I have recently been interested to see how unready the local Labour Party have been for the coming election. I have now been sent a leaflet which they have put through doors in a small corner of Walthamstow where they still have some deliverers. This has a number of claims relating to the things Ms Stella Creasy thinks her party can be proud of. Being a New Labour leaflet, tick-boxes abound. Maybe though she still has some childish dreams she has not yet overcome about being a romantic revolutionary, despite being a member of one of the most right-wing parties the country has ever known (and I include Thatcher's in this, because for all her many many faults at least Maggie did not build a chain of prisons to detain immigrant children, waste billions on ID cards, wage long wars without clear goals or plaster the country with CCTV) but Ms Creasy is urging people to get behind a number of 'campaigns' she wants to pretend she is in the vanguard of:

The first of these is a campaign for more bobbies on our streets, which after over a decade in government is a bit rich from the party that brought us the useless PCSO. Her party colleague, Councillor Leader Robbins was recently seen to be preparing the ground to capitulate on his failing efforts to get the 120 cops we have needed for some years but which he only woke up to last year, instead agreeing to fork out further tax-payer's money to get the Metropolitian Police to split the cost of an extra 10 police for the borough (Population 220,000+). Ms Creasy is pretending that money will still be found to provide the police we need, despite the Labour Chancellor Alisdair Darling softening us all up for cuts. She also declines to give us her views on the massive corruption scandal in the Labour-led local authority and also does not reveal that she was a Labour Councillor during a period when a lot of the anti-fraud protections were being systematically by-passed and the poor funds plundered.

She does however make claims about 'Tackling Child Poverty, Debt and Homelessness' an interesting claim in a borough where the local Trades Council is having to make payments to a Christian charity to pay for the homeless to be fed in a car-park in a recession because the Labour Government is unable to get a grip on the social problems in our midst. There is nothing in the leaflet which actually says how these problems were solved during the years of Labour government, just a bland comment that 'Local faith communities do so much to help our poorest residents. Can you help them by helping out at our day or night shelters?' In other words - if you vote for me, my party is going to expect the voters to continue to try to solve these problems amongst themselves. How very Victorian. Not a word there about jobs or capping the extortionate interest rates of 442% charged at Oakam which are still legal under this Labour Government.

Ms Creasy likes to give the impression that she is a selfless activist who is an example to us all in her leaflet, saying that she is 'Helping our young people achieve their potential. Could you spare an evening a month to help out our youth groups? I work with several, including the Scouts and find it really rewarding'. By golly, I bet she does find it rewarding, seeing as she is on that supposedly non-political organisation's very generous payroll as 'Head of Public Affairs and Campaigns'. Funny she doesn't tell the public what they pay her in her leaflet. For her maybe this is not just a nice little earner for a woman who does not seem to have ever done a proper job in her life - more an opportunity to burnish her own public image. I suppose though it could also be a break from spinning about her boss and arguing about drains. For a poser as an activist in the voluntary sector she forgets to draw on her alleged experience and tell us all how under this government there have never been so many barriers put up to prevent people getting involved, what with a meddling council, Health and Safety bullies shutting down as many enjoyable events as they have over the last decade and the bureaucrats crippling the voluntary sector with their paper-pushing and CRB sillinesses. The Scouts, incidentally, no longer even put on the gang show in Walthamstow.

There are some things she is saying that I may blog about later so won't mention them here in detail, but among the Other Stuff in the leaflet I have already blogged about are: jumping onto the coat-tails of Neil Gerrard's save the dog track campaign; her pretend 'fight' against the virtually non-existent spectre of the BNP in Walthamstow, which involved failing to organise a whelk stall properly; and of course, the fatuous waste of effort she puts in cosying up to Ed Miliband in the name of 'climate change', trying to keep sweet with a possible successor to Gordon Brown after Labour go down to defeat at the next election. She has learned something from Copenhagen, though, - having abandonned her claims to be priorising the 'fight for bats'. She is also oddly silent about the war in Afghanistan.