The problem is that when the grass roots had the choice in the previous leadership campaign Clarke won hands down but the parlimentary group picked William. Now the moderate grass root support has withered and so the party has once again elected a right winger as leader. My analysis on the situation has been for the last four years that we were mirroring the changes that that the Labour party had been going through after thew 87 election. I was hoping that we could circumvent the time these changes take by selecting Clarke as Leader. If Iain Duncan Smith has the will he may be able to change the party back to the centre right position, currently usurped by New Labour,without causing the splits a moderate might have created. This would pretty much follow the pattern that Kinnock started in the eighties when engineering the transformation of the labour party. Problem is we could be looking at another ten years of New Labour.

In the mean time I'm going to stick to local Government.

Cllr