Who does Helen Clark think she is?

She was the Labour MP for Peterborough, who lost her seat to the Tories last week, on a 6.9% swing, and then the very next day announced she was leaving the party and would join the Conservatives.

As far as I know, Labour and Tory policies did not change between Thursday and Friday. Up to Thursday she was happy to promote Labour policies and denigrate Tory ones, yet on Friday she has changed her mind. The only thing that changed was that she lost. She obviously does not care about what policies are best for the country or the people she represented until last week but only what policies are best for her chances of being in power.

Lets face it, if she truly decided that the Tory party was a better one she would have come to that decision a while ago, and was therefore fighting an election while believing nothing that she stood for. The other possibility is that, having lost, she decided that she would stand more chance in the future standing as a Tory. If they have any sense they will have nothing to do with her.

Most of the people I have met on the political scene in Crawley have a lot more integrity than that. Even the Tories. There are a few who have jumped ship. Malcolm Liles, a local vicar, left the Labour party over the Iraq business and immediately joined the Green party. I can understand taking a moral stance and leaving the party, but can’t understand joining another and then publicy criticising all the (non-Iraq related) Labour policies which a week earlier he would have publicly supported. Again, he was either being fraudulent before the defection or fraudulent afterwards, unless his entire belief system changed overnight – along with his wife and children who all followed him to the Greens.

I am not a member of the Labour party because I agree with every single policy, but because I agree with most of them, and because it most closely matches my own political beliefs. If the party changed enough to make me leave I would not be involved with any other party. If I felt I just had to stand for election to something it would be as an independent.

Another example of a rank opportunist locally is Brian Galloway. He stood in an election for the referendum party, then as a member of UKIP and then for the BNP, although in his case there really is not much difference between those parties’ policies so maybe its not the same.

Perhaps a better example is a chap who was a Labour party member who wanted to stand for election to the council last year. The Labour party has a system of approving candidates before letting wards select them. Its really vetting, but we don’t use that word, and its not really much of a political vetting, more to make sure the candidates meet some minimum standards of competency and potential. Anyway, this chap failed to be approved. It was felt that he would not make a good councillor, and would not represent the interests of the party. The next thing we know is that when the lists of nominations appeared, he was on that list as a Tory candidate in Southgate. At the time he was still a Labour party member! When someone is so desperate to be a councillor that they don’t care whether it is for Labour or Tories you have to wonder what the real motivation is.

Fortunately Labour held all the seats in Southgate, but the day after the election I did enjoy telling one of the more civilised and sensible Tories how close they came to having a Tory councillor who was a member of the Labour party. For me it showed one difference between the parties – even our candidates who are going to stand in safe Tory wards have to pass the test so that we know they have a fair chance of being a good councillor: the Tories are obviously not that fussy, and it does show in the quality of some of the councillors they have now.