is not fit to be an MP I will be promising to learn of these things in my election manifesto.

News from the valuation agency which is starting to cough up some figures. They should have listed 50 ports for business rates in 2005. They missed out just over 700 and got 800 wrong. Total errors 1,500 on the basis of this unique record of incompetence. The government has decided that the VOA can charge port businesses huge retrospective rate bills to cover the cost of their own failures. By ruining the ports.

These days the Blairites are gravitating or is it graveytaking – to well paid jobs. The lefties like Paul Flynn and Bob Marshall Andrews are writing their autobiographies.

A Future Fair For All. The daftest election slogan we’ve had. What’s worse, I’ve heard it before.

Why not make your policies credible? Replace George Osborne with Ken Clarke and you’re made

North East Lincs doesn’t provide much for free to its residents. But it does provide a big free lorry park at Immingham. This is populated by a score or more of foreign lorries every weekend.

 

Last word on the Towering Disaster of Love’s channel 4 programmes.

 

It wasn’t honest.

 

To do an honest programme about the miseries of Tower Blocks you’ve got.to work together as a team to show them.

 

Instead Love productions worked to a rigid plan of setting up the MPs as setting up the MPs as stooges and punishing them (i.e. us) if they didn’t jump through Love’s silly hoops.

 

A total waste of time and opportunity. If you’re doing a programme about tower blocks let the residents speak.

 

This is the dilemma of TV. Honesty v opportunism.