Seems that Peter McKay at The Daily Mail has read The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. He published my anecdote about Prince Philip’s views on MPs, a few hours before I did!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1183970/PETER-MCKAY-Crown-sits-uneasy-crisis.html
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/prince_philip_o.html
Have flitted this afternoon to a new server. Sorry people couldn’t comment for a few hours.
From Nadine Dorries’ Blog. Republished Without Permission.
This is a photo of troughing Tory MP Nadine Dorries at the Classical Brit awards. The British taxpayer pays over £20,000 a year to maintain her constituency home in Bedfordshire, because she declares she lives at her main home – in the Cotswolds!
Dorries has admitted deliberately concealing from her constituents that she has her main home neither in her constituency, nor near Parliament.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/iain_dale_is_a.html#comments
Dorries’ guest and escort on this occasion, the one looking slightly less stupid in the photo, is Iain Dale, the Tory blogger. Dale has robustly defended Dorries’ home claim on the taxpayer on his blog as “Within the rules”. At the same time, Dale has condemned as “Shameless” Dorries’ fellow Bedfordshire MP, Margaret Moran, for having her second home in Southampton, which Dale calls “100 miles from the constituency and 100 miles from London”.
Just like the Cotswolds, in fact. So why is the same thing OK for Dorries but shameless for Moran? Because Dorries is Tory, Moran is Labour and Dale is a hypocrite.
But at least he has a fun and free social life.
Update: More good stuff on Nadine Dorries’ expenses here. I hope that the good voters of North Norfolk note that Dale endorses all of this, and continue to have the good sense to reject him at the ballot box.
http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/05/17/more-questions-about-nadine-dorries-expenses/
From The Catholic Orangemen of Togo, p. 132, on the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to the Ghanaian parliament:
“The Prince laughed heartily, and we arrived at the Parliament building in high good spirits.
There he was first shown to a committee room where he was introduced to senior MPs of all parties.
“How many Members of Parliament do you have?” he asked.
“Two hundred,” came the answer.
“That’s about the right number,” opined the Prince, “We have six hundred and fifty MPs, and most of them are a complete bloody waste of time.”
Perhaps Prince Philip had a point.
The striking MP troughing story today is about MP Ben Chapman, who was allowed to continue claiming his mortgage payments despite having paid off his £279,000 mortgage. This still shocks despite eleven solid days of this.
One fascinating thing is just how many MPs appear to have been able to pay off their large mortgages, despite only having a salary of £68,000 per year. That speaks volumes.
Let us pause to remember the biggest criminal in the House of Commons, Tessa Jowell, who not only paid off her mortgage, but did so three times, using Mafia money.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2006/02/normality_and_t.html
Hopefully we will see what Jpwell’s expenses claims looked like during this fascinating period.
Most of you appear to read this blog at work, as readership drops at the weekend. So please do look at this piece I did on the really appalling hypocrisy of Tory blogger Iain Dale.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/iain_dale_is_a.html#comments
Iain has the number 1 blog on the Wikio rankings. If people want to read blogs that are simply a vehicle for party propaganda, that of course is their right. But I would hate people to be under the illusion they were getting anything more thoughtful or independent just because it is a new media fomat.
Nadine Dorries’ admission that she deliberately concealed from her constituents that she lives neither in London nor in her constituency, is appalling. Dale and Dorries are close – he was recently her escort and guest to the Classical Brit awards at the Royal Albert Hall (another freebie for the tireless trougher Dorries?). But his defence of Dorries, when he viciously attacks non-Tory MPs for the same kind of offence, shows Dale up for what he is.
Dale is in fact a double hypocrite. Having defended Dorries for claiming £22,000 a year for a constituency home when her main home is in the Cotswolds, but attacked Labour’s Margaret Moran for a similar offence, he then lays in to the Telegraph editor for defending his own friends:
The allegation is that the Telegraph went soft on Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper because Telegraph editor Will Lewis is a drinking and Karaoke buddy of Mr Balls.
When Dale himself had done precisely that for his friend Dorries! The truth is that both Lewis and Dale are both part of an intricately connected metropolitan clique who lord it over the rest of us.
