Linda Perks

I am going back to the piece I did on the 20th of August on 'fact or speculation' which was focusing on whether anyone will be standing for the General Secs position when the time came up. The interesting thing was that Mr or Mrs anon put a comment on that referring to a conversation he/she overheard on some train. I subsequently received a complain from another anon person stating that it wasn't fair on Linda Perks to be put in that position. I chose not to publish this comment as I did not wish to prolong or encourage the start of a negative exchange of comments on my blog but it has prompted me to say what I think of the whole situation and make a statement.

I worked with Linda Perks for a period of 2 years after her arrival in London when I was the Regional Finance Convenor (I was F Convenor in London 3 years before that as well) . We worked very well together and despite the rumour that she is the type to impose her will on whoever she works with this was not the case with our relationship. It is true that she does not tolerate those who simply wish to be disruptive but neither do I so despite coming from different directions we agreed on that. I also found her to be very flexible and very supporting. I can also confirm that she never tried to influence my views and had no problem whatsoever with my involvement with the United Left (they supported me) I can also state that she did not fight any proposals I came up with and more often than not she would agree to be persuaded to follow my line on finances. An example of this was the massive expenditure I got us to agree on the London European Social Forum event. So the fact is very different from thes fiction about how she works. I will go further and say that those on the Left who resisted the idea of me standing for the position of Convenor for London in 2005 made a huge mistake not because I would have been the best candidate for the job but because I would have been able to keep the balance between the different strands in London Unison. So quite honestly the United Left messed it all up for themselves and their arrogance is to blame for this. As for Linda Perks she has shown a remarkable degree of cleverness by being able to prevail and in a way achieve control over the region which is not what she was looking for when she arrived. She was simply looking to reach a balance. So in that respect I would say she is quite clever and very definitely on top of matters. I had no doubt that had I been the candidate for the position of Convenor things would have been different. So my message is to leave Linda Perks alone and attend a few courses on strategy and tactics before you get critical...