January 17th 2011
Well the people of Oldham East and Saddleworth had the chance to vote for their representative in Wesminster recently but mistakenly many believed that this was simply 'a chance to send a message to the government'. Indeed one of the major parties used this as their election strapline. If you live in Oldham you will know the phrase very well by now as there was not a Labour photo op, interview, leaflet or door knocker to be found without the repetitive anchor informing one that the best use of the vote you have, a vote people have fought for through the ages, was simply a conduit to 'send a message to the government'.
Sadly this negative empty and facile mantra got through and even more people than last time voted for the lady who doesn't live in Oldham. It's a great acheivement that we have our first woman MP ever in Oldham but that is a complete irrelivance. If she's the best person for the job thats fantastic but female or male, that makes no difference. Indeed Annie Kenney the suffragette must be turning in her grave to see that the trials and tribulations she went through to secure the vote for women was used to simply send a message of disaffection to a group of people upon which that message will be completely lost.
I sincerely hope that Debbie Abrahams will have the good grace to simply get on with the job she has been elected to do now and drop the sniping about the current government. Simply whining about how one disagrees with them will get nothing done. Her acceptance speech was an obvious platform for 'having a go' at the coallition but seriously, what are her own policies. Not for want of looking I could find nothing in her election materials that indicated how she was going to make the lot of the average Oldhamer any better. I know she's against the cuts (because there is such a surfeit of cash washing around at the moment) but even on her website there is only one single reference to her own policies. And that is a wooly meaningless "Fairness Guarantee". ths consists of a 5 point pledge as below:
Fair to Oldham East and Saddleworth – I will always do my best for the borough not what’s best for Westminster. |
To summarise, I'll go against everything that the government aim to implement (i.e. against what the country voted for). But what exactly does the pledge tell us that she will actually do? Some campaigning, standing against what the national government intend, aim to secure more facilities and erm, I'll work hard. Not a single indication of what or how any of these things will be done. Crucially there is nothing there that can be implicitly proven to have been broken. I'd like to have seen something positive and concrete, for instance "I'll cut 100 less police related jobs than the government and here's the detail of how I'll do it". Of course that kind of detail can be brough back to embarrass any politician in the long term (when they don't actually do any of it) so no actual clear policies are being made. So what did those thousand of Oldhamers actually vote for?
I put it to you, and you can draw any inference you like from this, that the election results and voter tallies would have been almost exactly the same if people had simply been shown a full length picture of each candidate and asked to vote there and then.
I'm not anti Debbie per se though I do believe she will do no better than any previous MP we've had (excepting Phil Woolas of course), I though Elwyn Watkins never ending stream of glossy election material was almost as vague and negative as Labour's. Obviously the Tories did terribly but the only two pieces of election material I received from them spoke solely about what Kashif Ali would be doing if he won and there was not a single reference to any other parties. Maybe theres a clear lesson to be learned there. Being open with people, laying out your stall and being positive instead of homing in against everything everyone else would do simply doesn't work.