Best of luck to everyone who is standing as a Liberal Democrat candidate; slightly more tepid wishes for other candidates 🙂

From the Worcester News, via RecessMonkey:

A CONSERVATIVE candidate in the Worcester city council elections has plunged her party into chaos by secretly joining the UK Independence Party … When confronted by the Worcester News, Miss Heider initially denied being a UKIP member, but she was later forced to come clean.

Oops.

Compare and contrast:

Caroline Spelman … the Shadow Local Government Secretary questioned the wisdom of moving towards more fortnightly bin collections (from the Conservative Party website)

with

Fortnightly collections ‘boost recycling’
LGA chairman Lord Bruce-Lockhart said: “The move by some to alternate weekly bin collections is aimed at working with residents to reduce waste, increase recycling and slowing rising costs” (from news reports on an LGA report)

That wouldn’t by any chance be one senion Conservative saying one thing in one place, and another senior Conservative saying the opposite somewhere else would it?

As the Western Daily Press writes:

The Tory Party in Wiltshire descended into outright civil war yesterday on the eve of vital elections over plans to axe five local councils and replace them all with one super-council.Three of the county’s four Conservative MPs attacked their own party’s county councillors for seeking greater glory for themselves over democracy, and disputed claims the move would save millions of pounds. The shock move has exposed massive splits within the Conservative Party in Wiltshire.

Well, that’s one way of spending the last few days before polling day. Full story is here.

After the May 1978 elections (i.e. the last round of elections before they won the general election) the Conservatives had 49.6% of councillors.

Edward Davey MP (Chair of Campaigns and Communications) has written to the Chair of the Labour Party Hazel Blears, asking her to suspend those responsible for alleged postal vote electoral fraud in Leeds.

You can read more on the party’s website.

The Liberal Democrats have today launched a report on the state of Britain after ten years of Blair and Brown being in charge.

Launching the document Ming Campbell said:

“The Blair-Brown government started with so much hope but now we are left with so much disappointment. This Government has wasted its opportunities and wasted your money.

“They have invested in health and education but lacked the courage and principles that would have enabled them to spend it effectively.”

You can read more, including the full document, on the Liberal Democrat website.

The BBC has the details.

So far the Conservatives are investigating rather than having suspended him as a member, which is a little curious given how eager Francis Maude has been to call for the immediate expulsion of people from other parties when the far right have been involved. Let’s hope that was just him falling prey to passing political temptation to try to score a few cheap points rather than evidence of serious sustained double standards from him on these sorts of issues.

From the Sunday Mirror:

One senior minister said: “The Tories aren’t doing well in the North, but we reckon we could suffer big losses against the Lib Dems in the South, especially London.”

All pretty good until those last two words. Full story is here.

The Sunday Times has a got a story about Labour breaking the rules on postal voting:

All three main parties, meanwhile, have signed up to the Electoral Commission’s code of conduct … Today we report that the Labour party in Leeds has driven an articulated lorry through this code in a desperate attempt to gain power on the city council. An undercover reporter posing as a student activist was part of a team told by the leader of the Labour group on the council, Keith Wakefield, and a fellow Labour politician, to collect postal votes in two key wards,

…