Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Oop she did it again - Labour MP praises herself for a 2nd time (and recycles her EDMs)

Readers of this blog may recall a few weeks ago I massively raised the profile of the unknown Labour MP for Gateshead East and Washington West, Sharon Hodgson, by revealing that she had lovingly lavished praise upon herself in an early day motion that slagged off Ryanair (MP praises herself)

For those of you who have never heard of Ms Hodgson, she was a union hack who was gifted the Gateshead seat in 2005, only to be dumped as a Labour candidate in the borough 18 months later (she has since re-emerged as Labour candidate for Sunderland - I'm not sure what Sunderland did to deserve that!)

Anyway, thanks to my hard work, Ms Hodgson's self-praise got a page lead in the Journal, our North East morning newspaper, and a mention in the Guardian diary column.

I was, this afternoon, doing some work on Early Day Motions from 2006 and discovered what I thought was a mistake. I found what I thought was the motion proposed by Ms Hodgson listed in the EDMs for the 2005/6 session when in fact she had proposed it earlier this year.

So I checked out the current session's list and there was the same motion except for a small difference: 2006 version slagged off Easyjet whilst the 2007 version slagged off Ryanair. Otherwise, apart from the addition of contact information about Ryanair, and the odd word, the motions were exactly the same.

And both contain the same self praise.

Interesting that recycling has taken off in this way!

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