Defections Archive

[name2remember]

Sept 20, 2012 17:13:49 GMT marksenior said:

Note Adam Trimgham is the father of Carina Trimingham who is linked with Chris Huhne .

And the relevance of this titbit of information is....?

[East Anglian Lefty]

Sept 20, 2012 20:43:32 GMT timrollpickering said:

Sept 20, 2012 10:42:52 GMT baloo said:

I would have thought the main factor in deciding whether someone made a good Green councillor was a concern for the environment.

That would assume the Greens are limes rather than water melons.

This is definitely an important point. JL earlier argued that the only thing that's essential for GPEW membership is a strong concern about the environment. I suspect that for a lot of GPEW members that's very much like saying that the only issues that matter to Labour Party members are trade union issues.

[Deleted]

Sept 20, 2012 23:36:39 GMT East Anglian Lefty said:

This is definitely an important point. JL earlier argued that the only thing that's essential for GPEW membership is a strong concern about the environment. I suspect that for a lot of GPEW members that's very much like saying that the only issues that matter to Labour Party members are trade union issues.

Exalt.

[Davıd Boothroyd]

Stephen West, elected as Conservative in Tadley Central ward of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council, left the Conservatives very publicly at a council meeting last night. This morning he was announced as a recruit to UKIP and the UKIP candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner in Hampshire and Isle of Wight.

[zoe]

Sept 21, 2012 10:58:48 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Stephen West, elected as Conservative in Tadley Central ward of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council, left the Conservatives very publicly at a council meeting last night. This morning he was announced as a recruit to UKIP and the UKIP candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner in Hampshire and Isle of Wight.

www.stephenwest.org/stephens-blog/2012/9/20/resignation-from-conservative-party.html

[Tony Otim]

Sept 21, 2012 10:58:48 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

Stephen West, elected as Conservative in Tadley Central ward of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council, left the Conservatives very publicly at a council meeting last night. This morning he was announced as a recruit to UKIP and the UKIP candidate for Police and Crime Commissioner in Hampshire and Isle of Wight.

Just out of interest, what is the selection process for UKIP candidates for Police Commissioner? Just wondering how that happened so quickly, even with behind the scenes negotiations?

[Pimpernal]

Secret!

[marksenior]

Sept 20, 2012 21:37:59 GMT name2remember said:

Sept 20, 2012 17:13:49 GMT marksenior said:

Note Adam Trimgham is the father of Carina Trimingham who is linked with Chris Huhne .

And the relevance of this titbit of information is....?

Point of Interest which is more than can be said to the relevance of the Liberal Party to UK politics today .

[erlend]

In perhaps a more easygoing manner I would regard it as interesting background info.

[stepney]

Sept 17, 2012 10:57:10 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

David Britton's defection is confirmed: www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/top_stories/9932547.Grove_Park_Conservative_councillor_defects_to_Labour/

Key quotes:

"The policies of this government are damaging the lives of the most needy and that is not what I am in politics to do.

"I find it impossible to continue to defend the government to the people that I have represented on the council since 1998."

"This decision has been difficult to make, but in the end my political principles have guided me to joining the Labour Party."

What a shame that amongst these choice quotes he omitted to mention "I'm after an SRA, and I tried to join the Lib Dems but they wouldn't have me".

For anyone who's interested, or indeed just wants a laugh, Cllr Britton's resignation letter (rather stupidly dated 1st October) makes it quite clear... er, actually it doesn't make much clear. I think it's got something to do with the Battle of Waterloo. And aid to the Third World (which this Government's increasing...)

From:
Councillor David Britton, Member for Grove Park

To:
Mr Barry Quirk, Chief Executive, Lewisham Council
Mayor Sir Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham
Councillor Alan Hall, Secretary Lewisham Labour Group
Councillor Chris Maines, Leader Lewisham Liberal Democrat Group
Councillor Christine Allison, Leader Lewisham Council Conservative Group
Councillor Darren Johnson, Leader Lewisham Green Group
Mr Simon Nundy, Chairman East Lewisham Conservative Association
Mr Brian Chipps, Secretary East Lewisham Conservative Association.

