Library protest tonight - take the fight to Rams!

Councillor Robert Rams, architect of Barnet council’s library cuts, will be the guest speaker at Chipping Barnet Conservatives' meeting tonight, Wednesday 8 December.

There will be a protest against library cuts outside the venue. Please spread the word and come along if you can. (And, needless to say, wrap up warm.)

Protest against library cuts – Wednesday 8th December at 7.30pm at Chipping Barnet Conservative Office, 163 High Street, Barnet EN5 5SU

Christmas is coming and the Tories are getting fat

Unfazed by the devastation they are wreaking in Barnet's council services, and unconcerned for the 800 staff with the threat of redundancy hanging over them this Christmas, Chipping Barnet Tories are marking the season in the best way they know: dinners, dinners, dinners.

The main requirement for being a Chipping Barnet Tory, it seems, is the possession of a presentable home to host fundraising dinners and teas in, and a sufficiently empty social diary to allow you to attend everyone else's fundraising dinner or tea.

Here is where Chipping Barnet Tories will be dining this month:

There are tickets left for the Old Fold Christmas Tea Party on Tuesday 7th December if you would like to come? Tickets are £10 each.

Coming up shortly is the East Barnet Christmas Dinner on Saturday 18th December at 7.15pm at the Conservative Office. Tickets are £15 each and include soup, followed by turkey with all the trimmings, Christmas pudding or mince pies, tea and coffee. A glass of wine and all soft drinks included.

Also the Osidge Christmas Dinner on Saturday 11th December is now fully booked, although there is a waiting list if you would like to put your name down.

They publish lots of election leaflets.com

I've chanced on a great website called the Straight Choice.

They are enabling members of the public and political parties to scan and post all the election leaflets they can find. (I know the Barnet Bugle blog is doing this for Barnet, but this is on a bigger scale showing you stuff from around the country, plus you can search by tags/"which party is being attacked", etc).

The Barnet trades council leaflet that we gave out yesterday in East Barnet ward is on there already - this website is an easy way for me to show it to you! We weren't only trying to be negative (against the BNP) but to suggest to people a positive way to react to political and social worries. As it says on the leaflet: "Fight for public services, good jobs, and decent homes for everyone".

I hope more and more people will be doing that. Frankly, we don't have a better choice!

Dishing out leaflets in New Barnet - but in East Barnet ward!

David Cameron breastfeeds

Oh, not really, but you know what I mean. The attempts to portray David Cameron as a loving father are becoming nothing short of nauseating, as this picture taken from the cover of Peopletalk magazine, which the Tories have seen fit to send me, shows.

David Cameron is a loving father, but that's not enough. Cameron must be seen to be a loving father.

I wouldn't mind this so much if it didn't go alongside the Tories' half-baked draft manifesto proposal to "recognise marriage and civil partnerships in the tax system in the next Parliament". At least they don't propose to discriminate against gay "married" couples, only unmarried couples... and single parents.

Privileging married couples over other people cannot turn back the tide on the massive social upheavals that the decline of marriage represents. It cannot help end child poverty. All it can do is penalise and stigmatise the parents and the children who do not fit this pattern.

My parents divorced when I was young. Perhaps they should never have married! They did, though, and they tried to make their marriage work, but they couldn't. They rowed a lot when I was growing up, and I can't say that I minded very much when that was taken out of my life. I was sad they split up, but perhaps I wouldn't have minded at all if the rowing had gone on.

Once they split, the weirdest suggestion you might make to me would be that they would get back together!

What did I mind about growing up in a single-parent household?

(1) the poverty
(2) the stigma.

It seems to me that the Tories' "family-friendly" proposal can only reinforce these - poverty, stigma - for children from single-parent or unmarried couple households when, for decades, we have been moving away from them.

One of my best friends was a "little bastuard" - a term I learned from my grandmother who learned it at the music hall! We have long, long, I hope, ceased despising children whose parents aren't married.

Two lesbian friends of mine have just had a baby. They are not married. Society changes, for the better, when it frees up people from age-old social prejudice and expectation. Let who will marry, but leave the rest of us alone!

Tieless Cameron: haven't we had it with image and no substance?

The headline on an Evening Standard article today is "Tieless Cameron is the Tories' poster boy for election battle". Conservative Party posters showing a tieless Cameron will go up all over the UK soon, presumably in an attempt to convince us that he is one of us/just what the country needs/a pretty straight guy, etc. Actually, he just looks like he's forgotten to put his tie on.

How empty-headed do Tory image makers think we are?

If they were promoting 'tireless Cameron' that would be worth something but why should we care what Cameron wears? Alright, perhaps for some people it does matter whether he wears a tie or not, but the point surely is that he should wear what he feels comfortable in and not what he thinks voters would like to see him in.

The image on the poster is pure Tony Blair circa 1997 - only, that little bit more dressed down. Expect Cameron to appear in public soon with a phony Blairite mug of tea welded to his hand as well (I always thought Tony Blair was a shyster - I was right). The Tories are making a mistake because I think - I hope - the public has had it with politicians faking niceness.

Barnet's troughing Tories

People criticise Brian Coleman for the high number of lunches and dinners he consumes in his numerous official capacities. (Of course, the main complaint is that he never pays for them.) But a glance at the Chipping Barnet Tories' website makes me wonder whether Coleman isn't just an exaggerated example of the political species as a whole, for to judge from this and this, being a Tory seems to consist of attending and occasionally hosting an endless conveyor belt of lunches, teas, suppers and other divertissements - with nibbles.

A bit like an exchange of pointless gifts at Christmas (or other major cultural/religious festival), Tories seem to be constantly entertaining each other in their own beautiful homes - except that it is not just reciprocal, each time something gets creamed off the top for the local Tory party coffers.

Before anyone accuses me of having an anthropological obsession with Tories (I have, everso slightly, in the long run-up to the election), I was looking into it from a practical point of view, wondering how me and my trade union and lefty mates could get some more cultural life around our political activism.

We clearly don't have anything like the social wherewithal to match Barnet's Tories, but I'm wondering whether we can do better than the odd snatched pint in the pub after a meeting, which is what passes for social interaction among us at the moment.