General Election – Will You Vote For Gordon Brown?

Voters, who were unavailable to vote on polling day in Tameside, were jamming the phone lines at Ashton-Under-Lyne town hall demanding not to be deprived of their vote. Staff told them their only option was to vote “by proxy” in the election. That is, to nominate another person to vote on their behalf.

The inept town hall staff at Tameside then did not rush to post out the proxy forms. The postal delivery service in Hyde is spasmodic at best, and mail tends to arrive typically every few days in mid afternoon rather than daily in the morning.

By the time the forms arrived (without a prepaid envelope), there was only two days before the deadline for proxy forms to be received back at Tameside Council. Your author duly posted a proxy form first class – from the sorting office in Hamnett Street. It only had to travel a few miles across town, so one would hope it might have made that journey in two days.

Another Labour Minister has been caught out in an expenses scandal after effectively admitting he had been wrong to claim £60,000 of taxpayers’ money for a property which is his parents’ main home – not his.

Employment Minister Tony McNulty performed a dramatic U-turn and announced he had stopped claiming the controversial MPs’ second-home allowance after being challenged by The Mail on Sunday.

Even more astonishingly, he said that 133 MPs who, like him, live within 60 miles of Westminster should be banned from getting the £24,000-a-year handout.

Mr McNulty and his wife, chief schools inspector Christine Gilbert, have a combined annual income of a third of a million pounds and between them own two London homes worth £1.2million.

They live together in a house she owns just three miles from Westminster.

Sir John also warned of bleak economic times ahead, adding: “It’s beginning to unravel in quite a serious way. The economy is running into serious difficulty.”

Pointing out that Mr Brown as Chancellor introduced the financial regulatory regime that allowed the near-collapse of Northern Rock, Sir John predicted that the bank’s failure would cost taxpayers more than the £3.4 billion his Government spent trying to keep the pound in the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

“We don’t yet know what the cost of Northern Rock to the economy will be, but it is quite likely that it will exceed the cost to the taxpayer of Black Wednesday,” he said.

Sir Victor Blank and Gordon Brown have made a bad banking crisis worse by fatally contaminating one of Britain’s few good banks. Mr Brown was the foster parent. People should remember this the next time either of them claims to have acted competently during this crisis. Sir Victor should go now; the electorate can decide on Mr Brown’s fate when he deigns to call an election.

MINISTERS have spent £900m paying off 15,000 civil servants only to recruit an extra 42,020 in new permanent jobs, according to figures released by parliament.

In the past four years government departments have paid £882m in severance packages, worth an average of £60,000, to staff on voluntary and involuntary redundancy programmes.

Over the same period, however, they have recruited nearly three times as many civil servants, with annual salaries totalling £1 billion, despite government commitments to cutting government waste.