October 1st, 2012

I have been a Conservative for most of my adult life and fought four elections for the Party (in 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994) before being elected to serve on Lewisham Council, as a Conservative Councillor, representing St Mildred Ward, in May 1998. Since then I have been re-elected as a Conservative member for Grove Park in 2002, 2006 and 2010. I served as Group Leader between 2006 and 2011. It was my stated intention to remain as a Conservative member until retiring from the Council in 2014.

I have never been a Right Wing politician. My Conservatism does not look back to Margaret Thatcher, many of whose policies I opposed, especially her reforms in education and the public services and her policies on local taxation, which I thought were unjust. My philosophy goes back to the founding father of Conservatism, Benjamin Disraeli, who, in his novel, Sybil, stated that the only possible justification for wealth was that the wealthy use it to help bring the poor out of poverty and bring to an end the two nations that existed in the UK – the poor and the rich. In many ways, this philosophy was the hallmark of the person I regard as the greatest Prime Minister of the second half of the Twentieth Century, Harold MacMillan – under whose administration, I first learnt about politics and followed my family into the Conservative Party, which was the only place to be if you were serious about politics in 1960s Surrey, where I grew up as a child!

My political philosophy was also coloured by my religious beliefs – and, when I went to Durham University to study Theology I discovered a number of things not obvious in Tory Surrey. I discovered the Labour Party and its Christian Non - Conformist background. I actually met my first Labour Party activist there! I also discovered the radical roots of Christianity and crucial facts about the world economy. As a result, I became a member of the Third World First movement, and attended a huge student conference in Manchester in 1968 where we pledged ourselves to fight to end global injustice. “That world’s not ours,” we sang, “we will end it.” I still believe that. My views have not altered over the years. If anything, as you will know from my speeches in Council, they have become stronger. My six years working for the ODM in Africa and my marriage to Joanna (a Nigerian) cemented my views. I became a Reader in the Church of England and preach and take services regularly at my church in Lee. I am also a mandated speaker for the Church Urban Fund, a Christian organisation which raises money to help launch projects aimed at bringing an end to homelessness, youth alienation, unemployment and drug addiction by working with those most affected and enabling them to find self-confidence and a way out of the trap they have fallen into.

That is my background. I honestly believed that, after the aberrations of the 1980s and 1990s, when first Margaret Thatcher rewrote Conservatism and then the Tory Right Wing first undermined and then destroyed the government of John Major, that the Party had learned its lesson and was going back to its roots when it elected a leader from the left wing of the Party. I believed Michael Gove and David Cameron when they pledged to protect the National Health Service and improve state education. I even accepted George Osborne’s argument that the huge national debt inherited by the incoming Government in 2010 had to be got down by a huge effort by all of us. “We are all in it together,” he said, and I believed him!

That was 2010. Now it’s 2012. We have just had a glorious Summer of Olympic and Paralympic Sport. We should all feel a glow of pride – but beneath it there is a deep sense of unease. “The captains and the kings depart” but the deep-seated problems that blew up into the London riots in 2011 are still there and unappeased. The Government seems unconcerned. David Cameron is using the Liberal Democrats as a shield to keep off the worst attacks of the Tory Hard Right – but he is only half-hearted about it. Every concession made in the name of Coalition Unity is made to the Tory Right, and the Liberal Democrats are expected to swallow it and get on with it, knowing that a General Election will probably reduce the Party to its 1960s nadir, when it had just 6 MPs. The Government, if you will forgive the analogy is like a Reliant Robin. The front wheel consists of the Cameroons – most of the cabinet, a few Lib Dem MPs and the 30% of the CPP MPs who are on the centre left of the Party. The right back wheel consists of the Hard Right Tory MPs and the back left – the rest of the Lib Dems. The front wheel is upright; the right and left wheels are leaning at 45% outwards in opposite directions. How can the driver steer it on a straight course?

