David Ottewell's Politics

Here’s Labour’s latest campaign poster, released to great fanfare today:

It’s reasonable effective, I suppose – but haven’t we been here before?

Remember ‘Dave the Chameleon’ from 2006? It was the same essential theme – you can’t trust the Conservative leader’s ‘progressive’ promises, he gives different messages to different audiences, his instincts remain right-wing, etc.

The thing is, it wasn’t an enormous success. In fact Labour ended up finessing the message – talking about David Cameron saying one thing and his party believing something else - because of the Tory leader’s stubbornly enduring popularity.

Perhaps Labour calculate that the public mood has changed, and Mr Cameron is more susceptible to personal attack than before. Or perhaps they are simply accepting that – given the high-profile televised debates – this election will necessarily be more about personalities and less about policies than is usually the case.

That isn’t necessarily good for democracy, but it should make for good bloodsport.

It’s true. The excellent Liam Frost is now following me on Twitter!

Next stop, Mick Jagger and Morrissey.

Here’s something I’m still trying to figure out.

The Labour party announced today that David Chaytor and two other MPs had had their membership of the Labour party suspended. This meant, said a party spokesman, that they had been ’suspended from the whip’ and could not attend party meetings.

But way back in May, when a parliamentary investigation into the Bury North MP was first announced, a Downing Street spokesman said: “After speaking to David Chaytor this morning, the chief whip has suspended him from the privilege of membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party pending further investigations by the parliamentary commissioner for standards.”

As far as I am aware, the commissioner never completed an investigation – it was overtaken by the criminal probe – and the suspension was never lifted.

So what exactly’s going on?

[UPDATE: Hmm. Apparently 'suspension' from 'privilege of membership' of the PLP is quite different from having your Labour party membership suspended. For one thing, it means Mr Chaytor is also banned from attending party events in his constituency.]

“The Labour party’s general secretary has today suspended David Chaytor, Jim Devine and Elliot Morley’s membership of the Labour party in the light of the serious allegations against them. They had already been barred from standing for parliament as Labour candidates.

“The decision follows a formal process which included representations from the chief whip and consultations with party officials over the weekend and means the three MPs have been suspended from the whip and cannot attend any Labour party meetings.”

- Labour party spokesman, a few moments ago

What’s a council to do? You launch high-profile plans to redevelop St Peter’s Square, the town hall, and bring the Theatre Royal back to life.

And what does the public say? Bugger all, basically.

From a new Manchester council report:

 That’s right – six responses, of which precisely half were from people rather than organisations. But at least…

There’s a serious point to all this. If people won’t respond to this sort of thing – a proposal that will utterly transform some of the city’s most famous landmarks – what will they respond to?

The assumption has always been that it’s a failure of process. If only the council held big public meetings, or allowed people to comment online, etc. etc.

But the fact is they now do many of these things. And still people don’t have their say.

Which raises two uncomfortable possibilities:  that the public doesn’t respond because either (a) it thinks whatever it says will be ignored; or (b) it simply doesn’t care.

Say what you want about Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, it does at least focus the attention.

Take our region, for example.

No matter how big a swing the Conservatives achieve, there are still only a handful of seats that are likely to change hands.

It is these ‘weathervane’ constituencies that will determine who forms the next government. And it is here that the parties will be concentrating both their efforts, and their limited funds.

Some have a particular significance. David Cameron speaks openly about the importance of Bolton and Bury to his party. Not only because they contain three marginal seats, but also because of the symbolic value of the Tories gaining a foothold in a Greater Manchester town.

Mr Cameron, who has invested a lot of effort winning hearts and minds in the urban north, wants a national mandate for change. He wants to be able to say he speaks for everyone. He needs the political map to show blue, as well as red and yellow, in places like ours.

But there are other constituencies in Greater Manchester which will have special significance this time, for all sorts of reasons.

Can the Liberal Democrats defend Cheadle against the Tories, and Withington and Rochdale against Labour? They will need to if Nick Clegg is to credibly claim his party is moving forward rather than stagnating. And will the anger over ‘expensesgate’ lead to seismic shifts in paces like Salford, or will it prove to be a storm in a (taxpayer-funded, bone-china) teacup?

Here, then, is my list of the top three constituencies to watch at the general election next year.

Bolton West – 2005: Ruth Kelly (Lab), Majority 2,064

A Labour seat since the Blair revolution of 1997 and held by the arch-Blairite, high-achieving Ms Kelly. It was not always thus; the seat was in Conservative hands between 1983-1997. In the 1950s it was a Liberal stronghold.

Ms Kelly is standing down this year. The Labour candidate will be Julie Hilling, a local activist who has lived in the constituency for two decades and rose through a trade union background.

Her Tory opponent is Susan Williams, the well-known former leader of Trafford council. Ms Williams, one of the faces of the successful ‘no’ campaign during the congestion-charge referendum, is in many ways Mr Cameron’s ideal ‘northern’ candidate: straight-talking, pragmatic and moderate. But she is also a skilled politician, who opponents underestimate at their peril.

The Liberal Democrats are also standing a woman candidate – Jackie Pearcey, a widely-respected councillor in Manchester who will run a strong campaign. Expect the Tories to pour resources into the constituency, with ‘big beasts’ from the shadow cabinet likely to be stalking the streets in the weeks and months to come. It’s one they will feel they will have to win to have any chance of forming the next government.

