The campaign to remove Labour MP for Bristol East and Twitter Tsar Kerry McCarthy – known by the Twitter hashtag #kerryout – hasn’t really lived up to it’s early promise. At first I supported it, as a new way to help Conservative candidates remove Labour incumbents. But it reall hasn’t live up to its early promise – yet, at least.

The kerryout.net website was supposed to be a “spectacular”, but the reality is nothing of the sort – it uses Blogger as a website CMS, to start with! The best of it it is the header image. Plus the content itself is not much cop. The reasons that are given for getting rid of Kerry are:

1. She has taken a lot of expenses
   She’s an MP! Pretty much all of them have.
   
2. She’s a “slavish party tool, she has NEVER broken the Labour Whip in her entire dismal career. NOT ONCE.”
   She’s a Labour MP. She’s never likely to vote against her party!
   
3. She’s Labour’s “Twitter Tsar”
   A rather silly reason to target her specifically, really.

I disagree with targeting her in such a way on these grounds – Kerry is no worse an MP than most of her Labour colleagues (and I’m sure a number of Lib Dem and Conservative MPs as well). For a campaign against any MP to be organised on this basis by people from outside of the constituency to this extent is wrong.

It is up to the Bristol East Conservatives to work to get Kerry out – and the people of Bristol East to decide whether to vote for her or Adeela Shafi.

Don’t get me wrong: I support the principle of #kerryout, just not the way it has been done. We definitely should campaign to get Labour MPs voted out and replaced by Conservatives, but not like this. We can do better.