SEASIDE postcards bearing the Labour Party's "Greetings from Bournemouth" have been slammed as insensitive by Blackpool hoteliers.

The picture postcards depicting the seafront will drop through 320,000 letterboxes nationwide next month - including 1,000 in Blackpool - during Labour's Bournemouth conference as part of a recruitment campaign urging sympathisers to join the party.

But Fylde Coast hoteliers are still smarting from Labour's announcement last year that it was pulling its lucrative conferences out of Blackpool for the next three years as facilities here were outdated.

Blackpool Hotel and Guest House Association secretary Josie Hammond said: "To send greetings from Bournemouth like this is very insensitive to other locations, top of the list being Blackpool because they've been here all these years.

"It's not something they've done before and I do think they could have done it differently, such as sent out postcards with the Labour logo rather than a seaside postcard that publicises Bournemouth when they never did it for Blackpool when they were here.

"I don't think they've thought it through."

But Labour Party press spokesman Matthew Doyle said it was nothing to do with favouring the southern resort.

"This is a new campaign and if we'd been in Blackpool this year we would have sent the postcards from there. The Labour Party has always made it clear that the situation with Blackpool is a short-term rather than long-term one.

"We specifically haven't ruled out coming to Blackpool in the future. There's no doubt many people in the party have had very happy conferences in Blackpool. But while Blackpool and the Winter Gardens undergo modernisations we've done what we've done."

Blackpool South MP Gordon Marsden dismissed the charge of insensitivity. "The Labour Party has used its conferences in the past as a hook to boost membership, including those in Blackpool, and hopefully we'll be able to do it from a Blackpool perspective again."

Labour's local government conference was being held in Blackpool in February he pointed out.

Meanwhile outspoken left-wing MP Dennis Skinner has refused to desert the resort - he is due to speak at a party fund-raising dinner on Friday(September 10) at the Claremont Hotel.

Mr Skinner re-jigged his diary to fulfil Blackpool South's request for a "Dinner with Skinner" because of his affection for the resort - scene of some of his greatest conference speeches.

The event will also be a reunion for Mr Skinner and Fylde councillor Alf Goldberg, an old ally from the Socialist Campaign Group, who will be signing copies of his book, World's End for Sir Oswald, during the evening.

Tickets are £7 from the constituency office, 132 Highfield Road, tel: (01253) 344940 or Coun Mary Smith, (01253) 316515.

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