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The bus to get a Labour MP elected in Hexham Constituency is leaving - Get on Board!

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No blogs for a while. I've been busy on twitter. The Progressive Hexham Constituency twitter account has attracted quite a lot of interest. There's clearly an enthusiasm to try to get rid of the current MP. Hexham deserves better. There's still quite a lot of discussion about the best approach and we need to thrash that out between now and the next General Election. Time is short! In a previous blog I asked everyone to remember the feeling that they had the day after previous elections, when the realisation that the Tories had won again, was sinking in. Sinking in is a good way of putting it, because it is that terrible sinking feeling associated with defeat. Contrast that with how you are feeling today, the day after another two fantastic by-election victories for the opposition. Labour in Wakefield and the Lib Dems in Tiverton and Honiton.  The Tories are literally falling apart. Oliver Dowden has resigned. His resignation is a pretty pathetic attempt to salvage his own c...
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Labour, Lib Dems and Greens have a lot in common - why not work together?

Here's a challenge! Have a look at the following tweets and guess which political party tweeted them: 1. In breaking their manifesto  promise and failing to protect the state pension, the Conservatives have plunged older people into a cost of living crisis.  This out of touch Government has left poorer pensioners out in the cold. 2. Youth services cut, Crime Rising, The Tories are failing our communities. 3. NEW: Inflation at 5.5%. Food. Petrol. Energy. We're all feeling it. This isn't just a global problem. The Tories have failed to get a grip and working people are paying the price. 4. 1 million adults in the UK went an entire day without food last month. 4.7 million experienced food insecurity. This is the reality of the cost of living crisis. 5. Climate action can bring other benefits for fuel poverty, health and warmer homes. There's nowhere better to focus that action than on social housing. Answer: Lib Dem, Labour, Labour, Green, Green I don't think anyone wh...
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The Tories are in meltdown - hope we can get our acts together in Hexham Constituency

No blogging for a while! It's been a full time job to keep up with what's going on. Even the Conservative Party are now waking up to the reality of what they have become under Boris Johnson's leadership. A steady drip of Tory MPs are writing letters of "no-confidence" in the Prime Minister. To add insult to many injuries, he sank to a new low by trying to smear Keir Starmer with the pathetic "Jimmy Saville" reference. Jimmy Saville was of course a massive supporter of the Conservative Party, but that is neither here nor there. This seems to have led directly to mass resignations of the PMs staff which is laughably being characterised as the "clear out" that Johnson has promised. What a shambles. All at a time when the cost of living crisis is in full swing, post-Brexit realities are hitting and there is a massive crisis in Ukraine. This is all without mentioning COVID, worsening inequality, empty promises of "levelling up", food bank ...
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The Tories are laughing at the divided opposition

No blogging recently - mainly because I've been holding my breath a lot to see if there is any sign from anywhere that there might be a prospect of a non-Tory government at the next election...... The Tories remain pretty strong in the polls despite presiding over an increasingly chaotic situation. The problems with petrol supply has come to symbolise government complacency. The shortage of HGV drivers, for a mixture of reasons, was known about ages ago and there has been no meaningful intervention to help the situation. Now the army has been called in. The government seem content to let "the market" sort out this and other problems. Leaving things to "the market" has proven catastrophic in other sectors - so that's a good plan! In the meantime there are real attacks on the living standards of the least well off, with the looming cuts in universal credit and the rise in national insurance contributions. Tax rises to fund public services is a good thing - but...
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Newspaper Review - Hexham Courant August 26th

Dunno if i will do this every week - but thought it might be interesting to have a look at this weeks Hexham Courant and pick out a few articles to highlight.  I quite like the Hexham Courant. Lots of interesting articles and local news - also covers quite a lot of local politics. The letters page is always entertaining. Great to see Hexham Bus Station reopening the waiting room - hope people will start using buses more - a lot of the ones I see going past don't have many people on. It's going to be crucial to tackle climate change to have much more public transport. In another article, there's mention of more COVID around and an increase in hospital admissions - so keep that in mind. Not mentioned in the Courant this week, but from my own experience and stuff on social media, there have been quite a lot of train cancellations recently. Need a reliable service to encourage people to use the trains - and affordable tickets!! COVID vaccination gets good coverage in the talkin...
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Afghanistan is long way from Hexham - what are we going to do to help?

No blogs for a while as I have been away on holiday - cycled from Lands End to John O'Groats. Great way to see the country. What a country we live in - incredible countryside, stunning bridges and beautfiul towns and villages. We met lots of lovely people along the way. It was nice to get away from the realities of politics for a while. We raised money for FareShare North East during the bike ride. Thanks to all for the donations. For more information see the blog about the bike ride: http://lejog2021forfsne.simplesite.com/450021484 Any donations to FareShare North East would be gratefully received. They do vital work in the region to tackle food hunger and food waste.  https://donorbox.org/wylam-friends-cycling-to-fight-hunger Anyway - back to reality with a bang. Considering its the summer holidays, sadly our Government do not take a holiday from new levels of incompetence. The latest issues to outfox the capabilities of the government make depressing reading/viewing in...
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Compromise is needed for a progressive future

There seem to have been a lot of anniversaries recently. 100 years since the partition of Ireland, 40 years since the Brixton Riots, 10 years since Amy Winehouse died.  I don't remember the partition of Ireland in 1921! But my Dad used to talk about it a lot. He was born in Tipperary in 1921. Imagine being born then, there. Just when things were really kicking off in Ireland. If you haven't come across it, there's a weekly programme on BBC sounds called "Year '21". It's a programme which charts the history of 1921 in Ireland, week by week. It's a fascinating listen. Presenting the history from different perspectives. There's contributions from the descendants of some of the key participants. There was one episode which referred back to an incident in Dublin in 1920, which I remember my Dad talking about when I was young. It was the original "Bloody Sunday". There was a coordinated assassination of a number of British intelligence agents i...
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