The answer is, we are told, that we have to get the economy right. Two issues arise here and I have been thinking about them since my illness two years ago and particularly this summer.
First:
I have been making a diorama of the Battle of Waterloo. That was an interesting battle because Napoleon had a good (if somewhat crude) plan – it had always worked in the past. Some of his generals argued against it, but he was the C in C and insisted. It should have worked, but it went wrong from the first, because his opponent did not react in the way he expected. Napoleon, as a great general, arguably the greatest of his time, should have amended his plan or quit the battlefield. (In modern terms he should have developed a Plan B). He didn’t- and, as a result, he lost the battle, lost the war, lost his throne, lost his liberty, and, according to some historians, ultimately lost his life at the hands of his British jailors in St. Helena. George Osborne is in that position. It is possible that his original plan was good – I’m not an economist so I can’t comment. It is interesting, though, that in 2010 it received a great deal of support from world economists. I have spoken publically and debated publically what the underlying causes were – and I have no intention of taking back anything I have said on the subject, although I do recognise that there are other opinions, and respect them. However, whatever the original cause, it has been taken over by events (as MacMillan was fond of saying). The present crisis owes more to events in the Euro zone than domestic causes. However, the election of a new French President, eschewing Austerity, changed advice from most world economists, and the dire warnings offered by August 2011 should have caused the Chancellor to think again. He refuses to do so.
Second:
George Osborne is fond of saying that “we are all in this together”. The budget fiasco of March 2012 shows this to be the nonsense it probably always was. The poor, pensioners, and those in low and middle ranking posts in the public services are all in it together. The rich apparently are not! If we were in any doubt, the budget proposals, many of which have subsequently been abandoned (it would make a good quiz question –How many 2012 Budget U Turns can you quote?) – put the lie to the concept of togetherness. Taxes on pensioners were raised; taxes on the wealthy were cut. The poor were thrown a few crumbs; the rich were told they could not sell their houses without paying more tax. However, since most of the wealthy pay huge sums to tax advisors to ensure they pay as little tax as they can get away with (1% in one case), the argument that we would get them to pay more by reducing their rate from 50% to 45% is laughable. Who will pay 45% when he is already paying 1%? Add to this the failure to do anything about the huge bonuses being paid to bankers and other top business people and you can see that only some of us “are in it together”. The Chancellor, challenged on this, said recently “we should not drive the wealth makers away from the country”. These wealth makers are doing nothing to assist the poor out of poverty. They are not, in the main, producers of goods, so they don’t employ anybody. They pay less tax than they should, and so they don’t contribute directly to easing the problem of poverty here. They don’t produce goods for sale, and, I wonder, how many buy British-produced goods. The Party has lost its way and abandoned the philosophy that created it. The hard-edged “get on your bike” philosophy of the 1980s Thatcher Government is a travesty of traditional Conservative values. Instead, we have the comedian’s “Loadsamoney” parody of 1980s values, which now appear to be normative among the newly rich.

To refer briefly to the public services - Mr Gove’s policy more and more resembles a deliberate attempt to destroy the state education system – from the wholesale conversion to academies, the development of so-called free schools, the hiving off of money from LEAs to spend on academy development, the abandonment of an insistence that all teachers should have QT status and the recent undercutting of the GCSE grades – they all follow a consistent pattern. He says he is trying to raise standards. I feel he is actually destroying the whole basis of public education, something we have built up painstakingly over 142 years since the Forster Education Act absorbed church schools into a state run system and created the modern education system in UK. I do not have the same level of knowledge about the NHS. However, I notice that NHS professionals, across the board, have opposed them, and my instincts suggest the same is true here as in education.

I have not mentioned the treatment of public service workers in terms of salaries and pensions - but the same pattern appears to apply here too.

A moment comes in every person’s life when he or she has to make a principled stand, even if it is one that involves a difficult and painful decision. I feel that I have reached that point. My political and religious beliefs remain the same as they have always been, at least since I was able first to formulate them back in the 1960s. My life has been largely within the Conservative Party. Many of my best friends are in ELCA. My election and re-election as a Councillor has been due to the efforts of many of them – especially Barrie Anderson, Bob Matthew-Walker, Brian Chipps and Andrew Lee, who I have been honoured to count as friends. For some time now it has only been their friendship that has kept me in the Party. In the end, Party membership and activity has to depend on more than this. I hope that we will remain friends, despite the political differences. This has been a difficult decision for me, and not one I took lightly. I have spoken to two of the political leaders and sounded them out. I have not spoken to Darren, but I could easily have done so. In the end I have to decide which Party’s philosophy is closest to mine. That is the statement “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs”, which resembles Disraeli’s philosophy of Conservatism in many ways.