And Dale then goes on to produce a self-righteous ten point candidates’ pledge of his own, which includes:
I will continue to live in the constituency, among the community I serve
Looks like your pledge would exclude Dorries then Iain, doesn’t it?
http://www.iaindale.blogspot.com/
Another one of Dale’s ten personal pledges reveals the weasel nature of his words.
I will be a full time MP with no jobs outside politics
Note the “No jobs outside politics”. Dale has managed to make a good living from hoovering up various streams of Tory gravy for years. Plainly he intends to maintain these income streams inside politics if elected.
Or he would pledge:
“I will be a full time MP with no other job”, full stop.
The real problem is, that the astounding hypocrisy of Dale’s defence of Dorries while hammering Margaret Moran for essentially the same offence, shows he is completely biased towards a Tory, to the exclusion of thoughts of natural justice. And that must cast into severe doubt another one of his candidates’ pledges:
I will serve all my constituents, regardless of their politics
Only serve the Tories rather better than others, one might suspect from the Dorries case.
For a party hack, Dale is remarkably thin-skinned. He commented on my post:
And all because I linked to a post by Charles Crawford which you didn’t like.
I thought you were bigger than this. But clearly not.
Why do you always have to be so personal. “Stinking hypocrite”. No reasoning. Just insults.
I used to really think you were a person worth reading and engaging with. I no longer do.
How very sad you have reduced your blog to this level.
Actually, this has nothing at all to do with Iain linking to Charles Crawford. I was not in the least upset by that. In fact, I was so not upset by it, I’ll do it myself. Here is Charles’ criticism of me:
http://charlescrawford.biz/N5A207442111
Charles has a different political view to mine. We argue fiercely. But he is logical and consistent, and I rather like him.
I am very straightforward, Iain. When I say that you are acting hypocritically, it is because I believe you are acting hypocritically, not because you linked to Charles Crawford.
I have contempt for your view that it is wrong for political opponents to do something, but OK for your friend Nadine Dorries to do the same thing. I have invited you to expound on your defence of Dorries and explain why what Dorries did was morally better than what you (rightly) condemned Margaret Moran for.
Oh, and of course I don’t mean that you smell by calling you a stinking hypocrite. The use of metaphors from smell to describe particularly evident bad behaviour is ancient. As in Shakespeare’s Claudius:
“Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to Heaven!”
.
One of the things I really do miss about the privileged existence I gave up, is the National Liberal Club. Seated with a book in a deep leather armchair by a roaring fire on a cold day, you could watch the shades of Gladstone, Lloyd George and the young Churchill stroll by.
In the Gent’s there is a cartoon of Tory wit FE Smith. The caption informs us that he would saunter, after a good few drinks, from his law practice at the Middle Temple to the Commons, often stopping at the National Liberal Club to use the lavatory. Some members complained, and one day he was stopped in the foyer by the porter:
“Excuse me sir, you do realise this is a private members’ club?”
Smith looked around him and sniffed:
“A club? I didn’t realise it was a club as well!”
Anyway, I really miss the place. I was a member for well over twenty years but I can no longer afford the fees. But why I recall the NLC now, is that it was specifically built following the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, to provide accommodation for working class Liberal MPs who could not afford a second home in London.
Sadly the bedrooms were sold off a few years back to the Royal Horseguards hotel, but surely this is the way to go? Out of London MPs should be provided with the use of a small flat in a dedicated block at public expense. That, their salary and travel to their constituency should be all they are given. I can see no evidence to suggest that the quite excessive office and staff budgets they have nowadays, have done anything to increase the quality of government.
I remember sitting under Caribbean skies at the Preparatory Committee for the UN Law of the Sea Convention. As we discussed thorny compromises over the regime to govern extraction of minerals from the bed of the deep sea, my friend Dolliver Nelson would break into flights of poetry. As many Jamaican weeks were passed, Dolliver introduced me to the extraordinary passion for the English language of Caribbean intellectuals of his generation. It was through Dolliver that I started avid reading of CLR James and Derek Walcott.
