Union boss Woodley rips up copy of The Sun
Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite, drew huge cheers from delegates at the Brighton gathering when he urged the rest of the country to do the same.
Holding up a copy of today's edition, with its front page headline 'Labour's Lost It', Mr Woodley said: "We don't need an Australian/American coming to our country with a paper that has never supported any progressive policies from our party, including the minimum wage, telling us how politics should be run in this country."
Mr Woodley, who is from Liverpool, said people in his home city knew what to do with The Sun.
Most exciting moment of Labour party conference 2009?
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David Bartlett
City editor of the Post and Echo covering politics, regeneration, and urban affairs.
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Cheap political theatre like this brings to mind the occasion exactly two years back when Brown had his chance to do the dramatic thing, but suffered stage-fright at the last minute.
I think Brown lost Labour the 2010 Election at that point. It showed lack of personal courage - but worse, it failed to do the morally correct thing by the country, namely: to win his own mandate after ousting Blair. It gave all those right-of-centre voters who had supported Labour in 1997, 2001 & even 2005 an excuse to return home to the Tories.
So the Tories will regain seats next year from both Labour & LibDem. And the LibDems needn't comfort themselves that Labour's ebbing vote will come to them. It won't. It will run straight back to the Tories.
But I predict regional variations. Labour's vote will hold up better where it has always been strong; where it has been soft, the Tories will win seats back. The LibDems won't benefit at all. In fact, overall, they will lose seats. Electoral reform is their only chance - and that won't happen either.
So Labour will lose in 2010. Three-term Government is about the limit of people's patience. Where a Party wins a fourth term (rarely), public patience quickly snaps as we saw after 1992. The 1997 & 2001 landslides were the result.
One wonders, why has "Union boss Woodley" waited so long to rip up the Sun?
He didn't do it to support the views of "the people back home", who would be ashamed to buy a copy in the first place; he could have done that a long time ago.
He was obviously OK with it whilst it supported Labour but now that they've changed sides - rrrippppp!
The hypocrisy of these people never ceases to amaze me.
I'm happy to say that I've NEVER bought (or read) a copy of the Sun, even to rip up.