April 26 2003

Labour's Policies for Fosse Ward

or Posturing before Politics

Fosse Ward is a policy-free zone for Leicester's Labour Party.

Labour's policies for the ward, as revealed in its leaflets for the 2003 election, can be summed up as follows:

  1. Tell people Labour supports Leicester FC.
  2. Promise to re-open the Fosse Neighbourhood Centre (which the Labour Council closed) but get its name wrong.
  3. Attack the Greens and the Lib Dems.
  4. Er....... that's it.
The first half of the front of Labour's latest Rose leaflet celebrates Leicester FC's return to the Premiership, complete with a photo of candidates Wann and Osman smirking and shaking hands with Brian Deane. One might almost think they were trying to claim credit for the team's promotion. The Labour team is so short of serious political ideas that this is the third Labour leaflet that has swung on the coat-tails of Leicester City FC. We wonder if they asked permission to use the Leicester City FC logo on their leaflets.

The second half of the front page of the same leaflet consists of a few juvenile cracks about the Green Party (their second attack on the Greens. Are they by any chance worried?) along with a pathetic attempt to claim that the Greens and the Lib Dems are essentially the same thing.

Green party spokesperson Brian Fewster said: "This is the opposite of the truth. Voting Green is the most likely way of getting rid of the Lib Dems. At the last election in 1999 in St Augustine's Ward, Geoff Forse (Green) beat one of the Labour candidates and came within 2% of beating the other. The Green vote has increased at every election, whereas Labour's has dropped dramatically."

Green Party candidate Geoff Forse said: "Labour has shot itself in the foot with this leaflet. Their contempt for the intelligence of the average Fosse Ward voter is so blatant that it is more likely to lose votes than to win any."

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