I want a labour majority but conservative local MP.

My prospective Labour MP thinks it’s hilarious to get kicked out of a night club for dancing on chairs, gossips about union members who support him and conspired with a union rep to have my mother suspended from a three day event just so his friend could go instead. His election campaign mostly consists of slagging the Tory’s off which I think is a wrong way to go about things. He should focus more energy on promoting ideas to solve local unemployment, the lack of affordable housing and other local problems.

My current local MP Stuart Andrew has experience long term unemployment and can relate to me even better than most of the union activist I started hanging around with from the end of last year, but one spirited individual can’t solve the long term unemployment crises in this country. Thankfully Labour has a good policy for solving long term unemployment by guaranteeing proper jobs as opposed to the work for your benefits policy that the conservatives currently have in place.

I recently questioned Ed Miliband in Sheffield on what he’s going to do with the Work Programme and he just wants to rebrand advisors as special advisors. IMO we should get rid of the Job Centres, their private providers and most of the DWP to free up some money to create jobs for the long term unemployed. Job Centre staff are supposed to help the unemployed but are stealing a living by delivering an ineffective service that doesn’t benefit clients much.

Stuart Andrew has been a lot quicker to deal with things than the union I’m involved in so I’d rather stick with him. At least he seems to know what he’s doing. Unions need to modernise fast but in my experience that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Can you prove that?



You really shouldn't hang around with union activists, they are well known for conspiring against mothers.


So good in fact that you nearly got a job during their 13 years in power.




I hear some union leaders shag mothers, is yours up for that?

Stuart Andrew is actually a Tory that I could possibly vote for, he's from the same mould as Mulholland in that he pays a lot of attention to his constituency and campaigns heavily on local issues, maybe its a Leeds thing but both of them are always in the local media and I dare say that Andrew probably uses social media a lot too, having access to an MP who will actually reply to emails or Tweets is the future.

I shall probably vote although it will no doubt be a wasted vote in our first past the post system. Not sure who I will vote for yet. If our politicians were serious about re-engaging the apathetic public they would move to a PR system. Another split vote may hasten that. As it would the height of non-democracy if, say, the Tories went into coalition with UKIP or the LibDems, when, say, Labour and SNP got an equivalent number of votes. If we are to keep getting coalitions with a first past the post system we will end up a dangerously divided country. Having said that, coalitions have been rare but if they were to be the future under the current system we ought to legitimise the coalition concept via PR.

The other thing that is sickening about our established political class is that they defend our method of 'democracy' as giving people a local representative in parliament and yet come the elections they make it all about the leaders and the prospective PM! Hypocrisy as with everything they utter. To hear Cameron and the female on QT last night was truly pathetic - they just repeat their simple message over and over again and stick to the party script. Not sure that's leadership or representation. Then there was Ed who did rather well with the audience but was embarrassing when Paxman interviewed him - came across like a petulant teenager.

Mullholland is exactly what an MP should - he is superb at supporting is constituents, a credit to his party, his area and most of all himself. It would be a tragedy if he didn't get re-elected.

This is from one of his Facebook posts today after his local campaign for an Otley kid to receive a drug that completely alleviates a rare condition ...






There isn't a party line for Greg Mulholland

There's better places to use this evidence than on a message board..



I had my longest period of employment when Labour was in power actually



Beside a lot of my acquaintances started their creative industry careers through the future jobs fund which the conservatives scrapped and replaced with work for your benefits at Poundland.



Can you prove that?

I bet there is when it comes to a division.

What's his voting record like?

double post

The only time I ever see engagement from my local candidates is via a few leaflets in the run-up to a vote. The last MP I knew anything about is because he was jailed for expenses fraud (David Chaytor, Labour). Granted, I don't go hunting them down but they're not a priority for time once I've factored in work, family, etc. I've had a couple of leaflets but generally the headline bullet points are all the same. I'm pretty aware of what's going on locally and I've never seen any engagement from an MP.

Interesting the Greens are getting a few votes on here. Is that because people can't bring themselves to vote for one of the 'big' parties (as in cod'ead), or because they genuinely support the Greens and want to help them grow share? Disillusioned ex-Labour/Lib Dem moving on perhaps?

I view the Greens a bit like UKIP. Both have radical views and are utterly dedicated to them, but frankly they come across as right muppets and I wouldn't place any of them in a position of power.

Personally I think UKIP are a busted flush - I think they will get less seats than the Lib Dems and this could be the Tories saving grace.

It seems no one wants to have a coalition with Cameron so unless he can pull a rabbit out of the hat he is done for.

