Our Glenis to lead Labour in Europe...

Congratulations to our East Midlands Euro-MP Glenis Willmott who has today been chosen as Labour’s new leader in Europe.

Glenis becomes the second woman to become Labour's Leader in the European Parliament - the first being the legendary Barbara Castle.

And like Barbara Castle before her, Glenis is a real fighter for the interests of people, both here in the UK and across Europe.

Since becoming our MEP only two years ago, Glenis has proved to be a real people's champion. (CORRECTION - it's actually three years since Glenis became MEP).

She works her socks off to toughen safeguards for consumers, from combatting over-charging by mobile phone companies to increasing protection when people are booking holidays and ending hidden airfare costs.

She campaigns to protect young people through the introduction of a missing children helpline, a child trafficking advice line and improvement to internet safeguards.

She is currently fighting for free fruit and veg to be offered to all primary school children, and has highlighted legislation to make toys safer as well as new strategies to fight obesity sooner and cut teenage smoking rates.

She also raises awareness of cervical cancer and screening and has championed a national cervical cancer vaccination programme launched last September.

And among many other campaigns, she has fought to save jobs for disabled people in the East Midlands, promoted active ageing and independent living for older people and worked to ban the import of products causing harm to animals.

Born into a mining family, Glenis began her career in medical science in Mansfield before working for Mansfield MP Alan Meale and later becoming one of the few women to hold a top trade union position as senior officer, looking after GMB members in Lincolnshire.

She became Labour’s Member of the European Parliament for the East Midlands in February 2006 following the sudden death of Phillip Whitehead.

Surely it was just a dream...

Sorry no posts for over a week...Just woke after a terrible dream: Tories win 300 council seats and Boris becomes Mayor of London. OK, more a nightmare than a dream.

Seriously, i was so busy working on the local elections, that my blogging had to take a back seat: I worked in London, and after seeing Ken defeated, I went into hibernation, and managed to get through the holiday weekend refusing to read a single newspaper, or the internet...

But I'm back...hope you are all well.

Clearly a lot to catch up on, so, as they say...

Watch this space...

Four stories that tell you all you need to know about today's Tory Party...

Four stories from today's trawl of the net reveal more than I need to know about the state of the Conservative Party under David Cameron's leadership:

First, two black Conservative Party members with a shocking tale of how they were treated like animals when they turned up for an annual meeting.

Next, Boris Johnson forced to apologise over a racist article published in The Spectator when he was editor.

The Tory choice to be Mayor the most diverse city in the world was quite rightly taken to task by a leading black lawyer.

One of the truly offensive Spectator articles claimed black people have smaller brains and are less intelligent. It claimed:

Orientals ... have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole.

In another Spectator article, black American basketball players were described as having

arms hanging below their knees and tongues sticking out.

You may recall that earlier in the campaign, the Tory choice to run the most diverse city in the world, was forced to apologise for articles he personally wrote in which he described Africans as piccaninnies with watermelon smiles.

Third story (which may of course not be entirely unrelated to the second): The BNP calls on their supporters to vote for Boris Johnson as their second preference in the election for London Mayor.

Two telling points to note on this one:

1. The BNP did not endorse the Conservative candidate in previous Mayoral elections but are willing to tell their supporters to vote Boris Johnson in this one.

2. Last week, Labour's Ken Livingstone won the support of a very different minority party who advised its supporters to vote Ken as second preference.

For good measure, here's the fourth story:

A Conservative councillor on Tyneside has today been forced to resign after suggesting euthanasia as a way to cut the cost of caring for vulnerable children!

The common thread in all four stories...the Tories are still the same old nasty party.

A tale of two MPs: one loses his job and faces a police investigation, the other gets a holiday...

A few days ago, a senior Labour MP apologised for late reporting of thousands of pounds in private donations which he received to fund his bid to win an internal Labour Party election. There was no suggestion of fraud or that the money was used illegally or of misuse of public funds.

Peter Hain blamed an administrative error for reporting the donations later than he should have done.

The Electoral Commission decided to call in the police and Peter Hain responded by immediately resigning as a cabinet minister…

Today, a senior Conservative MP apologised for misusing thousands of pounds of taxpayers money.

The House of Commons Standards and Privileges Committee said Derek Conway was wrong to put his son on the public payroll when he had little or no contact with his father’s office either at Parliament or in his Old Bexley and Sidcup constituency.

The Committee was astonished that young Freddie Conway seemed to have been all but invisible during the period of his employment.

That’s because he was hundreds of miles away studying for his degree at Newcastle University.

The Tory MP generously used public funds to pay his lad way over the going rate, as well as pension payments and lavish bonuses.

Mr Conway, whose previous fame seems to be as John Major's vote fixer in the Commons, is likely to face a ten-day suspension from Parliament.

So, one MP declares private donations late, loses his job and faces a criminal investigation.

The other gets caught misusing public money and gets sent on a 10-day holiday from work.

Is this justice, or am I missing something…?

There's one more very stark difference in these two cases:

Tory Leader David Cameron was first in the queue to put pressure on Peter Hain to resign.

I have yet to hear Mr Cameron announce that Derek Conway will be barred from standing as a Conservative candidate at the next general election...

UPDATE: Spot the difference: Leading Tory blogger Iain Dale was all over the Peter Hain story last week. He has yet to utter the words Derek Conway...! Same old Tories.

Will the last Tory leaving Blackpool turn the lights out...?

This was the headline on the leaflet which gets my Award for the Best of Conference Season. It was distributed this week by members of Blackpool Labour Party who are clearly worried that the John Redwood agenda adopted by David Cameron would threaten the future of Blackpool Illumninations.

The leaflet also features a photo of David Cameron lurking in the shadows behind his then boss, the Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont.

Mr Lamont and Mr Cameron had just emerged from Number 11 Downing Street. It was taken as the hapless Mr Lamont announced that it has been "a difficult day"£ on the international markets so he was hking interest rates by another three per cent (on top of a two per cent hike earlier in the day) to take rates to a record 15 per cent.

It was of course Black Wednesday.

No wonder that in a poll last week, 59-per-cent of those asked said they trusted Gordon Brown to run the economy. While less than 20 per cent trusted David Cameron.