Labour links of 'non-political' residents featured in UKIP leaflet

A row erupted in the Manchester Evening News today over the inclusion of three local residents in a photograph used in a UKIP publication. The three residents - Bernard Caine, Irene Lawrence and her daughter Rachel - claimed that the photograph was used without their permission. The article says,

"Mr Caine, who says he has no party political affiliation but on this occasion has picked Labour candidate Mike Kane via postal vote, added: “It is diabolical.”

Irene, 67, said she only went to the meeting because her housing association asked her to go."

That Mr Caine should vote for Labour candidate Mike Kane is not entirely a surprise as they were both directors of the Parkway Green Housing Trust back in 2006/7 and worked closely together. There are a host of other organisations which Mr Caine has occupied senior positions and in which he would have worked closely with Kane.

As for Mrs Lawrence, she is far from a stranger to Mr Kane either. She was a director (for 11 years) and chairman of the Willow Park Housing Trust, and also worked closely with Kane for many years, most recently over the building of a skate park on the estate in 2010 - as featured in the Manchester Evening News which ran the story about their 'lack of political affiliations' while relegating the story about vandalism and theft from the UKIP office to a side bar.

It is not of course just Mike Kane that Bernard Caine has worked with. He was also a fellow director of the Manchester Tenants & Residents Federation Ltd with Labour councillor David Royle.

Now, it may well be true that neither Bernard Caine nor Irene Lawrence belong to the Labour Party, although I have my doubts about their innocence in that regard. Be that as it may, what is undoubtedly clear is that in an area where the Labour Party vote is weighed rather than counted it would be almost impossible to reach the chairmanship of a Housing Trust without having the whole-hearted support of the local Labour administration. Such support would hardly be forthcoming unless it was reciprocated, and they wholeheartedly supported the Labour administration.

It may also go some way to explaining why certain Labour activists were telling those who displayed UKIP posters in the windows of their social housing that they were 'their' houses, and they couldn't display UKIP posters their. Are the housing trusts as corrupt as the Labour administration? We couldn't possibly comment.
 STOP PRESS! :D

Have a look at these two pictures. Is that Bernard Caine - 'local non-political' resident - on the right at a meeting with Mike Kane and Harriet Harman at the beginning of the  by-election campaign? The second picture is definitely of Mr Caine, taken at the funeral of Paul Goggins, the former MP where he was widely quoted, not least by the BBC - "Bernard Caine said Mr Goggins was always there for his constituents" - in a strictly non-political sense.