In the interests of public welfare, I post no photo of Wendy Alexander. If you thought Alisher Usmanov was ugly, you should see Wendy Alexander. Strangely, she is actually photogenic, in that her stunning, almost superhuman level of repulsiveness in the flesh does not really come through in photos, where she just looks plain ugly.

Anyway, the leader of the Nulab minority in the Scottish parliament has been caught not only with her own dodgy donations, but blatantly lying about them. A stream of documents leaked from her private records include a signed personal letter of thanks to a donor she claimed never to have heard of. Best of all is a document from her husband’s computer listing donors in one column and their false identities in the next.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.1874620.0.the_lies.php

The Nulab strategy at the moment is to use their control of the BBC in Scotland, the Scotsman, Daily Record and most of the other Scottish media to prevent anyone learning the facts of the case. The Sunday Herald has done a very good job to try to break through that.

The Procurator Fiscal in Scotland is not quite as well buttoned up by New Labour as the Met and, especially, the Crown Prosecution Service are in England. So Ugly Wendy may yet be the first senior NuLab figure to go to jail. I do hope so.

I am not in general prejudiced against ugly people. It does not inevitably follow that their ugliness is a metaphoric reflection of their inner disposition. But in Wendy’s case, it is. If you are very ugly, dear reader, please don’t be offended, I mean you no harm.

Anyway, I strongly urge MSPs to carry cheques with them and to wave them at Wendy every time she stands up to speak in Holyrood.

This gentleman is Bennie Abrahams, father of David Abrahams aka David Martin, Labour’s “property developer” peculiar donor, whose ability to get planning permission for major developments in areas next to the A1 where development is banned, is of course in no way related to his secret donations to New Labour.

Bennie Abrahams was a Labour Councillor in Newcastle for decades including throughout the 1960s, when he was one of T Dan Smith’s men in what was perhaps the most famously corrupt local government in British history, with the Poulson scandal only a chip off the tip of a very large iceberg. David inherited most of his massive property portfolio from the beautiful Bennie whose relationship with T Dan Smith was unlikely to have been unhelpful to the development of those property interests.

It is particularly interesting to me as I met T Dan Smith, as a small child, in our house in Peterlee. I am not sure if I also met Poulson. My father had a gaming business, Cam Automatics of Seaham Harbour, operating in Newcastle and throughout the North East, and he had to “keep happy” the Labour Party bigwigs who controlled all the various licensing bodies, including Newcastle City Council. He told me that Get Carter was an absolutely accurate portrayal of the atmosphere of those times, of the complex interlinking between all types of organised crime and local government, and of the levels of violence often involved.

It may have a smoother face now, but I learnt in standing for election in Blackburn that the corruption, both financial and procedural, arising from long term Labour domination of councils is as hard-nosed and vicious as ever. Scotland has countered this by introducing proportional representation for local elections, effectively eliminating one party mini-states. England is of course a comparatively benighted country.

As our political parties have become ever more monolithic, with huge staffs and huge advertising budgets, they have also all become less popular, with party memberships and voting turnout both tumbling. These two developments are linked. The major political parties are no longer groups of people working for a common belief, but large corporations attempting to get their hands on the levers of power for the enormous personal benefit this brings to those who control them. The local campaign and efforts of local people in a constituency, on the whole, is now drowned out by the massive national advertising and coverage of huge, expensively glitzy rallies.

The answer is to cap donations, from companies, individuals and trade unions, at £10,000 a year, and for parties simply to shed their armies of spinners and researchers, and dispense with control of every billboard in the country at election time. A candidate in a constituency election has “strict liability* for offences like bribery and treating. He has no defence of ignorance if someone from his campaign does it. Similarly any donation offences should be of strict liability, with Party Leader, Chairman and Treasurer all liable to three years imprisonment for any offence.