Quite bizarre…!

Our local Labour MP, Derek Wyatt, has on his website a quite bizarre posting. In his most recent blog entry he comments on the defeat of Labour candidates at the recent KCC elections and complains bitterly that “The gutter politics of the local Tories was shameful.”
 
Gutter politics! You might well ask what dreadful, underhand political act provoked this accusation. I’ll let Mr Wyatt himself reveal all. In an earlier post he wrote: “Yesterday, the local Tories went one better, they issued a one pager not on the EU, not on the county council, but on MP Derek Wyatt’s expenses… Welcome to the gutter.”

That’s right, we put out a leaflet detailing Mr Wyatt’s expense claim for April, which as readers of this blog will know, totalled £2,820. We didn’t lie. We didn’t exaggerate. We didn’t add anything extra. We simply copied the entry from Mr Wyatt’s own blog.

Presumably Mr Wyatt posted his expenses on his website because he wanted his constituents to see them, so why did he get so upset when we helped him publicise those same expenses to all those people without access to the Internet?

Mr Wyatt maintains that his expenses were fully justified and that he is not ashamed of his claim. If that is true, how on earth can he describe our leaflet as being “gutter politics”?

As it happens our leaflet had nothing whatsoever to do with the KCC or Euro elections, it was simply part of our campaign for an immediate General Election. A call that Mr Wyatt rejects on the equally bizarre grounds that this “…would cause a run on the £ and have a devastating effect on unemployment…”

The first part of that statement is deeply ironic when you see the way the £ has been adversely affected by the current political instability. As for a General Election making unemployment worse; judging by the KCC and Euro elections, that will certainly be true for large numbers of Labour MPs!

Added 08.06.09