Lighten up, Labour!

Reading Labour's local, somewhat unmagnanimous, victory newsletter it seems that Labour councillors are a little rattled at the work we have been doing in the ward.

We are used to Labour councillors whinging at us for supposedly 'taking credit' for their work but in reality they are just having difficulty recognising how hard we have been working in recent years and how effective Chris is as a ward councillor.

Some of Labour's favourite areas for this complaint are:

Kelvin Close - Cllr Howell spoke out effectively against unsuitable planning applications and campaigned against the then Labour governments's garden-grabbing policies. Coleridge Conservatives took our concerns about the planning system right to the top in the Shadow Cabinet.

Charges for disabled adaptations - Cllr Howell had challenged council officers on this subject before speaking out on the issue at a meeting of the Housing Management Board.

In contrast, Coleridge Conservatives actually welcome the involvement of our political opponents in issues on which we have led such as City Homes South and the Ashbury Close/Golding Road cycle path - that is what voters deserve. There is no doubt that since Coleridge Conservatives came on the scene in force, making this a marginal ward, residents have benefitted from extra attention from both sides. (The Lib Dems ignore Coleridge.)

The two big campaigns of recent years, saving Marshall's Airport and congestion charging are areas where Labour have tried to paint local Conservatives on the wrong side of the argument in the knowledge that that did not reflect the truth.

Marshall's Airport - Conservatives were first to expose the dangers of Labour's housing targets over ten years ago but Labour dismissed our warnings as scaremongering before waging a long newspaper letter-writing campaign to claim we were for the development.

Congestion charge - City Tories have opposed congestion charging ever since local Lib Dems expressed their love of the concept but Cambridge Labour kept trying to pin the Labour government's congestion charge blackmail on local Tories. I would have voted against the TIF bid if elected to the county council in 2009 but Labour's county councillor actually voted for it, with a sycophantic defence of the Labour government!

If Labour want to claim dirty tricks we could remind them of their attempts to skew our residents' surveys with dodgy responses - not helpful for residents - or the rather amusing 'Tawrie Bluebird'. A bit of self awareness would help! We know it is often hard for died-in-the-wool socialists to acknowledge positive traits in Conservatives and they can tend to 'hear' what they want to hear but my advice for local Labour councillors is to lighten up... we have always been keen to work with our political opponents for the benefit of local residents and nothing has changed in that regard... so how about that pint, Lewis?