Top Ten Things I'd Never Do

My spoofster drew my attention to this one. It's the blogging equivalent of a chain letter. You do it yourself and pass it onto 10 other people in the Labour Party. Eventually the person who started it gets to become the next Deputy Prime Minister. There's a stupid rumour in the local Trotskyist press that the initiator of this is Iain Dale. Mind you... it would be a laugh if he won!

Anyway, here goes.

I would never:

1. Stop eating flesh. I wouldn't become a vegetarian, either.
   


2. Be a football fan, although the way rugger is going right now...
   


3. Cast any of my votes for any party other than Labour.
   


4. Forgive Arthur Scargill for what he did to this country, allowing Margaret Thatcher to take most of the credit for emasculation of the unions, privatisation of public services and widening the gap between rich and poor, when we should have been the pioneers of these policies.
   


5. Understand why some people on the "left" enthuse about dictators like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, but attack people who were fairly and honestly elected at the ballot box, such as George Bush in the USA, Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and me in the Labour Home poll for 2022 Deputy Labour Leader.
   


6. Turn down an invite to a good restaurant, particularly if the menu includes foie gras, claret, steak, claret, unpasteurised soft cheeses, claret, claret and port for when they run out of claret. Especially restaurants which do child portions of foie gras, steak and claret for Augustus.
   


7. Get bored of listening to anything by Morrisey, Leonard Cohen, Dido, Bjork, Craig David, James Blunt, Neil Young, Dead Kennedys, Pearl Jam, Stone Roses and U2 (despite my strange views on bad taste).
   


8. Work for an employer who stopped me blogging, writing to newspapers and canvassing during working hours (this is part of my personal self-development programme and should be paid for by my employers, as they will profit in the long term from association with me).
   


9. Send my son to a faith, selective or fee-paying school. I shall, of course, be moving out of Hackney well before time for him to go to secondary school. I mean, be fair, would you send your son to one of them? Of course I totally disagree with the hypocrisy of Diane Abbott who pretended to support Hackney schools and then did a runner. I've never pretended.
   


10. Hide what I believe in to win votes. My record is 100% clear on this one. Everywhere I've campaigned for election I've said what I believe in... and each time I've lost Labour votes:
    
    

    Year	Election	Constituency	My vote		Change	Relative to
    2001	General	Aldershot	11,394		-12.7%	Bridgeman, 1997
    2005	General	Castle Point	13,917		-16.9%	Butler, 2001
    2006	Local	Chatham, Hackney	1,005		-11.9%	Me, 2002

    
    Now that's what I call integrity!
    


11. Yes... I know it's No. 11 (one day that'll be "next-door"!).
    
    Lie about where I live. Here I had a bit of a problem, because I didn't want mobs of adoring peasants outside my front door all night keeping Augustus awake. So I took a photo of a house further down the road and passed it off as ours.
    
    It was for the best of all possible motives, you can be assured, and nothing to do with the other property looking much larger and smarter than mine.
    
    After Linda told me that the other people would get p****d off if they saw my website, I decided to apologise and publish the real photo. So here it is, on the right.
    

Being a man of principle, I won't nominate any other bloggers to publish their own Top 10 things I'd never do. Spreading chain mail is not a nice thing to do.