2005 result: Lab 17,239, Con 15,175, LD 7,241

Current odds: Con 2/7, Lab 5/2, LD 50/1

Bury North – 2005: David Chaytor (Lab), Majority: 2,926
How can the Tories be almost-unbackable favourites to win a seat they lost last time by nearly 3,000 votes? The answer, in one word: expenses.

David Chaytor, the current MP, learned last week he was to face three charges in relation to his parliamentary claims. He strongly denies claims of deliberate wrongdoing, but the allegations will inevitably cast a shadow over the next election.

Bury North is another seat lost to the Conservatives in 1997. Before that, it was held for many years by Alistair Burt, an Oxford-educated solicitor and former Bury Grammar head boy who has since returned to the Commons as a Tory MP in Bedfordshire. The Liberal Democrats have traditionally come a fairly distant third.

Labour have chosen their candidate well. Maryam Khan, daughter of former Manchester Lord Mayor Afzal Khan, represents a clean break from the past. She is bright, young, photogenic and down-to-earth. But she is not a miracle-worker.

David Nuttall, the Conservative candidate, left school at 18 before joining a firm of solicitors and getting a law degree in his spare time. He is active in his community and church and is a traditionalist making clear on his website that he would support capital punishment for murder, and reducing the time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

The Lib Dems Richard Baum is an energetic young councillor and blogger who is tipped for big things in the future.

2005 result: Lab 19,130, Con 16,204, LD 6,514

Current odds: Con 1/6, Lab 7/2, LD 100/1

Manchester Withington – 2005: John Leech (LD), Majority: 667

My abiding memory of the 2005 election? A stunned John Leech taking to the stage at Manchester town hall, barely able to recite the victory speech he had barely bothered to write. It was an incredible win, overturning an 11,000-plus Labour majority and ending the Commons career of the respected Keith Bradley.

But the campaign was also a byword for bitterness. Labour activists still claim that the Lib Dems exaggerated fears, first expressed by doctors, over the future of services at the Christie hospital. The Lib Dems responded that they were simply campaigning to protect a world-famous resource.

What’s beyond doubt is that Mr Leech has proved an extremely active MP, winning awards for campaigns on road safety and championing several high-profile local causes. In response Labour has rolled out one of its brightest young things, Lucy Powell, who was appointed director of the pro-European Britain in Europe campaign while still in her 20s. Withington, though, could yet prove a campaign too far.

And the Conservatives? They were a distant third in 2005. Yet until Mr Bradley was elected in 1987, Withington had been a Tory stronghold since before the Second World War. How times have changed for the Conservatives and how they hope they are about to change again.

2005: LD 15,872, Lab 15,205, Con 3,919
Current odds: LD 2/5, Lab 7/4, Con 80/1

You hear a lot of opinion about race and immigration issues, but you don’t see that many facts.

The Office for National Statistics published some dense and complex figures today reflecting the ethnic make-up of Britain as of mid-2007.

I’ve managed to boil them down into pie charts for each borough of Greater Manchester.

(Note to any young readers planning a career in the ‘glamorous’ world of journalism: this is my day off. This is what I do on my day off. On a Friday. Later, I might wash the car.)

The result? With the exception of the city of Manchester, our region remains overwhelmingly ‘white British’. Which you wouldn’t necessarily guess from the tone of the debate.

I had an interesting chat with Bernard Priest, Manchester council’s executive member for finance, about the town hall budget this week.

We spoke about the council tax freeze for 2010/11 – ‘not easy’, he said, but the right thing to do at a time when residents were facing as many economic difficulties as large public-sector organisations.

We also talked about budget’s for future years. The council knows how much it is getting from the government for 2010/11, but not for subsequent years.

Neither does it know what political stripe the government will be after May 6.

Despite this – and despite all parties accepting the need for cuts in public spending – Coun Priest said he was still aiming for a council tax increase of no more than ONE per cent in 2011/12 and 2012/13.

How is this affordable? He spoke of more intelligent, joined-up ways of working – and also the loss of ‘hundreds’ of posts, to be achieved through ‘natural wastage’ rather than redundancies.

Apparently the council has already saved more than £50million through an efficiency drive in recent years.

“The Labour Party has already barred Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine from standing as Labour candidates at the next election and has taken the toughest action on expenses of any political party. The Labour government has swept away the old, discredited expenses system and introduced a new transparent regime. The Labour party has zero-tolerance for criminal behaviour and will take the strongest possible disciplinary action against any party member found guilty of breaking the law. We will not comment further while the legal process is ongoing.”

- Labour party spokesman, a moment ago

Manchester council has been investigating to what extent carers – people who look after loved ones who are sick or vulnerable – have been missing out on benefits.

The results are astonishing.

In one exercise, town hall officers gave detailed advice to 88 carers and found 70 per cent were missing out on benefits worth £185,000 a year.

I imagine other councils across the country would find exactly the same thing if they did similar checks.

It’s an odd time to be arguing for a higher benefits bill for Britain – but surely we want those who deserve their entitlements to be claiming everything they should?