Hopefully not!

Mark Ferguson poses the question: Will your CLP still exist in 2013?

Well, hopefully bloody not is all that I can say, although sadly it will probably continue in some form or other.of course, Mark is concerned about the issue of boundary changes, but for me I would be delighted if our Ward was whisked out of its existing CLP and moved, for instance, into Birmingham Edgbaston.

Not that I particularly want to be associated with either Edgbaston, or Birmingham. I would be equally pleased if we were moved to Wolverhampton, Bristol, or Newcastle! Ok, there would be logistical difficulties for delegates getting to meetings, but as most have them seem to have long since abandoned doing that anyway, it wouldn't make too much difference.

No, the reason I would be pleased is because all of the hard work put in by Labour Party members in my Ward would not be frustrated by some bureaucratic nightmare which means our CLP is in 'Special Measures', although the reason why seems to be a bigger secret than who was going to light the sodding Olympic cauldron.

Over the last 18 months despite the massive unpopularity of the Tories, and particularly the Lib Dems, and all the work done by members and councillors to secure our majority… only one new member has joined the Labour Party. No-one appears to know him. He doesn't respond to correspondence, and he has never attended a meeting nor done any election work. But he is a hero. He has somehow managed to crawl under the barbed wire, negotiated the minefield, and avoided the snipers… he is our new member!! Hallelujah!

Others who have applied have been either routinely ignored, or made to provide masses of identification information, or told they would shortly receive an information pack which never materialises. After a while, they give up. Let's face it, you are only going to make so many attempts to give someone your money before you give up bothering because they don't seem to want it.

Last week I had an e-mail from our glorious Leader… Ed. not just me, you understand, he sent it out to thousands of Labour Party activists. Poor young Ed. He was urging us all to go out and recruit a new member.

I did try to write back asking young Ed if the 'recruit a member' campaign meant recruit one member for the whole of the Ward, because if so we had already hit our target for the year but sadly, his personalised e-mail bounced back.

So… if we can be shifted in to a CLP where new members can join and participate in activity to remove this useless coalition rather than protecting existing elitists with inflated egos… I'm up for a bit of that Mark!