Reading Labour Party has responded swiftly to accusations from the local Conservative party that they put out a racist leaflet referring to one of their candidates as being "one of us" by writing an open letter.
Digging around the bins of Windsor Square, Mick Spreader has discovered the original notes for their rebuttal letter:
Dear girlie Ms Swaddle
Reading Labour Party utterly rejects your clumsy attempts to smear our candidates in this campaign. We're so much better at it than you. Should you repeat publicly any suggestion that our campaign is racist in its intent we will have no hesitation in pretending that we will be taking legal action against you.
Given the infighting that has consumed Reading East Conservatives following your deselection of a senior councillor of Asian origin, and ensuing legal action, it is not surprising that you should be seeking to distract attention from political problems with your own candidates by catching us out at it ascribing false and entirely baseless motives to ours. Not surprising to us because that's exectly what we did when we tried to kick a councillor of Asian origin out of our party.
Whereas the Conservatives in Reading have elected Tories now fighting one another in the forthcoming local election, Labour by contrast is a united party and we are particularly keen to demonstrate this fact to the electorate. Nowhere is this more important to us than in Church and Redlands wards which is where we think there is greatest scope for pandering to prejudice the 'one of us' statement has been used in our literature.
Your candidate is a political turncoat who previously represented the ward as a Labour councillor until he was disowned by the Labour Group following allegations of misconduct which we failed to report to the police or provide any evidence for because if we had people would have known that it was completely fabricated made up bollocks.
At no point has our literature made any reference to your candidate's race or to where he lives because that is how dog whitling works - duh!. By contrast you have attacked our candidate for living in west Reading which is a standard tactic we use all the time. so respect to you for that!.
We are fully expecting our political opponents to draw attention to the fact that one of our candidates did resign from the party so put some crap in here about how he hated Gordon Brown. Everyone hates Gordon Brown. He has subsequently rejoined the Labour Party and we are delighted that Unison's election day funding and resources his considerable skills and experience will once again be available to Reading Labour Party. However, we did feel it was important to emphasise that he is, once again, 'one of us'. You will note that there are no ethnic minority candidates in Redlands Ward we didn't want another police investigation into postal voter fraud.
I trust you will acknowledge that no other meaning was intended in the words we used in our literature in either Church or Redlands wards and that this matter is now closed. La la la la la - not listening.
Get the agent to sign this, ta