Walcott is a great poet. It is appalling that the politically correct brigade have drummed him out of the election for Oxford Professor of Poetry.
We live in a society in which any expression of male heterosexuality seems to be anathematised. It appears sex is supposed to happen nowadays without the male ever suggesting it, either verbally or by caress.
Nothing has ever been proven against Walcott. The accusations, even if true, do not amount to anything near rape or forced physical abuse. It is alleged that he came on rather strongly, decades ago, and was rebuffed. It is alleged he was petulant after being rebuffed.
It would be difficult to find, for example, great visual artists who did not sleep with their models. Should we empty the National Gallery? Pretty well all the Pre-Raphaelites and Impressionists would have to go, for a start.
Burne Jones and Rosetti. Picasso, Degas, Gauguin? All appalling sexual harassers! Burn their paintings!
Ruth Padel comes out of this very badly. If she had any honour, she should resign. It is plain by her website she is a desperate self-promoter. Her latest poem centres on a fantasy of dominating the male:
He brandishes
his pair of ring-ridged horns, arcing back
like sabres. But mine are one metre fifty.
I force him down, rough him up
and suddenly as he came he is gone
http://www.ruthpadel.com/pages/mother_of_pearl.htm
If Padel’s talent only matched her ambition, she truly would be great. She is already Chair of the Poetry Society, and very much at the centre of the London clique of man-haters who were spreading the word against Walcott. Her protests now against the hate campaign are late and unconvincing.
Sometimes I really don’t like myself. A friend phoned and asked me whether they would see me at the demonstration for Palestine that took place yesterday in Trafalgar Square.
I replied “I haven’t been invited.”
Except of course you don’t have to be invited to go and swell the numbers at a demo and make your own personal statement of belief. The truth is, I am getting conceited and expect to be “noticed”.
That can partly be defended on the basis that I can use my time more productively. But it it not a pleasant trait.
Anyway, here is a video of me making a two minute speech on Gaza a few weeks ago.
I enjoyed the Eurovision song contest last night. I have more or less always watched it; great fun! Like many of my generation, I remember vividly watching live when ABBA first burst into our consciousness. In those days your musical director conducted the orchestra, and ABBA’s strode to the podium dressed as a silken Napoleon. Then the band appeared, and there can never have been a more definable, single moment rise to lasting stardom.
Last night I voted for Azerbaijan because I thought the girl was seriously hot. I was going to vote for one of the Baltic states as well on the same criterion, but couldn’t remember which Baltic state was which, as usual.
Despite the appearance of Dita von Teese, who apparently is Art, which might explain why I don’t fancy her, there was slightly less exuberant sexuality on display than last year. The pole dancer singing for Ukraine seemed rather past her sell by date, though the aerial splits were still remarkable. The Norwegian winner was like a throwback, with its ponderous tum tum tum opening beat, but all good fun.
I am not a fan of the music of Lloyd Webber, and his song sounded like a parody. It reminded me of “The Song That Goes Like This” from Spamalot. But it was still the first UK entry for ages that didn’t make my toes curl in shame, and Jade surprised me by shooting up my fanciability scale.
The staging was appalling. The British “Team” apparently had a choreographer. Presumably the wooden, unattractive and positively scowling male violinists positioned awkwardly on the stage were her idea. Jade actually contrived at one stage to hit her microphoone hand on a fiddler’s elbow. There were loads of other fiddlers on stage on the night. The others were all drop dead gorgeous girls in flimsy clothes, or hunky men with sparkling eyes. We had grouchy middle aged graceless second violins looking like they had just left a Moss Bros oddments sale. And as for having Lloyd Webber actually on view!
Graham Norton was OK, but seemed not quite confident enough to move into full mickey-taking mode. He creased me up when he suggested of Iceland that the entire nation had to chip in for the air fare. But his breathless excitement over forty minutes about whether the UK came 4th, 5th or 6th was dull.
If Cameron had not arrived, I would have been at the Globe with my sister Celia and daughter Emily instead. I haven’t really enjoyed a Globe production yet. Eurovision or Shakespeare? Life is full of strange choices.
