Current mood:	tired
Entry tags:	crewe and nantwich, politics, prospective parliamentary candidate

Back to politics
Just spent three and a half hours at my first Labour Party meeting in a few years, since I gafiated... After the fiasco of last May's by-election, Crewe & Nantwich Labour Party has got round to choosing its Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the next General Election. I forgot how tediously boring these meetings can be, and I suppose I should be grateful that one of the shortlisted candidates didn't turn up, thus saving us a seven minute speech and fifteen minute Q&A session!

Something over 120 people turned up at a local primary school to choose between the shortlisted candidates (in order of appearance):
1. A male ethnic minority candidate from Derby. Actually a pretty good candidate, but given the way in which Nantwich people look askance at Crewe people, and vice versa, any candidate from outside the immediate area is travelling in hope rather than expectation.
2. A male candidate, currently resident in Manchester but originally from up the road in Middlewich, with an extensive local employment history (Crewe Bus Station, the Bentley car factory, agent for Gwyneth Dunwoody in the 1992 general election, before moving on to work for the regional Labour Party and latterly National Political Officer for the shop workers' union, Usdaw).
3. A male candidate, local resident, borough councillor and councillor on the new unitary authority, and formerly at various times a member of Merton and Manchester city councils.
4. A female candidate, locally born and currently living just outside the constituency, but working in it.
5. A female ethnic minority candidate from Bradford, who didn't turn up, but hadn't withdrawn from the competition, so she stayed on the ballot...

And the winner is... number 2, Dave Williams is his name, and he came second to Tamsin Dunwoody in the shortlisting for the by-election. I rather suspect Labour would have done better in the by-election if he'd been chosen, since hopefully he would have been strong enough to tell the regional/national party where to put their "Tory toffs" class-war campaign (which came in for heavy criticism tonight, as the Class War has never been of great interest to Crewe folk, who have never objected to people working hard in the local industries and earning a good salary by the time they retire).