Friday 9 April 2010

Letter from Lynne

I received this letter and accompanying flyer from Lynne Featherstone this week. She's the current Lib Dem MP.

I like Lynne Featherstone. She is consistently responsive to my hassling her on my chosen cause, she came out of the expenses scandal looking unusually good (I did see a receipt of hers printed in the paper for a Tesco chicken salad wrap or some such, but I think we can forgive her that) and from what I know of her actions and writings she seems to have, you know, principles and stuff.

But this is a bit disappointing. The whole letter is about Labour. Well, that's not quite true – most of it is about a particular housing issue that a particular resident had, which Lynne clearly thinks illustrates everything that Haringey's Labour council are doing wrong.

What about the Lib Dems, Lynne? You haven't even told us who the candidates are, for heaven's sake.

She also merrily conflates the general election with the council election - using results from the last general election (and bookies' odds from last year for the current one) to try to convince us it's a 'two horse race' in the council election. They are quite a long way from being the same thing, as evidenced by the fact we have a Lib Dem MP and Labour-controlled council. Based on these figures I'm none the wiser about what the best tactical vote would be for the council election.



Verdict

This is almost entirely negative. And it appears to be designed to confuse people by mixing up figures for general and council elections. And it puts a depressing amount of focus on tactical voting. Don't you have more to say for yourselves than that, guys? Poor show, poor show.
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. Lynne Featherstone MP10 April 2010 at 23:02

    HI - yes of course - loads of positive things to say about LibDem achievements - but it's a balance across all the literature in the campaign.
    As for election results - I narrowly beat Labour in the last General Election. I had around 20,500, Labour 18,000 and the Tories 6000. In the last Council elections the result was 30 Labour councillors and 27 LibDem councillors.

    The current letter going out has six pledges for the council - also at
    http://www.lynnefeatherstone.org/2010/04/liberal-democrats-announce-key-election-pledges.htm

    Thanks for opportunity to explain.
    Lynne

    ReplyDelete
  2. Robert B11 April 2010 at 15:12

    Thanks Lynne. Any more Lib Dem 'literature' that finds its way through my letterbox will be assessed on the same terms.

    As for the numbers, I do think you should have been clearer about them first time around.

    I also took the liberty of checking Ladbrokes' latest odds for you since your figures are four months out of date. You're still the odds-on fave but down from 1/20 to 1/8, while odds of a Labour win have shortened to 9/2. Tories remain a long shot on 100/1.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)