Sorry if your recent comment disappeared. I had a massive Christian (!) spam attack overnight, and had to burn a few of the innocent along with the guilty. God will recognise his own, doubtless.
I am at a loss as to why even the most eager evangelical could think deluging a site with spam references to verses in John is going to convert anybody. Very strange.
Nadine Dorries, Tory MP, has admitted she claimed her constituency home as her “Second home” for the purposes of claiming vast expenses. So where was her first home? In the Cotswolds, apparently.
Astonishingly, Nadine admits deliberately concealing from her constituents that she did not live either in her constituency or near Parliament.
Nadine Dorries says:
I never wanted my constituents to think that I had another prime responsibility other than Bedfordshire and Parliament; maybe I should have been more open.
http://blog.dorries.org/Blogs/2009/May/16#16
How her constituents will react to being deliberately duped is an interesting question.
So what Nadine is doing is just the same as Margaret Moran is doing. Nadine is basing her claims on having two residences, one of which is neither in the constituency, nor in London. In each case, which they choose to claim on is based on which will bring in more money.
Now to Iain Dale. I already pointed out that in the case of flipping by cheap far right propagandist Michael Gove MP, Dale and other Tory bloggers suddenly had different standards to when they were dealing with identical troughing by New Labour.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/the_breathtakin.html#comments
Iain Dale waxed furious over the “Shamelessness” of Margaret Moran. He fumed that her second home was
100 miles from her constituency and nowhere near Westminster.
Now then, Nadine Dorries’ first home is
100 miles from her constituency and nowhere near Westminster.
thus allowing her to put in huge claims on her constituency home.
So presumably Iain Dale regards Nadine Dorries as shameless, yes?
No. Because she is a Tory, and a mate of his.
I don’t condemn Nadine because unlike you I know the full details of her living arrangements and they fully comply with the rules, as she will be making clear in a further post.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=6214838&postID=2915940623081992628
(11.57 pm at 15 May on this comments stream).
Sickening, isn’t it? What a mighty blogging champion Iain Dale is! When it comes to New Labour, the tired formula of “Within the rules” is not good eonugh. But for his Tory friends, it is a complete exculpation.
Come on Iain, please give us a full explanation of exactly why it is fine for Nadine to do her job from the Cotswolds, 100 miles from both London and her constituency, while the taxpayer funds her large, plush constituency home.
You know, I obviously got it very wrong. I should have been Ambassador in Tashkent from a main Residence in Cannes. That would have been much more comfortable.
Tory blogs had become very popular as showing opposition to a rightly very unpopular governemt. But what the stupid, stupid, stupid thousand times hypocrite Dale shows is that the Tories are just the same kind of tribal predators as New Labour, simply itching for their turn to get their snouts in the trough.
Dale’s credibility as a blogger has been entirely compromised by his support for the Nadine Dorries scam. Actually, he’s only a Tory version of Michael White, with a thin veneer of good nature stretched over the hard party man.
Another Tory blogger, “Dizzy Thinks”, wrote a piece entitled “The Breathtaking Idiocy of Craig Murray”. Note that typically of a Tory, he knows so little of the Celtic nations that he can’t actually spell “Craig”.
http://dizzythinks.net/2009/05/breathtaking-idiocy-of-criag-murray.html
He also was attempting to defend the troughing of Tory MPs from my attack, and he decided the best way to do this was to attack me for being, as far as I can make out from his rant, a trendy environmentalist. He included this remarkable passage on his own virtues:
“I don’t eat organic food, nor drive a Prius. I have a 4×4 and love battery farmed eggs because they’re cheap.”
Which rather makes my point about Tory bloggers. Needled into showing their true colours.
There you have it officially from Dizzy. If you support the squandering of hydrocarbons as fast as possible, and keeping hens in 8inch by 8inch cages, then you probably should indeed vote Tory. If not, don’t vote Tory becuase you will be putting people like Dale and Dizzy in power.
