Ilkley Ward Result Bruce, Vaughan - Liberal Democrat 553 Dundas, Andrew Peter Alan - Labour 719 Hawkesworth, Anne Gillian Conservative - 3,245 Websdale, Bryan Green Party - 526 Total electorate entitled to vote 11,158 Total number of ballot papers received(including rejected papers) 5062 Percentage poll 45 Number of rejected ballot papers 19 Bradford Council site with full results Less than half the electorate bothered to turn out, if you can't be bothered to vote, please do not inflict your opions about politics / government / immigration / global warming / pretty much everything really, on anyone else. You have your chance to change things at the ballot box so don't moan down the pub if you didn't get off your arse on Thursday. I voted for the Green Party candidate, who finished last but within touching distance of the Lib Dems and not far short of the Nu-Labour candidate. I think I would prefer a proportional representation system for voting, although this would probably allow the BNP to get more seats than the two it currently holds, it would also allow more Greens and Lib Dems onto Bradford Council. Bradford Council Seats 36 seats Labour 35 seats Conservative 14 seats Liberal Democrat 3 seats Green Party 2 seats British National Party

Serious, Thoughtful, Dedicated Politician Wins In London Ha ha ha ha, oh deary me, Red Ken must have been really bad if you were willing to elect this clown. We eagerly await Boris' next episode of foot-in-mouth, he is the archetypal political accident waiting to happen.

Vote Green "My family and I simply love living in Ilkley as I am sure you do too, however there are important issues facing us all. Issues such as school places, affordable housing, questionable redevelopement of fine buildings and gardens, the management of the moor, , over use of the car and under use of public transport, strains on local shops and business...the list continues. I feel that it is time to view these matters through a fresh, contemporary, ecological and sustainable lens. We know now more than ever how much our actions and behaviours affect not only our environment but also our lives and the lives of future genrations here in Ilkley and around the world. There are many ways in which we can individually or as a family change our impact but I hope that with a vote for the Green Party we can help to re-examine existing local policies and structures. I am passionate about our town and its influences elsewhere and I am very willing to listen, learn and work for you so that Ilkley remains a wonderful place to live and visit" - Bryan Websdale, Green Party Candidate, Ilkley Ward.

"Biodiesel is a complete scam - the growing demand is causing forests to be burnt to make way for palm oil and similar crops. The land will need to grow biodiesel crops fo 70-300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction" - Roland Clift, Professor of Environmental Technology, UK Government Advisor.

French President or Black Sabbath Singer ? Oh dear, it's the old milk crate behind the mic stand gag for French midget Nicolas Sarkozy as he gets the Ronnie James Dio treatment.

Local Elections Looming But just what is the point ? I've always encouraged people, particularly those who have just become old enough to vote, to use their vote. The endless machinations of our politicians are leaving me feeling detached, distrustful and even apathetic. It seems that whoever we vote in, at any level of politics, just go on to be self serving swine in the trough, filling their own bank accounts at our expense. Nu-Labour has brought in numerous policies that any follower of traditional Labour would be ashamed off. Their current brand of champagne 'socialism' is so far detached from the party's roots that they have forgotten where they came from. The Tories under Cameron moan about everything, but whenever you challenge them on whether they are actually going to do anything about it (and the current row over the 10p tax band is a prime example), they shilly shally and avoid answering and you know in your heart it's just so much empty posturing. The LibDems ? Well, they've had my vote a couple of times now and to be honest at the moment they seem rudderless and directionless. I think I'll just go into the booth and write "None of the above are fit to govern me" on my paper.

