Weaste and Seedley: Ripe For Return to Salford Labour

Yesterday, after three hours working hard in Chorlton Park ward Saturday, I was out and about in the somethingly comparable Weaste area of Salford and came across a discarded Weaste and Seedly (sic) Focus. Smudgy and full of fibs, errors and of course pictures of the candidate with various Lib Dem people ... pretending to be ordinary residents.

Now for some reason this area - hard by the Salford Reds Willows Ground where there was incidentally a big Cup game featuring higher league Wakefield Trinity - has returned three Libdemologists.

Yet the leaflet is as usual written as an insurgent, almost as if the candidate is not already on the Council. And has not - with two colleagues - already had some years to sort things out for the people of Weaste and Seedley.

In fact the standard of the social housing stock is mostly very good with excellent gates and fences, private sector housing too is much improved, environment mostly clean to very clean, the pavements and roads seem to be in good shape, the green spaces - such as comically named The Elysian Fields are in fine fettle, and although there is a dog or two in a very large proportion of households there actually isn't a dog poo problem at all.

Makes some of the Lib Dem represented areas in Manchester look very much like the sad relation. But the improvements have I believe been achieved by Salford Labour, perhaps actually before the Lib Dems got their foothold here.

Obviously - due to going up annually - we have "Record Council Tax". Obviously - as is the case in LD run councils - consultants are used. But the real punch line of an otherwise very weak and unpersuasive leaflet is a cock and bull story about "a recent survey of nearly 7,500 Salford residents".

Now, partisanship aside, that's really impressive. A survey of nearly 7,500 Salford residents. Very impressive in fact.

Sadly reverse engineering brings a likely response of between 25 and 30 "surveys" - it could be lower still if there's a fib there - which amounts to around a one-third of one percent response rate to a survey on a partisan Focus leaflet. Essentially from a cadre of Lib Dem members and supporters.

This chronically dishonest approach is mind boggling. "81% of residents (sic) think that the Labour Council wastes too much of their money" they brag. Or to be honest about 20 people think that.

After that bombshell ... There is nothing whatsoever in this shoddy leaflet to engage local people to vote for the Lib Dem candidate. Just misery, stats fibs and whingery.

POSTSCRIPT: Just like many of the glossy, full-colour, high-solid, full-bleed, gloss paper leaflets being distributed in Manchester Withington this leaflet bore the imprint of being printed in the back room of the Man Wit MP's office. Difference being that this obviously Riso'd effort probably was, but the glossy stuff elsewhere almost certainly wasn't.