Nicola Sturgeon was on radio 4 yesterday, the arrogance is something to behold. The SNP will hold the power they might as well make Salmon PM because he will effectively be pulling the 2 Eds strings. Something is wrong when a party who get 1m votes dictates policy for the whole country

7.9% voting as a "rebel" [urlhttp://www.publicwhip.org.uk/mp.php?mpid=1672[/url

I don't know what the average is but it emphasis's my belief that all MP's should be free to vote in accordance with either their own conscience, their own local party instructions or to the benefit of their constituency BEFORE the national political party - there is little point in getting to know your MP if he/she is simply ALWAYS going to toe the line and vote for the party, you may as well elect a 10 year old child to do that, what you need from an MP is someone who is resident in the constituency (genuinely resident), who runs weekly surgeries (Mulholland has two per week on a Saturday), and who gets involved with local issues and campaigns and will take action on behalf of a constituent - for me Mulholland does this and he has twice assisted me in issues that I raised via email to him on one occasion introducing me to a senior manager in a Department who took on a case for me, the bugger disagreed with me in the end but at least I got above the sheep who normally just churn out standard letters.

When I am The Great Benevolent Leader the first thing in the bin will be the party whip system.

he's doing well if he can find two Saturdays in a week...

Have you ever managed to do two things in one day ?

Just out of curiosity is anyone on this forum even considering voting for the hard of joined up thinking party?

The only criteria that makes sense to me is that the right to vote has been hard fought for, so people should. Fine if you don't but you really can't complain if things are not to your liking when the election is over.

I'm looking forward to seeing the high standard of apathy being improved upon this election and the country will be "governed" by a camel type government.

I look forward to a hanged parliament.

The vast majority of voters vote for a party rather than for an individual. Whilst I want my MP to have a degree of independence I wouldnt want an MP who relies on the support of the party to gain election and then completely ignores the party's manifesto once elected.

Thats what I would like to turn on its head - you can still have the political party's with their manifesto's (or sales leaflets as I prefer) but your MP should be free to speak out and to vote according to his/her constituency guidance - maybe it would even involve more in communicating with their MP ?

Just to give two examples I have this morning listened to IDS refuse to discuss where his proposed £10bn worth of welfare cuts are going to be applied in the next term, he even denied that he had any targets in mind and insisted that nothing would be decided or announced until AFTER the elections, this was followed by Lucy Powell (Labour) stating that they would not have a budget to work with until "they had seen the books", in other words both of the major party's in this election are not being honest in their sales pitches and are expecting us to believe that they won't make any decisions on any project or expenditure until they form a government - despite this they are all making sweeping promises of what they will do in order to win your vote, in fact ONLY to win your vote, we all know what happens to policies when a hung parliament looms, they are the first thing to go in the shredder.

Can you honestly say that you'd prefer a system of sales pitches of vague promises versus a person who will actually represent the constituency in which you and they both live ?

It's always going to be hard to get large scale electoral backing for a minor party to grow. The first past the post electoral system is heavily weighted to the 2 main parties.

That said I expect UKIP to get an handful of seats on about 10% of the vote with reasonable numbers of second places in a few Northern Labour seats. I expect them to have a bigger impact longer term.

Did see Lucy Powell interview on Daily Politics this morning? Very cringe-worthy. She just couldn't come up with a credible plan for deficit reduction. I can only assume under Labour we as a country will continue to run a deficit till the IMF are called in.

For me, the economy is the most important factor in my decision making process and the Conservatives are by far the most competent.

Lucy Powell MP was on Sunday Politics today and argued that Labour have a three pronged way of clearing the deficit.

1. 'Fair taxes' - whatever that means. She did admit that one tax rise was to re-introduce the 50p tax rate which best estimates state would bring in £2BN

2. Cuts. She was vague about this and only mentioned a few things, winter fuel allowance, ministerial salaries and capping child benefit at 1% rises. Any savings from these would be minuscule.

3. Higher Wages etc. Then there was some general chatter about ensuring people are paid more to increase the tax take. The usual sound bites about zero hours contracts were trotted out. But she said they would not be abolished.

Then at the end she admitted that there would be more borrowing to the tune of £30BN to fund investment.

I just don't see how Labour have a credible plan to deal with the deficit and the economy.

You should have been watching an hour earlier when IDS was interviewed live by Andrew Marr, he too had no apparent idea of how he would save his targeted £12bn in benefits savings, or at least that was the party line that he had to toe - you could see where his tongue was bleeding from all the biting he was having to do while Marr kept insisting that he must at least have some idea of where the target would be achieved.

Basically in the first Sunday of the election campaign (even though it doesn't start until tomorrow) both the Tories and Labour have refused to give any detail on ANY policy, this is like buying a car and all that the dealer will say is "Its a blue one".

I can sympathise that they don't want to actually go into great detail about [iactual[/i cuts. By its very nature will upset some group of voters which you don't want to do before an election.

But I have more confidence that a conservative government will actually make the necessary cuts and take the difficult decisions rather than Labour who will say they will cut now but when it comes to it and they have the power, they will back out and borrowing and the deficit will spiral.

Neither party will come clean on their deficit reduction plans, they never do.

As at the last election, Labour has the most realistic target for reducing the deficit, the Tories' target is unrealistic. However the Tories are more likely to hit Labour's target than are Labour. Labour cannot achieve its target simply through taxing the rich. Eventually they will have to come up with some cuts that will hurt. But it will take at least two years of internal wrangling and bitter opposition within the party before they can actually start to implement them.