The trouble with elections is that things move so fast that its difficult to keep up with everything you want to comment on - my current ‘to do’ list already runs to stuff on both the Labour and Tory manifestos, more on things going on - and that have been going on - in Brum, including a bit more verbal sparring with John Hemming and the one piece that I reallt want to sit down and work on properly, looking at some of the ways in which the politics of race and ethnicity are changing - and not always for the better.

One thought I will leave folks with for the moment is that if anyone ever did have doubts on how the Tories really stood on the Iraq war then the comment from Nicholas Boles, the Tory candidate in Hove, which appeared in the Times in 2003, should everything perfectly clear.

“But the war for oil charge is not just factually wrong, it is also humbug. A war to defend open access to the Middle East’s oil reserves would be a just war – and a war fought primarily to defend the world’s poor.”

Props go to Hove Labour for unearthing that one and providing a link to the full article