The claim that Liberal Democrats voted against local ward-based police teams gets another airing, despite the fact that not only the Liberal Democrats but the Conservatives included sufficient funding for such teams in their alternative GLA budgets. Given that the same lie was used by one of their candidates in Bromley last year in the run-up to the local elections, I must presume that it is official London Labour's policy to spread this fiction across the entire city.
So, to make it easy for anyone to verify this, here is the Liberal Democrat budget proposal for that year and, in a spirit of even-handedness, the Conservative proposal. You will notice that both include funding for additional crime prevention measures...
The reference to improving standards at Heber Primary School is a nice touch. Naturally, no credit is given to the local authority, whose improvements led to Southwark being allowed to take education services in house again after the Government had removed responsibility form, yes, you guessed it, the then Labour administration.
On the plus side, there is a lovely picture of Tessa Jowell walking down Lordship Lane with two police officers, obviously detailed to make sure that she didn't get lost so far away from her home. Given the look on her face though, you would think that she has just been arrested for impersonated a competent Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport...
1 comment:
This is now an established tactic by Labour across the country. They're doing the same in Edinburgh, where Lib Dems proposed their own budget and voted against Labour's. However, this tactic has been exposed in the local media and is now widely seen as a desperate measure by a party on the way down and out. Labour form the most unpopular administration in living memory and would have lost councillors on 3 May anyway, but combined with a change of voting system to STV-PR in local elections, Labour could lose as many as HALF of their 30 current seats, and they could also lose two constituencies for the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh on the same day. My advice is this: these tactics are always counterproductive if they are mercilessly exposed, because the public rightly sees it as shameless opportunism.
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