My One's Bigger Than Yours

At last the truth is out. Despite the obviously faked monthly stats reports and the visitor counter on the bottom of his blog, the spoof Luke Akehurst has at last come clean and admitted that he gets a stunning 1,350 unique visitors each month.

The number emerges in a diatribe about the Alliance for Workers' Liberty which will be familiar to many female readers as the "my one's bigger than yours" argument, often heard just before staggering home from the Rose & Crown in Stoke Newington.

In this instance it went along the following lines: "it [AWL's paper 'Solidarity'] has just under 1,200 subscribers which is about 150 less than the number of individual readers I get per month."

I hope this doesn't make you feel bad, spoofster, but I'm afraid my one is a lot bigger than yours. I'm well past that number of unique visitors in December already and have over three times that number in total page views.

It just goes to show that telling the truth about the Labour Party is a great deal more interesting and popular than pretending to be a socialist and gibbering about with a bunch of similar people at Manchester Uni.

Mind you, I'd better be a bit careful here. I got the data on the AWL organ from its registration and reports on the Electoral Commission website. That filing is a statutory requirement under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 and the Representation of People Act 1983.

There's another statutory requirement under section 81(1) of the Local Government Act 2000 that requires local councillors to register their financial and various other interests in a Register of Members' Interests and to keep the register updated within 28 days of any change occurring.

So I've got less than two weeks to update my own entry to reflect my change of address before I'm in breach of the law.

Mind you, I don't suppose my entry will be much of a priority. There are quite a few other Hackney councillors with out-of-date information in the local register - including changes of employer, address, membership of management bodies, trade union membership and other political affiliations.

I don't care about the Tories and LibDems, but I must have a serious word with whoever is responsible for that sort of thing in the Labour group. I guess that must be the Chief Whip.