Therefore, I have decided that I can no longer be silent about what is happening within the Conservative wing of the Coalition, but can also no longer defend the policy that is developing as a result. I suspect that many in the Liberal Democrat group feel the same way, but realise that they are tied to the Government. As a result, although I share many of their views, I do not feel I can, in all honesty, join them. If it were just Europe, as it was last autumn, I would probably have done so. However, my concerns, as I have shown, are much more fundamental than that. I wish to send a warning shot across the bows of the Conservative Party (for its own sake since I feel that a real Conservative party is as important for the survival of British democracy as a Liberal Democrat or a Labour Party). Joining the Greens, although outwardly attractive would not do that, nor would remaining an Independent. Only one Party will enable me to express my feelings and beliefs and keep the vow I made so long ago in Manchester – That World’s not mine– I will change it.

Therefore, as from today (October 1st, 2012) with great regret and knowing how much personal hurt it may cause, I am resigning from the Lewisham Council Conservative Group, the East Lewisham Conservative Party and national Conservative Party, and applying to join the East Lewisham (and National) Labour Party and, consequently, the Lewisham Council Labour Group.

Yours truly,
Councillor David Britton
Member for Grove Park

[gwynthegriff]

Sept 24, 2012 13:57:30 GMT stepney said:

Sept 17, 2012 10:57:10 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

David Britton's defection is confirmed: www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/top_stories/9932547.Grove_Park_Conservative_councillor_defects_to_Labour/

Key quotes:

"The policies of this government are damaging the lives of the most needy and that is not what I am in politics to do.

"I find it impossible to continue to defend the government to the people that I have represented on the council since 1998."

"This decision has been difficult to make, but in the end my political principles have guided me to joining the Labour Party."

What a shame that amongst these choice quotes he omitted to mention "I'm after an SRA, and I tried to join the Lib Dems but they wouldn't have me".

For anyone who's interested, or indeed just wants a laugh, Cllr Britton's resignation letter (rather stupidly dated 1st October) makes it quite clear... er, actually it doesn't make much clear. I think it's got something to do with the Battle of Waterloo. And aid to the Third World (which this Government's increasing...)

From:
Councillor David Britton, Member for Grove Park

To:
Mr Barry Quirk, Chief Executive, Lewisham Council
Mayor Sir Steve Bullock, Mayor of Lewisham
Councillor Alan Hall, Secretary Lewisham Labour Group
Councillor Chris Maines, Leader Lewisham Liberal Democrat Group
Councillor Christine Allison, Leader Lewisham Council Conservative Group
Councillor Darren Johnson, Leader Lewisham Green Group
Mr Simon Nundy, Chairman East Lewisham Conservative Association
Mr Brian Chipps, Secretary East Lewisham Conservative Association.

October 1st, 2012

I have been a Conservative for most of my adult life and fought four elections for the Party (in 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994) before being elected to serve on Lewisham Council, as a Conservative Councillor, representing St Mildred Ward, in May 1998. Since then I have been re-elected as a Conservative member for Grove Park in 2002, 2006 and 2010. I served as Group Leader between 2006 and 2011. It was my stated intention to remain as a Conservative member until retiring from the Council in 2014.

I have never been a Right Wing politician. My Conservatism does not look back to Margaret Thatcher, many of whose policies I opposed, especially her reforms in education and the public services and her policies on local taxation, which I thought were unjust. My philosophy goes back to the founding father of Conservatism, Benjamin Disraeli, who, in his novel, Sybil, stated that the only possible justification for wealth was that the wealthy use it to help bring the poor out of poverty and bring to an end the two nations that existed in the UK – the poor and the rich. In many ways, this philosophy was the hallmark of the person I regard as the greatest Prime Minister of the second half of the Twentieth Century, Harold MacMillan – under whose administration, I first learnt about politics and followed my family into the Conservative Party, which was the only place to be if you were serious about politics in 1960s Surrey, where I grew up as a child!

