Lewkip

I do not need spoon-fed leaflets. Sure, I'll take the generic ones if they can be spared and fit in with what I want but my ones will be relevant to the reality of my borough and they sure as well will NOT be tearing down other parties. If Burger King, Pepsi, and Tesco can market themselves to success without slagging off Macdonalds, Coca Cola, and Sainsburys then that's good enough for me.

There's enough room for our brand of policies to champion without having to engage in negative campaigns against PARTIES. By all means, be negative against the GOVERNMENT be it local or central but it must be secondary to what we will DO.

C_steam

Good for you Lewkip. I only take some exception to your previous point regarding canvassers going out unprepared - maybe not in lewisham, but it happened in many other places.

Canvassers need to be prepared, members need to be trained and above all UKIP needs a coherent set of well researched figures. What has been the impact of regionalisation? Costs? How many A&E's closed? How many bin collections down to 1 per fortnight? and so on.

You also need a coherent set of 'guidelines' on what is acceptable 'UKIP' local policy. Of course central office cannot prescribe entirely what you should be saying locally, but some width needs to be stated - unless you want some canvassers to make up policy on the fly and decide to release all child molesters or something similar - and these things do happen - see last years GE for details.

In short, to suggest branches are 'on their own' to make local policy is a risky cop-out.

One Londoner

Lewkip may be right about truly "local" issues, but most issues that local government deals with are dictated by national (or increasingly EU) governnment. Waste management is the classic example.

Taking another practical example of particular relevance to Lewisham - where does UKIP Lewisham stand on directly elected mayors? Lewisham has one, courtesy of the 2000 Local Govt Act, but there is now a campaign to abolish the post.

What happens if UKIP Lewisham supports abolition, but say UKIP Hackney is against (perish the thought)? You rapidly descend into chaos if different bits of UKIP take different lines on the same issue. That is why some central direction on policy is needed.

Lewkip

The choice is simple:

Do you assemble yourselves around policy proposals that are reasonable or wait for approval?

Make some headway or lose time?

The LibDems do not refer to their national policies in their local leaflets round here - they make a song and dance about how they are fighting doorstep issues: grafitti, planning permission going awry, bad roads and how they can get them addressed. Honestly, any party could do this. They get ahead because they do the work. Overtime, the residents pick up on this and reasonably say `Hey, those guys put the work in and at least are responsive to what I think is important.'

It takes time, it takes work. No secret formula. That is the backbone of their success and if we were to adopt it, it could be ours too.

Aardvark

The Mayor/cabinet thing is different all over the country and the other parties aren't consistent. The way forward is to return to the committee system of old which gave more power to back bench councillors - most are now excluded from real decision making.

Colin McNamee

Lewkip wrote

Respectively they have been head to head for years.

Perhaps you just didn't understand their respective claims and advertising positions? They were certainly loud and I would have thought clear enough.

mkpdavies

The Lib Dems spoon feed their local branches all the tools they need to run an effective local campaign.

They add their own local stuff, but it is easy for them and they have cheap fast prodcution facilities available for all their branches.

The easy the centre makes it for local branches the better. That way, UKIP will have unorgaised, or underresourced branches performing to a reasonable standard, aswell as the more dedicated ones.

Add to that a decent national image, backed by a strong internet home and UKIP might actually reverse the current fall.

Sadly it sounds to me that isn't on the cards and it will remain a Dads Army style protest group.

__________________
http://brits4ronpaul.blogspot.com/
http://wokinglibertarians.blogspot.com/
http://lpuk.org

My ignore list

Labour, Lib Dems

Lewkip

I have personal difficulty in taking anything One Londoner says seriously, even when valid points are being made because of the history of the two UKIP London Assembly SEATS that could have made such a difference to us inner London people in the way it has with the Green's Darren Johnson who caused Lewisham to grow its councillors from one to six this year.

Anyway...

As far as I'm concerned, the matter of supporting any cross party initiative to oust the directly elected Mayor in Lewisham is a matter for UKIP Lewisham alone. As a matter of courtesy, I would pass any release to UKIP London for comments and if they say `hold on, we are about to do something of substance here that might differ, and other parts of the country will have to fall in line as well', I would hold off. But in the absence of that, I would press on. It doesn't suit me or the party to pursue conflicting policies.

Lewkip

London still has 90% odd of its local Government in the old way where you have annual leaders voted. The Mayoral system is noted for concentrating all power in the hands of one person for four years, regardless of opposing views. But even the system for everyone else still has to yield to central Government and don't forget the Regional Assemblies. The future is bleak.

Lewkip

I cannot recall either of these conglomerates having to quote the names of their rivals to make the advertising work. That is not to say they are not aggressive and competitive with each other. But they know the public think open aggression in their marketing is a turn-off. Small wonder why politics is the only arena of national life that the majority of people actually are turned off from.