Louise Bagshawe did an excellent post earlier on the important vote tonight in the Commons on post office closures. The Government only carried the day on a vote of 288 to 268, which I think makes it the closest vote since Gordon Brown became PM, but doubtless Philip Cowley will give us the definitive view tomorrow.
Louise talked about her opponent, Phil Hope MP, as a Government Minister ramming through the Post Office closure programme, whilst campaigning locally to "save" them. He told the Commons today when faced with the charge of hypocrisy that
"My Corby constituents hold me in extremely high regard. They like the fact that I stand up and campaign on their behalf".
We all laughed at that one on our benches. As Louise suspected, he did go ahead and vote for the closures at the end of the day. This is bad, and is the sort of behvaiour that gives politicians a bad name.
But check this one out for sheer brazen hypocrisy. We voted in two divisions in the Commons at 7pm and 7:15pm. After the second vote, I rushed to a public open meeting in Hammersmith on, you guessed it, Post Office closures. Both I and my neighbouring MP, Andrew Slaughter, the Labour MP for Ealing Acton (pictured above) were speaking. So, at 7:50pm, learning from Phil Hope, Slaughter was addressing the crowd on how much he was opposed to the local closures, and how he was fighting to stop them, and how our area was more afflicted than any other.
The only problem with that is that he is a Government PPS in guess which department? In BERR, the department that is, yes, pushing through the programme of closures. Even worse, he went on to say that he was backing Ken Livingstone's judicial review of the decision. I pointed out to him that he could have saved an awful lot of money wasted on another of Livingstone's judicial reviews by simply voting in the right lobby and persuading 9 other Labour MPs to do the same.
There might be another 2 years of this Labour Government, but will we ever beat the hypocrisy of a member of the Government casting a vote at 7:15pm and then at 7:50pm backing a Judicial Review of the decision he had just made?
