Will Hutton of Work Foundation: Vote YES For Progress

The Manchester Evening News have given Mr Hutton a platform to stand on. And on balance, while he understands our great love of the car, he suggests that this is yet another chance for Manchester to lead the way. Hutton concludes:

It is a vote about how you want to live. Manchester can either pull together to make the entire city more liveable in; or its citizens can say that all that matters is their right to drive ever more slowly in ever more traffic and condemn public transport to mediocrity. It is an important moment in time - and it is not hyperbole to say that the world is watching. If Manchester votes Yes, other cities will dare to follow. A lot hangs on this. Use your vote - and use it well.

As he says earlier in the piece: "As a non-Mancunian but relatively frequent visitor to the city - (I) consider (this) to be one of the most imaginative and best thought through road pricing and public transport investment schemes yet devised."

Mr Hutton is of course from the despised cosmopolitan intelligensia. Which you could not say of MEN Assistant Editor and luddite Robert Ridley. I'm sorry to say he can hardly string a sentence together and is fuddled with noxious and irrelevant methane statistics. In my opinion.

Which is it to be? Progressive forces for taking this massive opportunity? Or reactionaries from right and left and one of the most self-interested and pompous property speculators, land bankers and landlords who are, quite simply, trying to create the greatest excess profit for themselves by manipulating, lying to and scaring the working people they already feed off.

Remember, The Trafford Centre not only approved the concept of the disgusting rape attack video but recruited the makers to GMMG having heard about it.

Then kicked them out again when the world found out. There is more to come out about the dark forces of extremism - left and right - who have pinned themselves to the shirttails of the most aggressive and ruthless capitalism we have in our region.

CLARIFICATIONS Thu 00:01: The Trafford Centre is one of the four main businesses in the Peel Holdings portfolio. Peel are worth around a Billion last time I counted and have recently bought a slice of the British Film Industry too.

The Trafford Centre and Peel Holdings are major backers of the NO campaign(s), unwilling to give any indication of their expenditure in cash, kind and opportunity cost.

According to Dave Carlson of Sonassi, one of the producers, the Mall Rape 101 Video team aka "Stop This Madness" had a meeting with the Trafford Centre team and the concept/treatment/outline was agreed. During the same meeting Sonassi were recruited by the Trafford Centre high ups as members of GMMG.

Although any professional cuttings service or alerts facility would surely have found a video whose tags included "Trafford Centre" and "Comedy". So why did the powers that be, having some foreknowledge of the project and an alert on 19 November, we must assume wait to be rumbled, before acting?

Sonassi continue to host the "Free Manchester Partnership" website although this has been amended in various ways since Rape Video Gate. Not only is that disgusting "Comedy" removed, but so are other off colour artefacts, and also links to GMMG and Stopthecharge. They also have an express disclaimer claiming there are no links to th Trafford Centre or Peel.

Now, we know why GMMG/StopTheCharge/Peel/TraffordCentre want to disown these chumps, even if they do protest too much and surely but surely would have known the video they effectively sponsored with free facilities at least was online. But we do not know exactly why GMMG/StopTheCharge/Peel/TraffordCentre are not close bosom friends with MART (Manchester Against Road Tolls) and MART Tameside.

The theory that this was because of some level of BNP connections or overlap has been denied in the strongest terms by Sean of the Dead Cocker. So why exactly were the MARTs chucked out in the cold? Any and all tips welcome. Proof desirable.