Thursday 14 January 2010

No Good Advice

A few hours in the office, for the first time this week... I see people are reporting that Andy Burnham has 'let slip' the election date. I was at that event yesterday, which was the parliamentary launch of Julie Morgan's Private Members Bill to stop under-18s using sunbeds. The Bill will also outlaw unstaffed tanning salons of which there are quite a few in Bristol, sometimes offering sessions for as cheap as £1 or even 50p a minute. When I was first elected I met with Consol Suncenter, who run a lot of these unstaffed salons and have a regional office in my constituency. We discussed the steps they were taking to make sure under-16s didn't use their salons, and that others didn't over-use the salons, which was mostly about conspicuously displaying signs in the salon and having CCTV and spot checks, but I have to say, I wasn't convinced and will be supporting Julie's Bill.

Andy was joined at the launch by Nicola from Girls Aloud, who was obviously nervous at speaking in public but gave a lovely speech saying "You don't have to be Tangoed to be accepted". Have to say, she looked great. Killer heels.

Anyway, during Andy's speech he said something about a May 6th election, which caused these flutterings amongst political pundits. It doesn't mean a thing. I'm working on the assumption of a May 6th election. Everyone is. It seems the most obvious choice of date. But the only person who knows is Gordon, and I suspect even he doesn't know yet. He might wake up tomorrow morning and decide, what the hell, let's go for March 25th. He might not!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you are not letting on about that emergency legislation to extend the term of Parliament by another 5 years then...

labourparty said...

Now you've done it. All that careful planning letting 6 May 'leak' out and you go and give the nod for 25 March! Journalists aren't fools you know, they'll see right through your "I don't know" claim.

Richard said...

I just want it to be over.

Bristol Dave said...

Surely if you wanted to stop under-18s using "unmanned" sunbeds the easiest way would be to only allow payment by credit card? You could also then limit the amount of time someone spent there by refusing to accept multiple transactions on the same card. Surprised this hasn't been thought of to be honest.

I think rather than pushing the health dangers people should be highlighting that orange is not an attractive colour for a person to be!