• Home
• About Sara
• RSS

It's a real Ealing comedy, as Tories go hysterical

 In my experience, when Tories run out of facts to support their arguments (which doesn’t usually take very long), there are two routes of choice that they can take: lie or go hysterical. The former is much easier for others to disprove, but the latter is far funnier. One of the best examples occurred when a former Conservative group leader at Three Rivers misread an email header and accused the council of sending his emails to California in order to decode them. In a manner reminiscent of a cross between Brian Blessed, he boomed out his ‘evidence’, whilst the rest of us sniggered.

Ealing Conservative councillor Phil Taylor (not the world champion darts player) seems to fall into the latter camp. In a posting on his blog, he accuses the Save Ealing’s Centre (SEC) campaign of being a LibDem front. His breathless-with-excitement evidence for this is two-fold.

One of the local LibDem activists was boasting on Saturday that he had roused himself to do some leafleting. Interestingly Tor reports that: ‘The aim of today was to deliver the latest Focus, as well as a leaflet for a Save Ealing’s Centre meeting taking place on 20 January’.

If Save Ealing’s Centre want to be seen as an independent pressure group rather than just a LibDem campaign vehicle they need to keep some separation from the LibDems.

This is taken from information on LibDem campaigner Toran Shaw‘s blog, which mentions LibDem activists delivering leaflets for the SEC meeting next week. On that basis, a number of local charities here in Three Rivers are LibDem campaign vehicles, including the Abbots Langley Festival of the Arts and Beat the Killer Cold, as we deliver their leaflets with our own, as a service to local groups.

But this isn’t all the evidence that Cllr Taylor can offer. He continues:

I notice that SEC’s vision paper, all 32 pages of it, was printed by the HELP Press Ltd, Rickmansworth which is an in-house LibDem printing operation. Local LibDem leaflets, and indeed LibDem leaflets the length and breadth of the country, are printed by HELP.

I was worried that I’d missed this huge LibDem rival to News International. But maybe it was to be expected – after all, this corner of south west Herts did used to be home to England’s printing and paper making industries. But the answer is far less glamorous. HELP merely stands for Hillingdon and Ealing Liberal Print, the legal name given to a couple of Riso machines in local members’ garages. I asked one of the activists who help to run this printing society about their enviable nationwide coverage. “I wish“, he sighed. “We have done some printing for Hammersmith LibDems, though“. So there you go, the length and breadth of, er a part of west London.

By now, Cllr Taylor has whipped himself into a frenzy of conspiracy, seeing LibDems under the bed wherever he looks. The posting concludes:

I wrote to SEC at the start of September to ask for copies of its constitution and minutes. As a fully paid up member of one of the residents associations it purports to represent I figured I was entitled to see this material. I haven’t heard from SEC so I guess they don’t think public life should be transparent and open. We have evidence that they are a LibDem front. Do they want to furnish some evidence to the contrary?

I had a look on the SEC web siteand found quite a lot of information about them. They state that they are ‘a voluntary alliance of 25 residents’ and community groups’ and list those groups. The site also gives plenty of information about what SEC has been up to for anyone who is curious. I suppose Cllr Taylor could have done that himself, rather than given a hardworking bunch of local volunteers more to do.

If Cllr Taylor is so keen to know what the SEC group are up to, he could of course join them. As a local councillor, you might have expected he might have been interested in doing so. Or is there something stopping him giving this group his support? One of the main parts of SEC’s campaign is to oppose two high density housing developments of over 1500 flats in the centre of Ealing. But in his blog Cllr Taylor states,

The main customers for the town centre will be its own hinterland – a hinterland bolstered with some housing density in the town centre.

Ahh, there you have it. Cllr Taylor is upset because a lot of people disagree with him about a local issue and is trying to cover his embarrassment by putting it down to merely a political front, rather than people power. In Ealing it appears that the LibDems working with local residents - and the Tories are sniping from the sidelines as usual.

Related posts:

1. Removing the cancer from Watford's politics
2. Green day
3. So he’s gay, so what – but can Reigate’s Tories get over it?