Yesterday, I had the great pleasure to spend the day in Yorkshire with our excellent Parliamentary Candidate for Morley & Outwood, Antony Calvert. Antony is a former local councillor and attended a local comprehensive in the constituency, and is dedicated to representing his local area in Parliament. He is up against Ed Balls, who defends a notional majority of 9,784, and yesterday I thought I would take a look at how this key race is shaping up.
I think our chances here are very good. Antony is an "über-local", and talks eloquently and well about the challenges facing the local area. He lives and breathes Morley and Outwood. Balls, meanwhile, has suffered from being first elected only in 2005, but being parachuted into a top job almost straight away into the Cabinet. This means that he is both well known (even notorious, as we shall see) but equally never seen in Morley & Outwood. The new seat is actually mainly from Colin Challen MP's current constituency, who has been forcibly stood down to make way for Balls. Further, Balls could make a claim to be from Norwich, or Nottingham or even the Oxford University Conservative Association (and hence the FCS), but definitely not Yorkshire. And worth noting, in the last local elections in May 2008, Labour came fourth, behind the Conservatives, the BNP and the Morley Borough Independents. So we have a lot of cause for optimism.
We were hard pressed to find anyone with a good word to say for Balls. Antony Calvert and I visited various local schools, thinking here at least there might be someone who had a good word to say for the Secretary of State for Education. We met plenty of good heads, good teachers and enthusiastic pupils. But we didn't meet anyone who liked Ed Balls. The head teacher of a large local comprehensive, Rodillian School (outside of which Antony Calvert and I are pictured, at the very top), said he wanted "more independence for schools", and wanted "schools to be left alone", and pleaded for "no more reams of initiatives". He was scornful of the National Challenge, a government flagship initiative to turn around lagging schools. He felt that national government was trying to steal the praise for his own achievements, in return for a small extra grant.
Another head, who is best not named for obvious reasons, introduced me and Antony Calvert to his sixth formers, many of whom will be able to vote for the first time in 2010, urged them to vote, but for anyone "other than that dreadful Ed Balls".
The head teacher of the independent day school, Silcoates (with Antony and I, above left), gave me an astonishing heap of documentation which he is required to complete to satisfy Ed Balls's Independent Schools Inspectorate. The surveys were depressing. There was a self-assessment survey inviting the head to rank his own health & safety measures on a scale from excellent to unsatisfactory. There was even a self-assessment form for himself, to rank the leadership of the school from excellent to unsatisfactory. As the Head put it to me, "if the leadership here were unsatisfactory, then we would be out of business". Presumably, this would be long before any DCSF bureaucrat had digested the self-assessment form.
So even the people who might be expected to know him best had little to commend in Ed Balls. I would urge any ConHome readers, if you are looking for an exciting challenge in the coming election, then why not go and help Antony Calvert in Morley and Outwood. You can contact him here. Or join his famous "Balls out for a tenner" campaign, which was a conference hit this year.
You never know, in future years, the question might just be "were you up for Ed Balls?"
