My week ahead 20 - 27 May 2013

Monday 20 May - 4pm Culture portfolio meeting
6pm Labour campaigning in South West Ipswich

Wednesday 22 May - 7.30pm - Fabians meeting - 'Asylum and immigration - have we got it right?'

Thursday 23 May - 7pm - North East Ipswich Area Committee, St John's Church Hall, Cauldwell Hall Road

Friday 24 - 27 May - Trip to Verona and last stage of the Giro D'Italia

Saturday was like the first day back at school after the summer holidays, seeing your friends for the first time in ages and catching up with the gossip - but this was not our first day back at school but our first day back campaigning after two weeks off! We had 16 of us out in South West Ipswich, delivering thank you leaflets to our residents.

This is the way to deal with UKIP, getting out and talking to residents about their concerns. It is also important to be able to talk about issues like immigration and the Suffolk Fabians have a meeting about this issue on Wednesday.

But what are the other two main political groups doing to counter the rise of UKIP and to deal with the issues that concern the people of Ipswich? The Lib Dems have gone back into their 11 month hibernation, just counting the days when they are out of the coalition and they can go back to being a minor opposition party - whilst the Tories seem all over the place, blaming UKIP, thinking of joining UKIP and then attacking each other!

Locally an Ipswich Tory activist called me a moron on twitter - water off a ducks back, but I thought that sort of behavior just puts more people off politics and gets all politicians a bad name. trouble is there seems to be no self-discipline or leadership in the local Tory Party to stop it. Two of their members/candidates who have blogs seems to enjoy calling opposition Councillors names (when not attacking each other) but then it seems that this sort of behavior is also rife at the top of the Tory Party with the accusations that a senior adviser to Cameron called Tory activists 'swivel-eyed loons'.

Getting back to dealing with good news, this week the Ipswich HEARS service has now reached the target of 1,000 customers, this is a great service that looks after our senior residents and gives families peace of mind. When we took over at IBC, the Tories were planning to hand HEARS over to Suffolk County Council and we know that they would have looked to get rid of it (like the library service) as soon as they could. Well done to all those involved in HEARS.