The 10 Commandments Of Anarchy 1.Thou shall seek to destroy capitalism in all forms This is the first and foremost greatest commandment for all Anarchists. Everything flows from this first commandment. Anarchists seek to subvert the capitalist system and capitalists themselves at any appropriate time. 2.Thou shall disengage from the system and NOT worship consumerism Anarchists should seek to reduce their inputs into the system. This includes any form of financial input which maintains capitalism, in particular Anarchists should NOT consume goods from the multi-national, like McDonalds, KFC, Bunnings or Harvey Norman et al. and instead support small business enterprise. Think about setting up a local co-op, and use credit unions instead of banks, or Richies supermarkets which donate profits to community groups. 3.Thou shall seek self-sufficiency Following on from commandment 2, Anarchists should learn to make their own clothes, grow their own food, and any form of self-sufficiency. This reduces an individuals need to operate within the capitalist system. Alternatively, using trade or the barter system amongst similarly minded people. 4.Thou shall learn various skills Following on from commandment 3, Anarchists should constantly seek to improve themselves through the development of their skill set. This includes; martial arts for self-defense, learning mechanical skills for fixing cars, plumbing or any other household repairs. 5. Thou shall go forth and multiply Like Christians who go out and evangelise to increase their numbers, so too should an Anarchist. Learn how to network and communicate your ideas to new people. The system will never change if we only associate with like minded people. 6.Thou shall encourage freedom of speech Anarchists should see the abolition of censorship by the media, State, and individuals. Repression of freedom establishes fear, and disengages individuals from their political people power, which only serves to increase apathy and maintaining the status quo. 7. Thou shall NOT give away personal information to authorities Anarchists should never use programs such as facebook or myspace where personal information is easily available for authorities to obtain. Anarchists should be in the habit of using Proxy servers to limit the availability of their IP address being available in the ether for tracking. Unless you are asked specifically by the authorities for your personal information, don't give it away for nothing. 8. Thou shall work together for the benefit of mankind Anarchists should endeavour to work for the greater good, rather than seeking to increase their stature. Anarchists involvement in the movement should not be for financial gain (obviously), but should also avoid the pitfalls of narcissitic self-importance by Anarchist community notoriety, which borders on self-appointed charismatic leaders. Thus, Anarchists should work for the betterment of the community, not for themselves, which, in practice includes community service. This promotes anarchy as an option for social change; Food not bombs is a good example. 9. Thou shall NOT commit anarchy while in the presence of an agent of the law You're no good to the movement if you're caught. Check to see if police or other authoritarian is present first! 10. Thou shall be paranoid when discussing actions against capitalism Unlawful actions against capitalism (i.e. spray painting) should not be discussed, and follows from commandment 8 that Anarchists can find themselves entraped due to the pitfalls of egocentrism. Always assume that even your lawful actions (creating a co-op) are going to be subject to infiltrators and trolls who seek to maintain capitalism. Now, before any of my readers have a fit, it should be obvious that even with my current political leanings, there are sections of this (7 + 10 in particular) that I don't agree with, but I suppose that's the general nature of anarchy, it's a bit like herding cats.

Power Corrupts Michael Martin, MP for Glasgow North East and Speaker of the House of Commons, pictured here in the traditional Speaker's robes woven from the umbilical tubes of the now extinct Himalayan May Thrush. It is quite obvious to all of us tax paying voters in this proud democracy that Mr. Martin has done nothing wrong at all. In an age when the wife of the Prime Minister can spend £200 a day on hairdressing then surely the odd £4,000 in taxi fares is a drop in the ocean, indeed Mr Martin should be congratulated on his miserliness, after all, he could have bought a second car for his wife, but no, being a tight fisted Scots stereotype he sent her off to work everday in a battered Nissan Sunny smelling faintly of vomit. Well done that man. So he spent tens of thousands of tax payers hard earned money on paying a mortgage that he had already, er, well, paid off apparently. But shouldn't a bloke be allowed to have a bit of a spending spree at Ikea at the taxpayer's expense ? Also, I think MP Derek Conway has been unfairly criticised for paying his teenage son good money to do nothing. This is a situation that all parents of teenagers find themselves in, you agree to give your disagreeable, monosyllabic emo son a tenner for emptying the bins, he spends it on White Lightning cider and then stays in bed all day claiming that you're "stressing him out man, just chill." We've all been there, it's hardly a sin. Come on folks, our MP's do a damn fine job, some of them have to work almost 20 hours a week, they only get 2 months holidays and for this endless grind they might receive as little as £60,000 a year plus the odd 20 grand or so in 'expenses'. Bastards.

Nu-Labour's Train Of Sleaze Rolls On And On This man is Peter Hain. He ran for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour party. Six people ran for the position, Hain came fifth out of the six and in doing so managed to spend £190,000. Yes, £190,000. One hundred and ninety thousand pounds, now to me, that is an awful lot of money. If you were running a general election and had to go out and meet people and print posters and leaflets to push through people's doors I might be able to see how you could spend such a vast sum of money. But, this pile of cash was spent 'in house' as it were. This just seems ludicrous, and rather dubious and worrying. I really cannot imagine how Hain managed to spend all that money on persuading members of his own party to vote for him, or not to vote for him as it actually turned out. What did the money go on ? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but don't all the MP's meet up quite regularly, in a large building known as the Houses Of Parliament ? I would have thought that the entire campaign could have been conducted for a couple of hundred quid by running a few sheets of information ("Hello, I am Peter and I would like to be Gordon's whipping boy etc....) off the office photocopier and then pushing them through his fellow MP's pigeonholes. For no money at all he could have sent an e-mail round with much the same information. How much money then was spent on the campaign as a whole ? Would it be fair to assume that all candidates spent about the same, or might you think that the winning candidates might have spent more ? Was there upwards of a million pounds sloshing around the Labour party at the time of this internal election ? Where did it go, dinners at London's posh and expensive restaurants, evenings at the opera, a day at the races ? I have written a nice polite letter to Peter Hain to ask just what he spent £190,000 on. More dubious is the way that this pile of donated cash was filtered through a strange and faceless organisation known as the Progressive Policy Forum. This was set up after Mr. Hain's campaign began and appears to have no other function than to transfer funds to Mr. Hain, why ? There are so many things about this whole election process that seem shady and queer. I remember when Labour came to power on the back of what seemed and endless parade of Conservative mis-doings and sleaze, Tony Blair said the Labour government was going to be whiter than white, that all it's dealings would be honest and transparent. It has been pretty much the opposite, they don't get voted back out of power partly because the electorate has lost faith with politicians and they think that the new boss will be just the same as the old boss. Blair and his cronies promised that they were going to restore that faith, but they just carried on in the same old manner. The actions of politicians make me a hypocrite, and that upsets me. I keep encouraging my staff to make use of the vote when they reach 18, but more and more often when they ask me why, I just can't give them a positive answer.

