#0240* - UKIP DOESN'T EVEN GET A MENTION for OLDHAM - SURPRISED? NAH!

#0240* - UKIP DOESN'T EVEN GET A MENTION for OLDHAM - SURPRISED? NAH!!
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Clean EUkip up NOW make UKIP electable! 
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The corruption of EUkip’s leadership, 

their anti UKIP claque in POWER & the NEC 

is what gives the remaining 10% a bad name!
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UKIP DOESN'T EVEN GET A MENTION for OLDHAM - SURPRISED? NAH!
THEY ONLY GET PUBLICITY NOW AS THE TRAGI/COMMEDY TURN!
IT DOES LOOK AS IF THE LACK OF COMPETENT LEADERSHIP HAS DESTYROYED THEM!

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Oldham East presents voters with dilemma: who gets the biggest slap?

• Parties unsure how public will react to MP's disgrace
• Broken coalition pledges stir anger as poll nears

• Martin Wainwright
  

• Tuesday 28 December 2010 22.48 GMT
  

Ed Miliband works on the Oldham East and Saddleworth byelection campaign with Labour’s candidate, Debbie Abrahams.

 

Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA 

The battle of the backlashes has resumed in the fogbound Pennines after the briefest of truces over Christmas. Rival canvassing and leaflet teams are out again on the hillsides of Oldham East and Saddleworth trying to cultivate anger about either the disgraced former Labour MP Phil Woolas or about the coalition's troubled record.

Both strike a resentful chord in an area already grumpy about living on the edge of decision making, whether that means a remoteness from London or the age-old fissure between Yorkshire and Lancashire which meet here. But sorting out which – Woolas or Cameron-Clegg – most deserves the slap the constituency can give at the byelection on 13 January is proving taxing. "If Woolas did what they say, telling lies in his leaflets, then I condemn him," said Naeem Butt, a 30-year-old machine operator whose political interest sharpened abruptly after he lost his job in nearby Ashton-under-Lyne three weeks ago. "But there are a lot of coalition policies which I don't agree with at all. Worst of all is the VAT rise to 20%. Now that I've not got a decent income, and not a lot of hope of finding a new job straight away, that's going to affect me plenty."

Near Butt's home in Lees, a lifelong Liberal, Joan Radcliffe, was also undecided. Looking back to Woolas's knife-edge majority of 103 (0.2%) in May, which an election court overturned in November because of the leaflet lies, she originally considered the Lib Dems a shoo-in. But now, with challenging policies compounded by the revelations concerning the unease of Lib Dem ministers, she is less sure of backing Elwyn Watkins, who was defeated by Woolas in May and is now standing again. "I haven't got words bad enough to tell you what I think about Woolas," she said. "But I think these huge fees for students are completely wrong." Celeste Collinge, her companion on a post-Christmas shopping trip in Springhead, agreed: "I've a 16-year-old daughter who's been on course for university, but we've got our doubts now – not just myself and my husband, but our daughter too. We've a big gap before our next one [a primary schoolboy] so we may be able to manage to help her, then save enough for him.

But it wouldn't be easy. I've heard what they say about helping lower-income students and that sort of concession, so we'll be thinking about it. There's going to be a lot of thinking of that sort round here over the next two weeks." Two leaflet distributors were busy in Uppermill, where the election court sat for four days at the civic centre. Tom Hurst and Jane Collins, the local and Yorkshire regional organisers for Ukip, were optimistic about picking up "traditional Conservatives who see David Cameron as a Liberal". They hoped to benefit from rumours – plentiful locally but strongly denied by Tories – that the Conservative party is reluctant to fight too fiercely against its coalition partner. Saddleworth has a long history of tactical voting; it helped the Liberals win Colne Valley and then Saddleworth and Littleborough when constituency borders included its network of villages in those seats. Meanwhile others, who were inclined to wish a plague on all three houses, red, blue and yellow, were looking to the British National party, even though its leader, Nick Griffin, ducked the contest after hinting that he would stand. The BNP's reputation deterred 91-year-old Catherine Reed, out walking her son's dog in the thaw, but she said Griffin was the only politician to have highlighted her main concern. "He got it in just before the end, on Question Time. He's against all this sex education they give children when they're so young. It robs them of innocence and their childhood. That's what I think. That's what I want our MP to take up."