My political philosophy was also coloured by my religious beliefs – and, when I went to Durham University to study Theology I discovered a number of things not obvious in Tory Surrey. I discovered the Labour Party and its Christian Non - Conformist background. I actually met my first Labour Party activist there! I also discovered the radical roots of Christianity and crucial facts about the world economy. As a result, I became a member of the Third World First movement, and attended a huge student conference in Manchester in 1968 where we pledged ourselves to fight to end global injustice. “That world’s not ours,” we sang, “we will end it.” I still believe that. My views have not altered over the years. If anything, as you will know from my speeches in Council, they have become stronger. My six years working for the ODM in Africa and my marriage to Joanna (a Nigerian) cemented my views. I became a Reader in the Church of England and preach and take services regularly at my church in Lee. I am also a mandated speaker for the Church Urban Fund, a Christian organisation which raises money to help launch projects aimed at bringing an end to homelessness, youth alienation, unemployment and drug addiction by working with those most affected and enabling them to find self-confidence and a way out of the trap they have fallen into.

That is my background. I honestly believed that, after the aberrations of the 1980s and 1990s, when first Margaret Thatcher rewrote Conservatism and then the Tory Right Wing first undermined and then destroyed the government of John Major, that the Party had learned its lesson and was going back to its roots when it elected a leader from the left wing of the Party. I believed Michael Gove and David Cameron when they pledged to protect the National Health Service and improve state education. I even accepted George Osborne’s argument that the huge national debt inherited by the incoming Government in 2010 had to be got down by a huge effort by all of us. “We are all in it together,” he said, and I believed him!

That was 2010. Now it’s 2012. We have just had a glorious Summer of Olympic and Paralympic Sport. We should all feel a glow of pride – but beneath it there is a deep sense of unease. “The captains and the kings depart” but the deep-seated problems that blew up into the London riots in 2011 are still there and unappeased. The Government seems unconcerned. David Cameron is using the Liberal Democrats as a shield to keep off the worst attacks of the Tory Hard Right – but he is only half-hearted about it. Every concession made in the name of Coalition Unity is made to the Tory Right, and the Liberal Democrats are expected to swallow it and get on with it, knowing that a General Election will probably reduce the Party to its 1960s nadir, when it had just 6 MPs. The Government, if you will forgive the analogy is like a Reliant Robin. The front wheel consists of the Cameroons – most of the cabinet, a few Lib Dem MPs and the 30% of the CPP MPs who are on the centre left of the Party. The right back wheel consists of the Hard Right Tory MPs and the back left – the rest of the Lib Dems. The front wheel is upright; the right and left wheels are leaning at 45% outwards in opposite directions. How can the driver steer it on a straight course?

The answer is, we are told, that we have to get the economy right. Two issues arise here and I have been thinking about them since my illness two years ago and particularly this summer.
First:
I have been making a diorama of the Battle of Waterloo. That was an interesting battle because Napoleon had a good (if somewhat crude) plan – it had always worked in the past. Some of his generals argued against it, but he was the C in C and insisted. It should have worked, but it went wrong from the first, because his opponent did not react in the way he expected. Napoleon, as a great general, arguably the greatest of his time, should have amended his plan or quit the battlefield. (In modern terms he should have developed a Plan B). He didn’t- and, as a result, he lost the battle, lost the war, lost his throne, lost his liberty, and, according to some historians, ultimately lost his life at the hands of his British jailors in St. Helena. George Osborne is in that position. It is possible that his original plan was good – I’m not an economist so I can’t comment. It is interesting, though, that in 2010 it received a great deal of support from world economists. I have spoken publically and debated publically what the underlying causes were – and I have no intention of taking back anything I have said on the subject, although I do recognise that there are other opinions, and respect them. However, whatever the original cause, it has been taken over by events (as MacMillan was fond of saying). The present crisis owes more to events in the Euro zone than domestic causes. However, the election of a new French President, eschewing Austerity, changed advice from most world economists, and the dire warnings offered by August 2011 should have caused the Chancellor to think again. He refuses to do so.
Second:
George Osborne is fond of saying that “we are all in this together”. The budget fiasco of March 2012 shows this to be the nonsense it probably always was. The poor, pensioners, and those in low and middle ranking posts in the public services are all in it together. The rich apparently are not! If we were in any doubt, the budget proposals, many of which have subsequently been abandoned (it would make a good quiz question –How many 2012 Budget U Turns can you quote?) – put the lie to the concept of togetherness. Taxes on pensioners were raised; taxes on the wealthy were cut. The poor were thrown a few crumbs; the rich were told they could not sell their houses without paying more tax. However, since most of the wealthy pay huge sums to tax advisors to ensure they pay as little tax as they can get away with (1% in one case), the argument that we would get them to pay more by reducing their rate from 50% to 45% is laughable. Who will pay 45% when he is already paying 1%? Add to this the failure to do anything about the huge bonuses being paid to bankers and other top business people and you can see that only some of us “are in it together”. The Chancellor, challenged on this, said recently “we should not drive the wealth makers away from the country”. These wealth makers are doing nothing to assist the poor out of poverty. They are not, in the main, producers of goods, so they don’t employ anybody. They pay less tax than they should, and so they don’t contribute directly to easing the problem of poverty here. They don’t produce goods for sale, and, I wonder, how many buy British-produced goods. The Party has lost its way and abandoned the philosophy that created it. The hard-edged “get on your bike” philosophy of the 1980s Thatcher Government is a travesty of traditional Conservative values. Instead, we have the comedian’s “Loadsamoney” parody of 1980s values, which now appear to be normative among the newly rich.