Fill Yer Boots, Again Is anyone that votes Nu-Labour just the teensiest bit embarrassed at the way that former leader Tony Bliar continues to farm his fame for vast quantities of cash after giving up as PM ? The highly lucrative trips to China to open supermarkets, numerous public speaking engagements in the USA and now a high profile position with bankers JP Morgan Chase. Even this enormous pile of money won't be enough for our Tony though as he has also been in talks with Credit Suisse, Citigroup, HSBC and 'a small handful' of similar companies. I seem to remember that when Bliar left office he was going to save the world by bringing about peace in the Middle East, but now even George 'Warmongering Loony' Bush seems to have gazumped him there. Then again, he probably can't see the Middle East from behind that huge pile of dollars.

Gordon Brown

Time To Vote For Another Set Of Self Serving Wasters ? Is there an election in the offing ? How strange that rumours of a general election are rife, and that this week my sitting Labour MP, Ann Cryer, has chosen to write to me to tell me what a fabulous job she has been doing. A cynic might say that the two items are somehow related, after all, my MP has never bothered to write to me before, so why now ? I had been a Tory voter for all of political life until the last set of elections, general, local and European, and then I switched to voting Liberal at home and Green in Europe. As we (possibly) approach a snap Autumn election I really don't know who I'm going to vote for, I would like a party to..... Stop slavishly following US foreign policy. Stop blaming immigration for all our woes. Build more nuclear power stations, the UK is facing a power crisis in the coming decades and successive governments have done nothing at all to plan for it. Generally become greener, which in some eyes will clash with the point above. Do much more to alleviate poverty, hunger and suffering across the world. Keep the BBC and the Licence Fee. I doubt that I'm going to vote Labour, the Liberals seem rather directionless at the moment and the Tories have also been without a definate direction ever since Labour stole all their policies three elections ago. Perhaps I'll just go in and scrawl 'none of the above' on my ballot.

Friends Of The Common People A Private member's Bill was put before the Commons yesterday which, if passed, would have led to firms being unable to unfairly discriminate against temporary / agency workers. (TEMPORARY AND AGENCY WORKERS (PREVENTION OF LESS FAVOURABLE TREATMENT) BILL:?Second Reading. Member in charge: Paul Farrelly). Examples cited by MP Paul Farrely (who is a Labour Party MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme) were the case of a man who had worked for Salford Council for three years, was paid a third less than his colleagues employed directly by the council, and got no holiday provision or sick pay. Another case cited was a man who worked for 9 years in a call centre as an agency employee and could not get a mortgage because of his temporary status. This bill would have prevented this sort of discrimination, just the sort of thing the Labour party stands for, or so you might imagine. The bill was not passed, it was talked out of time in the Commons......by a Labour Minister, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Jim Fitzpatrick Nice, just another stab in the back for the traditional Labour voter then. Labour MP's in the commons were so disgusted that one MP (Andrew Dismore, Labour, Hendon) said "Is there any way of recording in Hansard that dozens of Labour Members came today to support the Bill, that we decided not to stand to make a speech to make sure that it had a reasonable chance of getting a Second Reading, and that we are extremely dismayed and ashamed of the fact that our Front Bench has not acceded to the request of so many..." At which point he was cut off by the Deputy Speaker. What exactly is it that Nu-Labour stands for at the moment ? Apart from telling lies to start wars that is.

Get On Your Bike / Eurostar / EasyJet etc. The LibDems are whining about new Government measures which will force first time passport applicants to attend face to face interviews. The Lib Dems' Simon Hughes said the move would disrupt the lives of working people. "Most people do not have the time or the inclination to have to travel, probably quite a long way from where they live." So, why do they want a passport in the first place then ?