Saturday 7 February 2015

The Future Is Nearly Here

On the local political front, at council level here in Medway, I have noticed during recent conversations with a fair number of my sources that their assessment of how things look to be going turn out to be broadly in line with what I predicted, four years ago, would happen at this time if the wrong decisions were made back then.

This is good, because it means that others have worked out for themselves what is now happening, at least to some extent. A few of them were at the ward candidate selection meeting in 2010 where I stated a couple of these (what were then just) predictions, but several were not; and my other predictions I kept to myself at that time, as it wasn't the purpose of that event. I was just putting down a marker, for the future, and that future is now virtually here.

I am not going to disclose any of that material until after polling day – but enough people on the inside now know sufficient of it to be able to recognise its accuracy (or otherwise!) when the new Medway Council is elected, three months from today. Okay, strictly speaking the results won't be out until the following morning, but the election itself will be on the 7th and that is when people will decide, or earlier if they have a postal vote.

These recent conversations with my various sources have also allowed me to sow further seeds in their minds, so that messages have been conveyed and they will realise all too soon that there will be lessons to learn within the local party, both in the constituency associations and within the council group.

This will now have to be the hard way, as I was not heeded four years ago and (as some party members have privately admitted to me) their collective weakness as a group on the Council has now allowed their main opponents to profit substantially in the last couple of years in particular, and this will inevitably harm the ruling group significantly this coming May.

My own absence from the Council has, exactly as I predicted, also emboldened the main opposition members, as there is no longer any truly effective counter to their fabrications and manipulations – nothing more substantial than a battle of words, in fact: one person's word against another's – and their change of group leader has also tipped things their way. Again, this is something I (probably alone) foresaw a few years back, as that party group leader is well aware and could confirm if asked.

Harmful stories have been appearing in the local media that I'd have killed off before they could have been published, but that was possible only by my speaking at the Council or, in a few cases, a committee meeting at which the attempt was being made, with the concrete proof in front of me, on my trusty portable computer. A retraction a week later is no good: the damage will already have been done by then and will not be reversed. It has to be dealt with at the time it is brought up at the meeting, in a way that immediately makes it impossible for the reporter to use.

I did this five times at Council during my time there, more than all other group members were able to do between the lot of them in the same period. This has not changed since my departure.

Overall, it is going exactly as I foresaw would be the case if I were not back on the Council for this one crucial term (I'd not have been needed so much after this); and I still to this day have no reason to believe that my alternative and markedly different outcome – with me back on the Council from 2011 to 2015 – was any less accurate.

The deviation from that path is quite marked, and has become sufficiently obvious that, as I mentioned at the start of this post, others have independently reached the same conclusion that I had foreseen some four years ago. As I never tire of saying, the clues are all 'out there' for anyone to find and evaluate with a modicum of intelligence. I am not particularly clever, as is now obvious(!)

In fact, it is now a much stronger forecast than it was back then, simply because the two former Lib Dem members who were elected as Independents in 2011 subsequently joined Labour. The numbers are now near-enough rock solid: that variable (a three-way marginal ward) has thus been taken out of the equation.

We in Medway are in for an 'interesting' time ahead...

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