To Ken Bennett, a former executive on the Sunday Mirror and Daily Express, who now runs his own monthly, the Saddleworth Independent, anything local that might be taken up, skilfully and energetically, could mean victory. In its ninth issue the paper broke the news, in December, that a Voice of Saddleworth party would fight every ward in next May's council elections, on a platform of "Saddleworth before party politics". Every candidate will claim to fit such a bill, but with only a fortnight to convince voters, Watkins' previous run at the job could prove handy. The Lib Dems have also earned points for calling the election quickly, ignoring Westminster etiquette which gives the right to the sitting party. "People here are longing, yearning even, for an end to all this business and the right to have an MP making their voice heard, like everyone else," said Bennett.

Against that, Labour's Debbie Abrahams stands to pick up votes from another of the region's many varieties of disgruntlement. Geoff Haigh, who runs the Ram's Head , at the constituency's highest point, a tongue of Lancashire where, in the old days, West Riding of Yorkshire county council refused to collect bins or grit the moorland road – summed it up.

"I don't think a court should interfere with our judgment," he said of the Woolas debacle. "We voted him in. It should be up to us to vote him out at the next election if we want to." One signal could be whether the Ram's Head erects the vast red Labour billboard that greeted Tony Blair in May, when he dropped by on his election tour to pick up a strawberry-topped cake for his birthday. "I'm not saying how I'll vote," said Haigh, "but Woolas was certainly a thorough constituency MP. I'll put it like this, as my granny wrote in my autograph book when I was a boy: 'You never know the value of water until the well runneth dry.' "

To view the orioginal of this article CLICK HERE

Candidates: Debbie Abrahams labour Derek Adams BNP Kashif Ali Conservative Peter Allen Green David Bishop Bus Pass Elvis Nick Delves Monster Raving Loony Loz Kaye Pirate Stephen Morris English Democrats Paul Nuttall UKIP Elwyn Watkins Liberal Democrat General election May 2010 Phil Woolas - Labour - 14,186 Elwyn Watkins - Liberal Democrat - 14,083 Kashif Ali - Conservative - 11,773 Alwyn Stott - BNP - 2,546 David Bentley - UKIP - 1,720 Gulzar Nazir - Christian - 212

Surely one can only see it as embarrassing that UKIP lacks a credible candidate and failed to get so much as a mention from its local candidater who is after all the party Chairman and thus Farage's puppet placement after 17 years!

Then again with just 1,720 votes trailing the BNP by best pat of 30% and beset with publicity of playing the fool - utter incompetence in management terms - failed leadership - attacks by the claimed leader on his own people on TV - endless self inflicted bad publicity - Court case after Court case lost - dishonourable failure to settle their debts - contempt for British Law - collusion in Racism, anti Judaism, sexual harassment and the like with their violent gutter chums in the EFD in EUrope - what would one expect.

It is a very long time singe UKIP had a positive story of any consequence in the media and can YOU remember one that wasn't put there in desperation to pimp up Farage?

Now I don't claim to know much about that bit from Shropshire to The Scottish Borders but do correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the allegiance split between Manchester, Sunderland, Newcastle & Liverpool?

Isn't the main rivalry between Liverpool & Manchester where to give both something they can win at they both have 2 football teams! Glasgow has nothing going for it either a ghastly dump but to try to have an occasional winner they have two football teams too.

Like all football teams they all seem to represent their community and be hugely in debt with over paid oiks milking the local; poor.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Oldham strongly affiliated with Manchester? Doesn't that make the concept of putting a nebish from Liverpool in situ as a candidate make UKIP look outright idiotic - is this just another ego trip by Nuttall or just another example of unprofessional leadership by the utterly incompetent Farage?

I was also particularly interested in the only comment on a UKIP was picked up by Google and states:
"Tom Hurst and Jane Collins, the local and Yorkshire regional organisers for Ukip"

Surely this is particularly embarrassing in view of the fact that OLAF have taken regular interest in UKIP's abuse of EU funds and the employment of 'Regional Organisers' for political purposes!
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Posted by: Greg Lance-Watkins

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