The Willesden and Brent Times spoke to local candidates standing as independents or for the smaller parties, including Shahrar Ali for the Green Party and Atiq Malik.

Atiq Malik is Brents’ own ‘controversial’ candidate. An ex-conservative councillor in Queensbury ward,  jumped/pushed from the party in 2008, he has previously been referred to the Standards Board for England, the standards watchdog for Councillors and other officials. He was subsequently cleared of misconduct. Atiq Malik’s pledges have a clean up politics air about them, the usual puff against employing family members, claiming second home allowances (like Brent’s Dawn Butler and her £66,000 of expenses), having jobs outside parliament… He could do with starting the political clean up in his own office by all accounts. Illegally copying private correspondence and distributing it for political aims is not the sort of politiking I want see represented in parliament.

I’ve scanned the pages or you can also get the WBTimes article online.

What they’ll do for you

What they'll do for you

YouElect is a non-profit and independent British Muslim grassroots initiative aimed at promoting voter registration and political engagement. I’ve just looked up Brent Central where Sarah Teather is the Community Choice Candidate, commended by both the British Muslim Initiative and  salaam.co.uk.

Dawn Butler and Sachin Rajput are also profiled on the YouElect site.

Is Barry Gardiner standing as an independent? You’d think he doesn’t want to be associated with Labour from the look of his campaign materials. See the full leaflet at The Straight Choice.

Brent’s Labour Group formal apology for issuing leaflets with defamatory claims about Sarah Teather is on page 4 of the WB Times this week.

Dawn Butler apologises to Sarah Teather

The Straight Choice election leaflet project is an archive of election leaflets distributed throughout the campaign. This is a helpful thing to be doing as …..

1) Promises that candidates make in their leaflets can be compared to what they promise to do elsewhere. In the future we can also compare the voting record of MPs with what they promised on the campaign trail.

2) It helps catch parties or candidates who are breaking electoral law – 2 parties have been reported to the authorities based on leaflets uploaded to TheStraightChoice.org in the past couple of weeks.

and

3) We get to see how the corporate identity of the main parties messages are tightly managed nationally.

Check out Brent Central, Brent North and Hampstead and Kilburn at the StraightChoice website and join in.

Democracy Club website helps us to hold candidates to account, and stimulate public engagement in the campaigns for local and national elections. Big job… lots of small tasks. The website helps residents to track and contact candidates, create local issue lists and track the responses from candidates.

Check out Brent Central, Brent North and Hampstead and Kilburn at the DemocracyClub website and join in.

LibDem Voice has some news on Brent Centrals dirty politics.

Labour Minister Dawn Butler has issued a legal apology to Sarah Teather for calling her a hypocrite over MPs’ expenses. Butler made the accusation while the running of Sarah Teather’s office was under investigation. The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner later dropped the investigation because there were no grounds to suspect any wrongdoing by Ms Teather.

This issue came up at the MapRA Hustings on Monday night. There was a question from the floor on expenses which had Dawn attempting to justify £66,000 ACL since 2005 for her Wembley second home, when she has another property in Stratford. As we know, Sarah Teather has not claimed the second home / additional costs allowances. Dawn did well and may have carried it, but a follow up question on Brent Labours’ smear campaign and the ficititous complaints to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner about Sarah Teather by someone from Dawn Butlers team made a stench. Sarah announced that she had received a written apology from Dawn – you can download it – and won the ‘clean up dirty expenses’ applause.

Cllr Ann John attempted a last minute clawback… however her proclaiming of a ‘citizens right to know’ sounded hollow, now that we know of the ‘false… improper…wholly untrue….’ nature of what they wanted us to know.

Bums on seats….

And more…..

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Election hustings and MapRA AGM at St. Gabriel’s Church, Walm Lane, tonight.

Click on for a map.

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Completed nomination papers accompanied by the deposit of £500 must be delivered to the Acting Returning Officer at the offices of the London Borough of Brent not later than 4pm on Tuesday, 20th April 2010.

You can view / download the election notices at Brent Council’s website.