It seems that the Salford Labour Party is developing a unique new approach to media relations:
I’ll charitably ignore the terrible grammar, but this is a truly bizarre article and as it appears on the Salford Labour website I assume it has the blessing of the Labour leadership.
I’m sure all politicians of all political colours – both in local Government and at a national level – find the nature of press coverage to their distaste some of the time. I’m no different, although my only current beef with the Advertiser is their insistence on using a photo of me taken when I was 21… although perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing after all!
For Labour to throw their toys out of the pram in such spectacular fashion is not only completely counterproductive but is unfair and borders on abusive. From a personal perspective, all of the journalists I’ve ever dealt with at the Advertiser have been both friendly and professional, and I know that journalists in the local and regional press work long hours for an awful lot less money than the public think they earn.
Indeed, the political coverage of the Advertiser has improved immeasurably over the last few years, and their agreement to publish the weekly leader columns is to be greatly applauded.
As for the letters page, perhaps it hasn’t occured to my Labour colleagues that the vast majority of politically-orientated letters received by the Advertiser are in fact from local residents fed up of a Labour Council that takes them for granted and lets them down!
Councillor Roger Jones – Labour Councillor for Irlam Ward but better known as the architect of the toll tax as Chairman of GMPTA – attended the full Council meeting on Wednesday.
However, he disappeared when we broke for lunch and did not reappear in the afternoon. Roger is an elected member of this City Council and the Chairman of GMPTA, yet he did not manage to attend a meeting of full Council to participate in a debate about transport, congestion charging and the TIF bid. The Council Meeting dates were published nearly a year ago. Not good enough.
On Wednesday I attended two debates on the proposals to introduce a “toll tax” congestion charge in Manchester.
The first was in the Council Chamber, where my colleague Cllr Ian MacDonald and I introduced a motion calling for local residents to be given final say on the toll tax in a referendum. You can read the Advertiser report on the debate online, but needless to say your Labour Councillors voted down any proposals to consult the public in a referendum.
The second debate took place at Methodist Central Hall in Manchester.
It was organised by Kashif Ali of Manchester Conservatives and featured representatives from all three main political parties (Rob Adlard for the Conservatives, Marc Ramsbottom for the Liberal Democrats and Anthony McCaul for Labour) as well as speakers from Manchester Against Road Tolls (MART) and Clean Air Now UK.
What was interesting was that the Labour representatives in Salford and Manchester took completely contradictory positions in support of the congestion charge.
In Manchester, Anthony McCaul did his primary school teachers proud with a very competent reading of a speech clearly prepared and written for him by someone far higher up the Manchester Labour food chain – Pat Karney perhaps or maybe Richard Leese himself. However the speech set out a utopian vision 0f a public transport paradise to justify support for the congestion charging.
Meanwhile in Salford, John Merry and his colleagues put forward a wet lettuce of an amendment, wringing their hands and saying “we can’t decide anything now, we don’t know anything about this at all until the Government tells us”.
This is nonsense – the plans are available online at www.gmfuturetransport.co.uk. The simple truth is that they are too scared to have this debate before the local elections on May 1st.
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