Support outside the region

A letter for the local press outside the region from Chris Cooke

Dear Sir,

You might have missed it in national papers, but the Referendum on Regional Assemblies in North East England is well under way. The only Region where John Prescott actually thinks he might squeeze a YES vote and so create a domino effect to knock over the rest of the English Regions.

To ensure victory his Government quango, the Electoral Commission, gave official designation (and £100,000 of taxpayers money!) to a NO campaign which was nothing more than a Conservative backed group formed in only in the last couple of months. In these Labour heartlands of the North East designating such a Tory NO campaign is the equivalent of putting a skunk in the NO lobby of the House of Commons. If you want to vote NO you'd better hold your nose! A delighted Mr Prescott now portrays the whole referendum as "Labour v Tory".

A very much better known, respected and well supported peoples' NO campaign, up and running for a number of years, was totally ignored by the Commission. This - the all postal voting - and other suspicious events - all point to a deceitful stitch up of this Referendum by our Government. In fact their chosen NO campaign is so elusive that people looking for them find it about as easy as discovering Lord Lucan's home address!

Regional Assemblies are demanded by EU plans for Europe. I long suspected Tories only pretend to be EU "sceptic" because it sabotages anything else that might come along to upset the EU's mad rush to become a fully integrated super-state. So I did expect this Tory involvement in sabotaging the NE Referendum NO campaign. I also expect similar tactics to be used to railroad through the West Midlands Regional Assembly, if and when we in Tamworth are allowed to have our vote. The West Midlands Assembly already exists, spending large sums of taxpayers money and interfering in much of our local politics. The only Referendum question they will ask us is do we want a lot more elected politicians running it - or just unelected ones!

Anyone else despair of this country?

Yours sincerely

Cllr Chris Cooke
Address witheld