Anders Hanson

I can’t help but see the news that two Labour MPs have reported 80 Tory MPs for non-declaration of donations as just revenge for the Tories pursuing Peter Hain.

Maybe there will be something in it, but from what I can see it all looks above board.  All parties get money from unincorporated associations, which are completely innocuous not for profit bodies that receive lots of small contributions from loads of different people.  Examples of the sorts of bodies they tend to be are council groups, 200 clubs, Conservative/Liberal Clubs (where most of the money comes from people buying a drink at the bar), friends organisations and so on.  If these Labour MPs think it is practical to monitor every person who gives money to an unincorporated association then they either have no idea how voluntary bodies are run or they have completely lost it.

Unfortunately it now looks as though we are descending in to the problems we currently have in local government with the Standards Board.  If someone from Labour reports a Tory, then a Tory reports someone from Labour - tit for tat.  It doesn’t even matter whether the allegation is found to be true or not, (no one remembers that), the aim is simply to get their own back and to ensure that the councillor gets bad publicity whilst it is being investigated (which can take months).

The real loser in all of this is the image of politics.  We have enough problems with the public thinking all politicians are crooks as it is, without two stupid Labour MPs making it worse for a complete non-story.

A posting on The Yorksher Gob blog (which I only discovered yesterday thanks to the Campaign for Gender Balance Blog Awards), has made me realise I use another bit of Yorkshire dialect without realising it.

The Yorkshire Gob mentions in the footnote to one posting about the word ’stood’:

stood is a perfectly valid Yorkshire dialect particple of the verb to stand. I would like to see it adopted countrywide over the much more unwieldy standing, but a bit of a forlorn hope.

Well I use “stood” in the same context, and it had never really occured to me that it was gramatically incorrect, and I would consider myself to be someone who largely uses English properly (except when I am writing blog entries quickly and don’t check them properly afterwards).

I can now add “stood” (in the present tense) to words like “pot” (to mean a plaster cast on your arm or leg), “mardy” (to mean someone who is being a bit sulky and angry), “nesh” (to mean a bit feeble and weak - often as a criticism of someone if they are complaining about the weather), “while” (to mean ‘to’, as in ‘we’re open 9 while 5′) and “gennel” (to mean an alleyway), as words that I have always used but that I had never realised were Sheffield dialect until someone pointed it out. I did find out about some of them when I went to university and people didn’t have a clue what I was talking about when I said that someone had a ‘pot on their leg’.

As someone who doesn’t have much of an accent, (although some Southern friends of mine would disagree), I like the fact that I do use some local words. It does at least connect me with my roots and where I grew up.