To refer briefly to the public services - Mr Gove’s policy more and more resembles a deliberate attempt to destroy the state education system – from the wholesale conversion to academies, the development of so-called free schools, the hiving off of money from LEAs to spend on academy development, the abandonment of an insistence that all teachers should have QT status and the recent undercutting of the GCSE grades – they all follow a consistent pattern. He says he is trying to raise standards. I feel he is actually destroying the whole basis of public education, something we have built up painstakingly over 142 years since the Forster Education Act absorbed church schools into a state run system and created the modern education system in UK. I do not have the same level of knowledge about the NHS. However, I notice that NHS professionals, across the board, have opposed them, and my instincts suggest the same is true here as in education.

I have not mentioned the treatment of public service workers in terms of salaries and pensions - but the same pattern appears to apply here too.

A moment comes in every person’s life when he or she has to make a principled stand, even if it is one that involves a difficult and painful decision. I feel that I have reached that point. My political and religious beliefs remain the same as they have always been, at least since I was able first to formulate them back in the 1960s. My life has been largely within the Conservative Party. Many of my best friends are in ELCA. My election and re-election as a Councillor has been due to the efforts of many of them – especially Barrie Anderson, Bob Matthew-Walker, Brian Chipps and Andrew Lee, who I have been honoured to count as friends. For some time now it has only been their friendship that has kept me in the Party. In the end, Party membership and activity has to depend on more than this. I hope that we will remain friends, despite the political differences. This has been a difficult decision for me, and not one I took lightly. I have spoken to two of the political leaders and sounded them out. I have not spoken to Darren, but I could easily have done so. In the end I have to decide which Party’s philosophy is closest to mine. That is the statement “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs”, which resembles Disraeli’s philosophy of Conservatism in many ways.

Therefore, I have decided that I can no longer be silent about what is happening within the Conservative wing of the Coalition, but can also no longer defend the policy that is developing as a result. I suspect that many in the Liberal Democrat group feel the same way, but realise that they are tied to the Government. As a result, although I share many of their views, I do not feel I can, in all honesty, join them. If it were just Europe, as it was last autumn, I would probably have done so. However, my concerns, as I have shown, are much more fundamental than that. I wish to send a warning shot across the bows of the Conservative Party (for its own sake since I feel that a real Conservative party is as important for the survival of British democracy as a Liberal Democrat or a Labour Party). Joining the Greens, although outwardly attractive would not do that, nor would remaining an Independent. Only one Party will enable me to express my feelings and beliefs and keep the vow I made so long ago in Manchester – That World’s not mine– I will change it.

Therefore, as from today (October 1st, 2012) with great regret and knowing how much personal hurt it may cause, I am resigning from the Lewisham Council Conservative Group, the East Lewisham Conservative Party and national Conservative Party, and applying to join the East Lewisham (and National) Labour Party and, consequently, the Lewisham Council Labour Group.

