I do not know who should replace Jim McMahon as Leader of the Labour Group on the Local Government Association. But I certainly do know who shouldn't.
Anyone from Durham County Council.
There ought to be significant national coverage of its treatment of its Teaching Assistants, and especially of the proposed significant reduction in their pay, with the obvious impact on their pensions as well as on their current quality of life.
I wonder why there is not?
There ought to be significant national coverage of its treatment of its Teaching Assistants, and especially of the proposed significant reduction in their pay, with the obvious impact on their pensions as well as on their current quality of life.
I wonder why there is not?
The right wing municipal Labour establishment in it for the allowances is alive and kicking up here.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, the thing has descended into self-parody in recent years. County Council seats for MG-driving 19-year-olds, and what have you.
DeleteSimon Henig himself is a baffling figure, who would literally struggle to understand what was being said at a Labour Party meeting in an old pit village. Yet look at him.
No one will be deselected. I doubt that they are even thinking about it. I mean that of Councillors and MPs alike. When the parliamentary boundaries change, then every candidate will be a sitting MP. I guarantee it.
But what else is there?
They told you you were too young and too posh (for Lanchester!) when they unsuccessfully put up someone the same age and no less middle class but prettier, thicker and with more knowledge of football and pop music. These days they would tell him he was too old and not posh enough. Meanwhile the people who were the old stagers 20 years ago are still bloody there, on it for life. People think it's voluntary work, it's not, it's paid a small fortune if you're a teenager or a pensioner and quite a bit if you're not.
DeleteIt beggars belief you were only ever a parish councillor. Who got the high profile paid seats instead? Where are they now? What have they done?
ReplyDeleteYears and years of persecution and abuse for daring to have the slightest intellect or aspiration.
DeleteI remember an interview committee for the County Panel criticising me in writing for talking about politics when I should have been talking about "race nights, and pie and pea suppers".
And it won't change. Not round here.
McMahon was born in 1980, not 1950, but having left school at 16 he still became a councillor at 23, group leader at 28, council leader at 31, a member of the Labour National Executive at 34, and an OBE and MP at 35. All with no post-16 qualifications and born while Thatcher not Attlee was Prime Minister. So much for "Education, Education, Education". You are better off out of the Labour Party, they are not your sort of people and they hate your sort of people.
ReplyDeleteI must confess to thinking that myself.
DeleteIf it's not millionaires' teenage heirs who were schoolboys less than a year before (a Buckingham Palace Garden Party before he had graduated from university!), then it's this.
I mean, he left education completely at 16 in 1996. Hardly anyone still did that by then. And that CV is mind-boggling. Was there really nobody of any longer standing for any of these things? Or was he really so much more dazzling than any of them?
Even the university contingent are the likes of Neil Fleming, not your people at all, as you have said all about pop music and football. Football, why is it always football?
Delete£13,300 before all the additions. A lot of the TAs are going to be left on less than that. Full time work for the council, less than a councillor's allowance.
ReplyDelete