J4MB is proud to announce the appointment of Ian Young as a J4MB candidate for the May 2015 general election. Young’s a resident of Hucknall, a town seven miles to the north of Nottingham, a city in central England, formerly the home of Robin Hood and his merry men, who robbed the rich to give to the poor—at least that was the defense put forward by their lawyer after a sneaky dawn raid by the Sheriff of Nottingham and his sidekicks on their lair in Sherwood Forest. It was winter, so there were no leaves on the trees, the place wasn’t hard to find. Mr. Hood and his band of merry men were found to be in possession of more stolen goods than could reasonably be distributed among the population of poor folk living in Nottingham at the time. I digress, as I am inclined to do.
Young will be standing in the Sherwood constituency, where he has long lived. He’s a highly respected person in the area, and his nomination as a J4MB candidate has just been reported in a well-written piece in the Hucknall Dispatch. Historically, Sherwood has generally been a safe Labour seat, but Mark Spencer, a Conservative candidate, won the seat in 2010 with a majority of just 214 votes.
Ian Young is well-known as a survivor of domestic violence and an advocate for male victims of domestic violence. He was recently interviewed at length on BBC Radio Nottingham, here. His contact details and web presences are as follows:
Mobile: 07842 137041
Email: iangyoung@live.co.uk
Blog: http://thesilenceofdomesticviolence.blogspot.co.uk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MajorMagicIan
We wish Ian every success and will support him as much as we can in the run-up to the general election and beyond. Which brings us to an important matter—our new strategy for the 2015 general election. For some time we’ve been considering the possibility of targeting adjacent marginal seats in order to make our campaigning more efficient and effective, to keep campaigner morale high in a concentrated geographical area, and to maximize the value we get from donations for poster campaigns and the like.
The Sherwood constituency is one of three constituencies that are adjacent to each other and that were won by very slim majorities in 2010. To the west of Sherwood is the Ashfield constituency, historically a safe Labour seat, which Labour candidate Gloria de Piero (standing for the first time) almost lost in 2010, winning by just 192 votes. GdP is the Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. In July we awarded her our Lying Feminist of the Month award for her comments on the gender pay gap—the story is here.
I shall be standing as the J4MB candidate for Ashfield next May.
To the south of Ashfield and the southwest of Sherwood is the Broxtowe constituency, historically another safe Labour seat, which was won in 2010 by Anna Soubry for the Conservatives, with a majority of 389 votes. Ray Barry will be standing as the J4MB candidate for Broxtowe next May. Ray is well-known as the leader of Real Fathers for Justice, and three days ago we video recorded him speaking next to a controversial new sculpture in Birmingham, A Real Birmingham Family, which consists of two sisters who are single mothers, one of them pregnant, with their young sons. A celebration of fatherlessness, no less. We’ve had good reactions to the video, here.
Our interest in the Nottingham area isn’t limited to these three seats. We’ve never been a party that lacked ambition, and we never will be. We’ll be seeking candidates for two adjacent seats that were won by Labour with majorities of less than 2,000 votes in 2010: Nottingham (South) and Gedling.
We’re also keen to field a candidate in Loughborough, 17 miles to the south of Nottingham. The seat was won by Labour in 2001 and 2005, but Nicky Morgan won it for the Conservatives in 2010 with a majority of 3,744 votes. Morgan is the Minister for Women and Equalities. David Cameron, to his eternal shame, replaced the highly regarded Michael Gove as Education Secretary not long ago with Morgan.
We’ve compiled voting data from the past three general election results for the three key seats near Nottingham (and Loughborough)—here.
Our decision to contest one or more Labour seats marks a departure from our former strategy of only targeting Conservative marginal seats in 2015. Our rationale is that until J4MB develops to the point of having rather more candidates standing in general elections, targeting only one party’s seats is purely symbolic. We felt it worth changing the strategy in order to target the seat of a (Shadow) Minister for Women and Equalities. Also, life is going to become markedly worse for men and boys if Labour wins the next general election, with truly obnoxious bigots such as Yvette Cooper given free rein to roll out yet more radical feminist agendas, including teaching schoolboys to be feminists, i.e., brainwashing them into becoming lifelong unquestioning slaves to women, grateful for their servitude.
