Labour's Likely Losers Exploit Their Positions

The New Welsh Right blog mentions Martin Linton as one of the Labour MPs who have started a campaign to limit the amount of money that parties can spend in constituencies annually.

At a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party last night Martin Linton, David Borrow, Stephen Ladyman and Celia Barlow called for Gordon Brown to limit the amount of money that may be spent in constituencies each year rather than just at election time.

Of course, being Tories, they have either completely misunderstood the issue or choose to deliberately misrepresent it.

Linton, representing highly marginal Battersea (and you thought it was out of the goodness of his heart) led the charge and argued, basically, that he was scared that the people of Battersea might like his Tory opponent better than him and that this was very bad indeed. He also pushed the point that Parliament should use its power to write laws (usually fairly serious things that require a bit of thinking through) to hobble his opponent early on. This was to take the form of banning him from spending much on advertising, leaflets, phone calls and all those other tools of debate that nobody ever died or got sick from.