He knew about hard choices and he would understand that we are living in a very different age.”Mr Smith insists that the growing unpopularity of the Prime Minister has not been a factor on the doorstep “The Prime Minister is not a big issue This is very much a by-election. He said: “Aneurin Bevan was a pragmatist and those who think otherwise don’t know their history.
”Referring to Bevan’s “fight to set up the NHS” amid opposition from senior members of the medical profession, he said: “He stuffed consultants’ mouths with gold to ensure the NHS was established. They have been taking this place for granted for years and years and now the worm has turned.”There is a degree of confidence in the highly organised Labour campaign that the worm, having turned once, will probably turn back to Labour. Mr Smith argues that Mr Bevan would be four-square behind the NHS reforms being introduced by the Government, including the concept of giving patients “choice”.
Well why don’t they bloody well know about those concerns by now?” he asked. “About the unemployment, the drug problem, the affordable housing problem. “They have been walking around with clipboards asking people about their concerns. A dyed-in-the wool New Labourite, he works as a lobbyist for the American drug company Pfizer.
Mr Law’s agent, Dai Davies, a shop steward at Ebbw Vale steelworks before it closed in 2002, is standing as an Independent Labour candidate, while Mr Law’s widow, Trish, is standing for the Welsh Assembly on a similar platform against John Hopkins, the Labour council leader.Mr Davies, an electrician, is convinced that if Nye Bevan were still alive he would have nothing to do with New Labour. Mr Smith, a former BBC journalist, was a special adviser to the former Welsh secretary Paul Murphy. Blaenau Gwent was the party’s safest seat in Wales – until last year.For the last election, Labour’s high command in London insisted on an all-woman shortlist of parliamentary candidates and Maggie Jones, an ultra-loyal Blairite, was duly selected.
Ms Jones then suffered one of the biggest electoral reverses in the history of the party, ceding a 9,000 majority to an Independent Labour candidate. Ms Jones was given a peerage for her pains.Today the voters of Blaenau Gwent will go to the polls once more. The election has been prompted by the death of Peter Law, a former Labour councillor who stood against Ms Jones and won spectacularly.Mr Law died in April of a brain tumour.Owen Smith is the fresh standard bearer for Labour, but one who has been selected locally. He will argue that “renewal”, which has become a Brownite word for a change of leadership, must involve a new wave of reforms.. There is surprisingly little to commemorate Aneurin Bevan in his home town of Tredegar in south Wales.
The father of the NHS – and one of the finest orators to grace Parliament – is remembered in small plaques, a medical centre and further afield by a group of roughly hewn stones on a hill above the former steel town of Ebbw Vale.
Perhaps Bevan’s most impressive monument in the constituency, though, has been the 19,000-vote majority regularly commanded by Labour in general elections. In a keynote speech on Saturday, the Prime Minister will stress his determination to influence the policy agenda to be pursued by his successor – almost certainly the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. But a senior party strategist admitted yesterday that a Liberal Democrat victory in Bromley was “a very tall order”.. Tony Blair is to warn the Labour Party that it will risk losing the next general election if it turns its back on his reform drive after he leaves Downing Street.
Tory candidates took 60 per cent of the vote in the May council elections.The Liberal Democrat candidate, Ben Abbotts, a political lobbyist, has campaigned on his record as a local councillor, and attacked his Tory opponent as “three jobs Bob” – a reference to Mr Neill’s seat on the GLA, the board of a local health authority and his legal work.
Voters in south London are going to the polls today to fill a gap left by the death last month of the maverick right-wing MP Eric Forth. This was an unnecessary election.”The roleThe first Lord Chancellor was Herfast, who joined William the Conqueror during the Norman invasion and was given the post in 1069. But the first Lord Chancellor to have a formal role as speaker of the House of Lords was Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon, who became Lord Chancellor to Charles II in 1658, after helping to run the government of Charles I in Oxford during the Civil War. The Liberal Democrats have been fighting hard in Bromley and Chislehurst in the hope that they pull off a victory that would be a serious setback for the Tory leader, David Cameron.
The signs yesterday were that the Conservative candidate, Bob Neill, will win, despite some haemorrhage in the Tory vote.The Liberal Democrats claim they have persuaded a few Tory voters to switch to them, while some of the more traditional Tories who have been put out by Mr Cameron’s campaign of modernisation have decided not to vote, or to switch their allegiance to the UK Independence Party.
Mr Cameron suffered a setback earlier this month when Bromley Conservatives rejected two of his “A-list” candidates, made up of the “beautiful people” Mr Cameron would like to see elected as Tory MPs, in a drive to increase the number of women MPs and MPs from ethnic minorities.Offered a choice of two “beautiful people” – Julia Manning and Syed Kamall – Bromley Tories instead opted instead for Mr Neill, a lawyer who has been a member of the London Assembly since 2000.
Mr Cameron shrugged off the rebuff and praised Mr Neill as an “an outstanding champion” who knew the constituency “extremely well”.Mr Forth, who was first elected there in 1997, held the seat in 2005 with a 13,342 majority over Labour. In 1660, it was formally recognised that the Lord Chancellor would preside over proceedings in the Lords They have done so until the present day.. Lord Tebbit, the former Tory cabinet minister, was among peers who voted before the start of business yesterday.
