Uppal roundup

The great man is appearing at the university tonight, by popular demand, alongside Emma Reynolds the rather excellent local Labour MP.

Obviously I'll be there and live blogging the event, but I thought you might like a quick potted guide to Uppal's ignominious career in case you're planning to attend:

Knowingly misleading Parliament (and here): he said there was an ongoing  investigation into electoral fraud during the 2010 election campaign. The Electoral Commission told me that a) there wasn't and b) he knew there wasn't, while the police told me they'd received no complaints.

He doesn't like the Internet, and when forced to have a blog during the election campaign, happily deleted all critical comments.

He has never once, when calling in Parliament for tax breaks for multimillionaire property speculators, mentioned that he is a multimillionaire property speculator. None of his election material mentioned this at all. But his friends in the British Property Federation think of him as 'our man', in an article now suspiciously deleted (quoted here). I thought, naively, that an MP was 'our' representative, as constituents.

He received a free education (Warwick, Politics, though he won't tell anyone what class of degree he got). He has now decided that HE is a private benefit rather than a public good and voted to impose £9000pa fees on students.

He always manages to quote 'a constituent' who expresses exactly what Mr Uppal believes. How very convenient. In the example linked to, he tells us the rather tall story of the person 'ridiculed' by her feckless dole-choosing neighbours for 'choosing to work' and claims that young people have 'looked [him] in the eye and said that life on benefits is not such a bad option'.

He doesn't like having his photo taken, or strangers at public meetings.

He described Liam Fox's murky and illegal activities in Sri Lanka as 'sterling work': though when I asked him what this meant, he couldn't give a single example of what 'work' Fox had done.

He thinks our high streets have been ruined for 'shoppers' (he doesn't believe in citizens) by 'charity muggers' - and not a recession which has closed over 30% of this town's shops.

He appears to think that deregulation will save the economy, whereas everyone else on the planet outside Newt Gingrich's skull thinks that deregulation let the banks ruin the entire global economy for everyone. He said this in January 2012, so he can't even plead ignorance.

In the past couple of weeks, he's voted to slash benefits to disabled children and called for tax breaks for commercial property owners (without - of course - mentioning that he is one of those commercial property speculators).

His current campaign is straight out of 1960s Mississippi (and the current US South): making it harder for the poor and the mobile to vote - like students. This of course has nothing to do with his wafer-thin majority of 600 and the imposition of £9000 fees. I'm looking forward to the 2015 campaign. I'm going to give every student a picture of Uppal with the slogan 'this man personally made sure that you paid £9000 each year'. Job very much done.