The article was presumably intended to promote her electoral chances as Labour's parliamentary candidate for the Rochester and Strood seat -- as the Medway constituency will become known with effect from the next General Election -- after having been selected recently from an all-women short-list of candidates. I suppose this is a kind of self-publicising "start as you mean to go on" approach...
Her selection is of course a hardly-unexpected outcome, as a result of this female-only shortlist (as per Labour Party diktat -- they're good at that sort of thing). Not much competition, then, especially as the other two local elected candidates are both male, and the rest are unknowns. Realistically, who else stood a chance under those largely artificial conditions?
As usual with such articles, I flicked through it without particular interest, but was amused by Mrs Murray's contention that "Rochester and Strood is very much a Labour area."This really is priceless!
Reality check: 18 of the 22 council seats that fall within this constituency are held by Conservatives. Two of the four Labour-held seats are on very small majorities: a mere 16 votes in Strood North, and 52 votes in River ward -- both of which will almost certainly be overturned next time, turning those wards completely blue, and leaving Labour in just one ward, if that.
The trend during recent years has been away from Labour and toward the Conservatives, especially in Strood, as successive local election results have clearly shown. Medway people are generally trading-up! Labour is the only party in permanent decline in Medway, as the above graph shows. This gives the proportion of seats held by each party at every election for Medway Unitary Authority, rather than the number of seats, so as not to be skewed by the reduction of overall number of seats from 80 to 55 a few years ago. Click on the graph for a larger version.
Note that the only reaon for the "plateau" in Labour's line in the graph between 2000 and 2003 is that it was the Labour Group's proposals for new boundaries that were accepted for the urban (i.e. most of) seats/wards in the Boundary Review, and -- surprise, surprise -- they had geared the new boundaries to favour themselves; hence some strange "niches and notches" in the new ward outlines.
Oh, and of course the Labour membership on Medway Council went down from 17 to 16 in between the 2003 and 2007 elections, when Cllr Rehman Chishti came over to the Conservatives. Looking at the trends, I'd say there's every chance that the LibDems will overtake Labour at Medway's next local elections, pushing Labour into third place and taking from them the mantle of main opposition group.
At parliamentary level, the same broad trend is well established in this part of the country. Indeed, the real reason that Bob Marshall-Andrews is not contesting the seat himself this time is because he knows he hasn't a chance of holding it. He even (erroneously) conceded defeat at the 2005 General Election, though a recount afforded him a very small win.
The future was (and still is) obvious to anyone with a working brain: Rochester and Strood (and neighbouring Gillingham and Rainham, which also nearly changed hands in 2005!) will almost certainly become represented by a Conservative MP after the next General Election -- whenever "Bottler" Brown has the guts to call that election.
Thus the sheer hubris of Mrs Murray (a characteristic that seems to be endemic within the Labour Party as a whole, as recent events have demonstrated so very well) is really no more than light entertainment for those of us with any kind of idea about what is going on and why.
Very few people want a Labour MP anywhere around the Medway area. There will always be those with a personal vested interest, especially (often misguided) Trade Union members, and some others with a chip-on-shoulder attitude, plus a few other categories -- but they are diminishing in numbers year by year, fading away into the previous millennium's historic perspective and nothing more.
The world -- and Medway -- will move on, and Labour will be left ever further behind at both local and (increasingly) national level. It's all "out there" for anyone with eyes to see, and the Teresa Murrays of this world will simply fade into history and obscurity, and rightly so.
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