I guess there always has to be some humility when you see that an opposition candidate has had a bit of a proof-reading failure. After all, it could just as easily happen to you.
That said, Labour candidate for the Spotland and Falinge ward of Rochdale Council Shefali Begum will no doubt be very embarrassed after reading her pitch on the Rochdale Online website in which she says:
I believe to make a prosperous thieving borough we need united and strong communities which are dedicated and passionate about where they live and their future generations will reside.
Whether her campaign will be thriving after this error is another question.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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16 Comments
Tee hee!
Poor lass. Reminds me of my first speech in a council chamber when I was supposed to be talking about extending local participation and earnestly proclaimed instead that we should “widen the Town Hall”.
Perhaps a deliberate ‘error’. After all, as shown here , she will get far more publicity, because of this, than any other candidate.
I still remember a General Election hustings meeting in 1987 where one of the candidates was a Director of Social Services. When asked to comment on a recent child abuse scandal he opened his remarks by saying ‘ Child abuse is very much my field’. The assembled residents responded with a mixture of gasps and giggles.
Lesson number 1 – why Word spell check doesn’t always get it right…
Reminds me of a poem I wrote at school about a woman living alone in a house. I meant to use the word ‘erratic’, but by mistake used ‘erotic’.
One of our wards recently put out a focus with the headline (in 50pt font of course) “PROTECTING THE VENERABLE” I’m sure that Pope Benedict XVI was unimpressed by the local budget cuts but not sure we quite got the lead right there!
Of course, even without the spelling error, I’d be embarrassed to deliver something containing such mom’n’apple pie meaningless sentiments – pure bomfoggery. Which will no doubt be echoed in ten million leaflets across the country by candidates of every party in the next three weeks…
Reminds me of when, years ago, I had to pulp a load of someone’s leaflets I’d started to print which left the “not” out of the sentence, “We will not repeat Labour’s mistakes”. Yes, it can happen to anyone. Make sure someone OTHER than the author(s) proof-read your FOCUSes!
I still have a chuckle over the Cambridge Young Liberal meeting where someone persented us with a recruiting letter he had written which started off “Dear Suer or Madman”.
Years ago, when Chris Nowakowski was standing as the Alliance candidate in Surbiton, when the predictions were very poor for us, a leaflet of his famously advised us that we should never trust the “poles”.
I know of a campaign that had to extract thousands of “blue ink letters” from envelopes when someone spotted that they claimed to be from XXX MP – which is not allowed in a general election campaign.
I use voice recognition software a lot. It produces some good errors…
This is the ward of the great Cyril Smith and his brother Norman. Went Labour at the General Election. Very close this time with the excellent Lib Dem candidate Mohammed Sajjid. Watch this result as an indicator for the Lib Dem revival in the urban north – or not.
I have some sympathy. Our Focus team in my council days nearly sent out a Focus proclaiming “The Police have a hand job…” (true though that might have been) but in the general hilarity failed to spot that the sentence continued “…but we do want gun law.”
Not quite in the class of a real Conservative council speech on sex education and gays: “What these people do in the privacy of their own homes is up to them, but…(dramatic pause)…I don’t want it shoved down my throat!”
that was the spellcheckers fault.i know for a fact she didn’t do it deliberatly it was the spellcheckers fault :(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(
Clearly, after her showing on BBC 2’s ‘The Planners’, Cllr Begum didn’t make a spelling error at all! She certainly stole planning permission from the process of democracy.