Yours truly,
Councillor David Britton
Member for Grove Park

At least he kept it concise.

[Pete Whitehead]

He sounds like a bit of a twat - Conservatives probably glad to be shot

[stepney]

Sept 25, 2012 11:07:47 GMT @trident said:

He's an old school, Macmillanite One Nation Tory. Clearly there is no place for people like that in the Conservative Party any more.

Oh, absolute balls, and I refuse to believe you are either stupid enough or enough of a partisan hack to believe that yourself.

Anyway, anyone who genuinely thought this Government was "worse than Thatcher, head-bangingly right-wing, grinding the faces of the poor, sending kids back up chimneys", yadda yadda, would not have first made overtures to join our coalition partners.

[East Anglian Lefty]

Sept 24, 2012 13:57:30 GMT stepney said:

Sept 17, 2012 10:57:10 GMT Davıd Boothroyd said:

David Britton's defection is confirmed: www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/top_stories/9932547.Grove_Park_Conservative_councillor_defects_to_Labour/

Key quotes:

"The policies of this government are damaging the lives of the most needy and that is not what I am in politics to do.

"I find it impossible to continue to defend the government to the people that I have represented on the council since 1998."

"This decision has been difficult to make, but in the end my political principles have guided me to joining the Labour Party."

What a shame that amongst these choice quotes he omitted to mention "I'm after an SRA, and I tried to join the Lib Dems but they wouldn't have me".

I can't see how the letter supports this argument. People defecting in the hopes of preferment do not normally tell the party they're defecting to that they considered other parties, but have picked this party not because it is the closest political fit but because it will do most harm to the party they're leaving.

The quotes upon the actual defection are for public consumption, and will have been cleared by negotiation with region and the local Labour group. But the entire group will have had sight of that letter, and that is not the best way to come across as 'one of us'.

[baloo]

Sept 25, 2012 11:07:47 GMT @trident said:

Sept 24, 2012 13:57:30 GMT stepney said:

For anyone who's interested, or indeed just wants a laugh, Cllr Britton's resignation letter (rather stupidly dated 1st October) makes it quite clear... er, actually it doesn't make much clear. I think it's got something to do with the Battle of Waterloo. And aid to the Third World (which this Government's increasing...)

Okay, he rambles on a bit, but the nature of his objection, and his political standpoint, are very clear. He's an old school, Macmillanite One Nation Tory. Clearly there is no place for people like that in the Conservative Party any more. My only criticism is that it has taken him so long to realise that.

I don't know whether you believe that or not but it's wrong either way. I say this as an out and proud member of the Tory Reform Group.

[heathergreen]

I understand that Cllr Britton went to a Labour Group meeting a few months back before the defection letter was sent or even drafted, and while still in talks with the Lib Dems.

[Khunanup]

Two Tories go Indy on Fareham Council. Nick Gregory (Fareham East) who was originally elected as a Lib Dem in a by-election in late 2010 who then defected to the Tories has left along with David Whittingham (Fareham North West) who was first elected in May. For Gregory this his third defection having previously been chair of the local Tories before joining the Lib Dems, winning the by-election, then defecting back to the Tories on a few weeks later. Both are now (much to the delight I'm sure of Boogs) committed to standing an Independent council candidate in every ward in Fareham in 2014.

Both give reasons of council leadership for leaving (which considering the person involved might be seen as fair enough) but looking at their history and their statements since it would seem more a convenience.

www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/politics/fareham-tories-quit-party-in-a-row-over-leadership-1-4297438

[Khunanup]

Impending 'defection' (though in fact expulsion) on Hampshire County Council.

www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/local/hampshire-councillor-launches-police-commissioner-campaign-1-4313457

[AdminSTB]

David McNarry MLA (Strangford) joins UKIP from being an Independent (expelled from the UUP earlier this year).

[Deleted]

Small defection

Nigel Rumble the Tory who finished 2nd in the May Camden/Primrose Hill by election has gone to Labour

richardosley.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/dear-andrew-ive-joined-the-labour-party-rumble/