5/5/2010

The Daily Mirror today revealed the true danger of voting for a Conservative government and a Conservative MP here in Gloucester.  You can read all about the Tory agenda of cuts here.  Below is the Mirror report on the battle in Gloucester.

GLOUCESTER

If Richard Graham takes Gloucester for the Tories, it will almost certainly mean David Cameron marching into Downing Street with a majority.

The marginal, which has a Labour majority of 4,271, is 119 on the Tory hit list. They need 116 to win outright.

Old Etonian Mr Graham, a former diplomat, is up against Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda, whose parents moved to Britain from the Punjab in the 1960s.

Their backgrounds could not be more different. Mr Dhanda's dad Balbir worked as a long-distance lorry driver and mum Satrinder spent 25 years as a hospital cleaner.

Their first home in Britain was a rented room in a house in Southall where Mr Dhanda was born.

He worked with his mum as a £2.40-an-hour cleaner and night porter to help pay his way through university. He says: "People I went to school with were more intelligent than me but ended up working in warehouses - good jobs, hard-working people. But they deserved the same opportunities as people who, through the good fortune of birth, ended up in an affluent family.

"I'm a street fighter who has had to doggedly fight for everything I've got. I've taken that into politics because the people here are great and they deserve the best."