Acting Chair Alan Humphries expressing concerns about our MP’s inability to separate what’s right, from toeing the party line.
“WHILE hoping for a return to a ‘kinder politics’, it is impossible to refrain from commenting in the strongest terms on the recent voting record of our Mid-Worcestershire MP Nigel Huddleston.
First, our representative for a town, many of whose residents use the Severn and Avon rivers for leisure activities, votes against measures to force the privatised water companies to stop polluting our rivers with sewage.
He even meekly follows the party line by printing in the local press a spurious defence of the vote, provided by Conservative Central Office, only to be embarrassed by the rapid Government U-turn on the issue!
Then he follows it up by voting to defer the sanctions on Owen Paterson, which were recommended by the independent Standards Commissioner and approved by the cross-party Standards Committee, for what they describe as one of the worst breaches of lobbying rules they have ever seen.
He also voted to alter the process of justice by rewriting MPs’ oversight rules in mid-case, only to be further embarrassed by yet another U-turn.
Many Conservative MPs showed courage in refusing to support such flagrant attacks on the proper accountability of a colleague, but not our MP.
By this latter vote Mr Huddleston has again identified himself with what Martin Kettle has recently described as ‘a culture that embraces the corruption of public appointments, contracts and honours, the curbing of the power of the courts, threats against the BBC and the restriction of voting rights’, all with the aim of ‘purging independent checks and balances’ on this dysfunctional Government.
What do these votes all have in common? They stink!”
Alan Humphries
Acting Chair, Mid Worcestershire Labour Party
Letter first published in the 12th November 2021 Droitwich Standard