If you’ve been watching the to-ing and fro-ing of the Labour Leadership battle from afar, you’d be pleased to know it has been delivered right to your doorstep in a kind of political online pizza service, as the five MPs who are in the fray try to get the good citizens of Exeter out to vote in the city council elections.
Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, Diane Abbot and The Brothers Miliband (as Dostoevsky might call them) will be pounding the pavements of the city that returned one of just the two Labour MPs in the whole of Devon.
Just what they make of the need for the snap elections which were called when the plan to make Exeter a unitary authority was blown out of the water, we will probably find out as they glad-hand the city’s constituents in a bid to get them out to the polls.
Is this focus on the South West a photo-op or a seed change within the Labour Party, which has often been criticised for its lack of enthusiasm for anything not urban?
The leadership campaigners had already made a good fist of engaging the South West, with the Milidbands, Balls and Burnham visiting – or planning to visit – Devon.
Ben Bradshaw, Exeter’s Labour MP and former Culture secretary, said: “It’s great that all the Labour leadership candidates are coming to lend support in our local elections.
“They share our anger at the way Exeter has been treated by the Con-Lib Government — taking away our unitary status and forcing these expensive elections on us.”
Councillor Dilys Baldwin, leader of the city’s Labour group, told the Western Morning News: “This, I feel, is recognition of the commitment Labour voters in Exeter deserve, as we are one of the few Labour parliamentary seats held in the South West.”
It’s a pity then that the party made a mess of providing a candidate in the Alphington ward, when the potential Labour candidate was deemed ineligible after being nominated by an elector who was not entitled to do so.
Devon, which has never been a winner under any government, is set to suffer as cuts and the economic downturn bites, and where will the contenders be then?
Come and enjoy Devon – book a hotel and get away!
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