Stalinism in the Conservative Party?

One of the things us bloggers do is keep an eye on our stats. Every so often we spot an unusual pattern. At the moment there is an extremely unusual pattern occurring. A blog I posted last April has suddenly started getting dozens of hits for no apparent reason. What could be going on? All I know is that people up and down the country are sending each other emails and linking to the page. This is the page :-

http://barneteye.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-tories-become-new-stalinists.html

I thought I'd revisit the blog to see what they could possibly be finding so interesting. Now in a rather Stalinist move, the organisation I was blogging about -  The Conservative Political Officers Network removed the page which I linked to in the blog. Anyway, here's the next best page that still exists which explains what this mob do :-

http://cpon.info/about/

Now here's the disturbing bit. From their aims and objectives page :-

Since then, CPON has grown with local authority demand for political assistance supporting elected members. We continue to maintain the original aims of providing a support network for Conservative political officers, but have expanded in recent years to provide a consultancy service to local authorities considering creating political officer positions.

 The Barnet Eye passionately believes that if a Councillor needs "political assistance" from a member of CPON (or anyone else), they are not up to the job. We also believe that the last thing local authorities should be wasting taxpayers money on is Political Officers. The mere term Political Officer stinks of Stalinism. The idea that elected representatives need these sort of people to "Help" them is abhorrant to me and the fact that Local Authorities pay the wages of an openly political officer merely to ensure that Councillors tow the party line rather than follow their consciences is disgusting.

Needless to say, Barnet Council employ one of these. They would rather pay a political officer's wages than a few Sheltered Housing Wardens. I asked a Conservative Councillor whether he thought that this was a good use of public money. He told me that "He'd read my comments about CPON and thought I was ignorant, naive and stupid" He told me I knew nothing about how a modern Council is run and what the job of a Councillor is.

Let me just say one thing for the record. In the event of the electors of Mill Hill giving me the privilege of representing them, I will represent them to the best of my ability. If anyone starts giving me political advice as to why I should ignore my conscience they will get told two words, one starts in F and the other is "off". As I said, if you need a Political Officer to tell you how to think, you aren't up to the job.

As ever, you dear reader can make up your mind as to whether I'm "ignorant, naive and stupid" or whether I'm right.