This is about the Labour flyer I received from Colin Challen, the sitting MP.

I’ve never actually met him, although I have been at several events that he has also been at. He doesn’t seem to be the sort of MP who “works the room”. My first encounter was at an “angry parents” meeting at a nearby school which had an admission cap at a rather unnatural 45 kid intake, despite being popular and in demand. The event was being run by teachers and some local Councillors were in evidence, Bryan North (former Lord mayor of Leeds) and another one whose name escapes me now. Colin came and sat down next to me but didn’t acknowledge anyone other than Bryan North. He eventually stood up to speak- as the prospective parliamentary candidate replacing John Gunnell.

The next time I saw CC was at the Leeds City Council election count in 2003. He spent most of the time on the mobile phone looking worried, a routine he repeated even more vigourously in 2004.

He recently spoke at a special event for Joseph priestley College, who celebrated 50 years in Morley Town hall. He “ummed” & “erred” a lot and I felt that he managed to make an interesting topic rather dull through a somewhat bland delivery. (The speech is on his Website here). He sends out a newsletter to interested constituents (that we call “Colin’s Chat”) and it unwittingly sends out the message of how banal and irrelevant the life of a Backbencher can be regardless of who is in power. There was a speech printed almost verbatim about how successful his diet had been that went on at such length that I assumed that he must have been filibustering.

The other downer is that he claims the glory for all sorts of things. His “I convened a meeting” translates from the other parties as “We invited him to a meeting”.

Here is his flyer, “by Colin Challen”, although no doubt there are hundreds that look and read very similarly all over the Country. It is basically the old “the Tories are going to cut money” scare tactics.

On the back, are thirty positive reasons why you should vote Labour. It is actually 29, the 30th being that CC supports them, well hoop-de-do. I was going to come up with an alternative list to match the title, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to emigrate.

I mentioned last week that I had been to see Malcolm Matson speak. He is a founder of an organisation called the OPLAN Foundation and OPLAN stands for “The Open Public Local Access Network” which he describes as a 4th utility for the information age. This disruptive concept blows the incumbent Telcos out of the water & they don’t like it up ‘em, Mr. Mannering…

I have been in dialogue with him sporadically since last summer and he recently gave me the password to get into www.oplan.org, which I won’t divulge although Malcolm will presumably let you have it if you email him (I assume they are limited in bandwidth). In this site there a fascinating document, which is creative commons public domain. I can’t justify putting it up in my own webspace at the moment as it is over a Meg of pdf but it makes most of the points of his roadshow elegantly and with a lot of humour.

One eye opener is the concept that if the canal owners had been put in charge of the railways they would have introduced the tracks alongside the towpaths in order to pull the narrowboats along. In many ways this is currently being repeated with the idea of 21st century Networks which are replicating the PSTN rather than being genuinely disruptive.

There is a very similar document to his current one on a Danish site called Citynet, which has a lot of useful information about Municipal networks (a lot in Dutch, however). You can find the OPLAN document at the bottom of this page.

Footnote on Tory Boys- it has been pointed out to me that I am confusing my camp comedians. “Shut that door!” was of course Larry Grayson. John Inman’s catchprase was “I’m freeeeeee…..” and he is also remembered for having very little interest in Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy.