Full of Eastern promise?

Bristol East MPs old and new in the news this week. The former MP until 2005, Jean Corston, the New labour ultra-Blairite ultra-loyalist whose ruthless focus on her Westminster career rather than her constituents saw her rise to be Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, is now sitting in the House of Lords as Baroness Corston of St George while also claiming an enhanced parliamentary pension claimed on the basis that she was too ill to continue working in the Commons.

Anyway, it seems Jean’s miraculous recovery is continuing apace because Tuesday saw the Baroness not only at the state opening of Parliament but even delivering the proposal to accept the new Queen’s Speech to the House of Lords.

Jean’s speech was yet another masterpiece of the kind of self-aggrandising patronising tosh that seems to come entirely naturally to that Blair babe generation. Corston told the Lords, with a straight face:

I was very proud of the fact that after we came to power in 1997 it was in the poorest parts of my constituency of Bristol East—areas that are not on any tourist map—that the first new school and health centre were built. Now every secondary school in Bristol has been or is being rebuilt. Such things matter, and not only for teachers and health professionals; the quality of local services is seen as a direct reflection of the worth that we place on local communities.

Such things do indeed matter Jean and if “the quality of local services is seen as a direct reflection of the worth that we place on local communities” then the reality is that you value Bristol East very little.

Because behind the spin about new school buildings and new hospitals lies the reality of public services in Bristol. That’s an education system glued to the bottom of the national league table where 50% of parents choose to take their kids out of the city to be educated elsewhere and a hospital trust topping the tables for incidences of c-difficile because Labour’s management are unable to keep our hospitals clean.

Thanks Jean for confirming what you think of our communities here in Bristol.

In further news this week it now appears that Corston’s replacement, the jobbing Labour lawyer Kerry McCarthy has politics to right of, er . . . Hampshire’s WI!

We kid you not. This week saw the WI from that most conservative of home counties calling for licensed brothels in order that there’s places for prostitutes to work from in safety. The WI members took this decision as a direct response to the murders last year of street prostitutes in Ipswich.

McCarthy meanwhile, as The Blogger reported two weeks ago, is supporting the government’s 55th Criminal Justice Bill since 1997 that proposes yet more of the same old failed police and criminal justice-led initiatives to resolve the street prostitution problem afflicting parts of her constituency.

What a joke. And what a personal embarrassment for McCarthy and for the rest of the Labour Party. At 40, McCarthy should be representing the bold new future of the Labour Party and working class politics in the UK. And what do we get? Failed Blairite crap that will do nothing for the residents of East Bristol but might play well in the key marginals of middle England.

McCarthy is currently bleating on her blog about being called a Stalinist by Tory MP Dominic Grieve. Can’t think why that might be. Can you?