Is this the latest Tory poster?

Guido over at the Returning Officers may just have got into the mind of CCO...

Well done dark blues

Always glad to see the Oxford boat beat the Tabs.

(Is this the way to) Amarillo?

Last night I took a well-deserved (at least I thought so!) night off, and am telling you about it as part of the quest to prove that you can be a parliamentary candidate and reasonably normal. So thanks to the Duke of Cambridge's half price cocktails, Felafel House's monster chicken sheesh and the legendary Disques Vogue, today's leafletting was done in rather a fog...

Trade unionists for Labour

Last night I enjoyed myself at the Oxford and district meeting of USDAW, the shopworkers' union in Didcot. Myself and the lovely Mark Macdonald went along to encourage their members to volunteer in the coming campaigns and to answer questions from trade unionists. And I'm really glad that we went - talking to women who volunteer their time to represent and support other staff members reminded me that this election isn't just about Iraq and asylum - it's about the difference the Child Tax Credit and free nursery places for 3 year olds and the new miniumum wage for 16-17 year olds makes. 'Cos none of those things will survive if Michael Howard is the next PM. And trade unions fought alongside the Labour party for a fair deal for women and a fair deal for workers.

So the message is - got a job? Get a union!

Young people are doing it for themselves

Went along to the elections for the Oxfordshire Reps for the UK Youth Parliament up at Brookes SU last night. I was really impressed by all the candidates, who seemed to have thought about why they wanted to be involved and to have some issues to raise that they really cared about.

I was most impressed by Emma, who wanted better sex education in schools - a cause I care passionately about. It just seems obvious to me and to Emma, though not always to parents, governors and ministers, that sex and relationships education should be a) compulsory for every child as part of the national curriculum and b) just as much if not more about relationships as about the biology of it all. Now I've said that, I'm clearly not going to get many votes from the pro-life and family values campaign now, but then I doubt I was piling them up from that quarter anyway...

I was also impressed by Rob, who had a real awareness of the multipicity of paths young people take after leaving school, and was a normal young bloke in a baseball cap fully prepared to be a representative of young people doing Modern Appreticships and E2E as well as young people doing traditional A-levels.

I know it takes a lot of guts to put yourself up as a candidate for these things, so well done to Lauren, Tom, Emma, Rob and the other young man who will be Oxfordshire's MYPs and deputy MYPs for 2005-6.

Whose right?

You may know that I spent some time in the US last year for the presidential elections, and one of the things that I hated most was watching day-in day-out protesters outside the Planned Parenthood clinic across the road from the campaign office, harrassing women and families as they went in to access reproductive medical services.

And it's scary, watching as the "moral" and "ethical" issues become more important in this election. In the US, none of us could believe that Americans could be taken in by George W. Bush's concentration on gay marriage and abortion when they're haemorraging jobs and when people can't afford healthcare. But they were.

Could it happen here? I hope not. I'm not religious, but I welcome the commitment and contribution of people of faith and the churches to the campaigns against global poverty and AIDS.

But for the leader of the Catholic Church to start telling Catholics how to vote based on abortion is outrageous. I make no bones about it - I'm pro-choice, and far from being in favour of restricting women's rights to safe legal abortions, I'm in favour of extending them. I believe that abortions should be available as early as possible, and as late as necessary - that means getting rid of archaic rules about consulting two doctors, and performing a delicate dance to say the right thing so as to get the referral. Let's actually have abortion on demand - horrible term, all it means is to make abortion like any other procedure - up to a woman and her doctor and no-one else.

But then the pro-lifers aren't going to vote for me anyway, are they? They don't seem very keen on women MPs at all... "God made man and woman compatible, not equal. He gave us separate roles. The main role of women, whether we like it or not, is to raise children - not kill them by abortion for the sake of our personal freedom."

Keep Azim in Oxford

I spoke at the Keep Azim in Oxford demo earlier today. For those of you who don't know, Azim Ansari is a first-year Engineering student at St John's College, Oxford. He and his brother Wali are refugees who fled Afghanistan four years ago and were grnated leave to remain. They learned English, Wali got a job and Azim studied fo A-levels. The Home Office has now decided that they have to return to Afghanistan, and they lost their appeal against deportation in January.

The rally today in Broad St was a wonderful show of solidarity for Azim, and I was proud to be invited to support his campaign to stay in Oxford. It goes without saying that all of us in the Oxford Labour party urge the Home Office to grant Azim and Wali the opportunity to stay in the UK. I think it's also important to be clear that demonising asylum seekers and refugees isn't an election tactic we'll be using, and I hope that's true for all the other candidates in OxWAb too.

For more information, go to Keep Azim in Oxford.

BBC Oxford also has a (rather scanty) report on the rally.