My week ahead 10 - 16 August 2014

Monday – 11 August, 9am – Rushmere Ward Councillors meeting, Woodbridge Road
6pm –Labour Group campaigning session

Tuesday – 12 August, 2pm – Labour campaigning in SW Ipswich

Wednesday – 13 August, 2pm – Labour campaigning in NW Ipswich

Thursday – 14 August, 7pm – Culture Working Group

Saturday – 16 August, 10am – Labour campaigning in North East Ipswich

Back from India and also a short break at the Commonwealth Games and it is straight into full time campaigning. Some see August as a non-political activity month with many at the council on holiday and Westminster also away on one of their many long breaks but with the General Election now under 12 months away many will use August to campaign hard.

Even Ministers are making official visits, with the Tory Minister for Coastal Protection in the region this week, even the local news programme indicated that it was rare to have a ministerial visit in August, also indicating that they believed the visit may have been official and not a campaigning visit but it was only taking place because of the time of the General Election now getting closer.

The local political blog even indicated that they would be concentrating on national issues in their ‘Diary’ column this week as August was always a slow month – I thought possibly the non appearance of any of our local MPs at two recent civic events – a medal ceremony for local Reservists and the Monday night event in Christchurch Park to commemorate the centenary of the start of the First World War would have been a newsworthy story. In particular after the clumsy way Tory spin doctors and the Right wing press attempted to make Ed Miliband and the Lib Dem leader look uncaring after they were handed wreaths that had already been labelled, but the labels looked the work of a small child.

What that action by the Tories did show is that as we get closer to the General Election they will get more and more desperate.

It has not been a great week for the Tories and in particular David Cameron, Baroness Warsi storming out and then Boris telling us all he was coming back and that he had suddenly become slightly Euro sceptic! Many may have hoped that Boris announcing that he was coming back to save the Tory Party may have knocked Warsi off the front pages – it did for a day but many papers this Sunday have carried further interviews with the Baroness, none of which will make good reading for Mr Cameron and his (Boris’s ) party.

On international issues, I do think that Westminster and in particular MPs can get a bad press that is underserved at times but I do wonder that with the Gaza crisis, the situation in Iraq (that now has the RAF involved) plus the public health issues caused by the Ebola epidemic that there seems to be little mention of a recall of Parliament!