The Telegraph has republished Tim Ireland’s brilliant detective wrok in proving that the photogenic people endorsing the BNP on their leaflet are not supporters at all, but stock photos of models. Hilariously given the BNP’s message, they are not even British models!http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2009/05/bnp_stealing_im.asp#comments
Many congrats to Stephen Paulger as well, on this site which is new to me
http://www.newspeak.org.uk/2009/05/13/british-national-party-voters-dont-exist/
This is what the BNP pretended to look like
This is what the BNP actually look like
Britain’s most disgusting journalist, New Labour creep and Jack Straw cheerleader Michael White, is on Sky News trying to justify his New Labour chums. He has just let us know that a middle ranking minister, a “Good Chap”, has told him that he was actively encouraged to put in a claim he knew to be ineligible, by the Fees Office.
That information comes from two sources both of which I trust not at all – White and a New Labour minister. He then went on to imply that New Labour MPs are contrite and have learnt their lesson “Unlike Sir Anthony Steen”, and then wound up by warning of the danger that all this fuss will let the BNP in.
White has gone on to say that the Brits are always angry about something, and a poll has shown us to be “the angriest people in Europe”. He then said it was all parties, not just New Labour, called Cameron “Hysterical”, and rattled off the names of four MPs whose cases he thought were “Serious”, all of them Tory.
Why this odious New Labour creep is allowed so much airtime for his government propaganda hidden behind a thin veil of hearty good nature, I do not know. It is bad enough that he gets to bully everyone on the Guardian who criticises New Labour. White is Associate Editor of the Guardian and he regularly hints to other journalists that his friend the City Minister, Lord Myners, Chairman of the Guardian Media Group, will be most unhappy with their anti New Labour stories.
White is the most disgusting reptile in the British media, which is saying a lot. He is on a salary of £182,000 at the Guardian, incidentally.
Gordon Brown will not leave Downing St until the last permitted date, which is June 2010, and then will leave his fingernails in the carpet. It is no good petitioning him to resign.
It is becoming plain that all the political parties are clinging on to the speeding gravy train together and have reached a mutual agreement not to call for any of their number to resign as an MP, even if they give up the odd apointment.
This parliament has to go. We have to work with the unwritten constitution we have. The only person who can dissolve a parliament is the Queen.
The UK constitution constantly evolves. There is no recent precedent for the current total loss of public confidence in parliament. The constitution now needs to evolve to cope with the age of new media. Such a request if strongly supported would become an important political fact in itself.
This is not about whether or not you are a monarchist. (I am not). This is about channeling the unfocused public anger with Parliament into action.
http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/27778.html
(The language of the petition is respectful towards the Queen but not traditional. There is no language which would suit all shades of opinion on the monarchy. I know the Queen personally, enough to know she is not going to be insulted).
This is the uncorrected transcript of my evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights
I believe these excerpts give the key points in my evidence:
Q77 Chairman: To summarise where we are, we were not directly involved in torturing anybody in Uzbekistan, but effectively there was a chain that ended up with you in Tashkent via the CIA and MI6 in London. It is not like the allegations we have received regarding Pakistan, for example, where basically we are in the prison cell asking the questions and somebody may have been tortured. This is a much more remote chain of circumstances. Your argument is that because Uzbekistan is a country where torture is almost a way of life in that country evidence was being obtained by the CIA indirectly from the Uzbeks and then supplied to MI6 and the sum totality must have been known to ministers. Although we were not directly involved through that chain that is sufficient in your view to create an allegation of complicity by the UK in torture in Uzbekistan?
Mr Murray: I would agree with that.
Q78 Chairman: That is a summary of your case?
Mr Murray: I would add one point. My case is that because as an ambassador I was fortunately a member of the senior civil service and I was arguing against this I was able to be given high-level policy direction and be told that ministers had decided we would get intelligence from torture. The fact that ministers made that decision was the background to what was happening in Pakistan, for example. It is not that MI5 operatives were acting independently; they were pursuing a policy framework set ministerially.
Q79 Chairman: So, ministers specifically used the words “torture”, “evidence from the CIA” and “no questions: turn a blind eye”?
Mr Murray: Ministers certainly had before them and read my telegrams which said that this was torture and detailed the type of torture involved.
Q80 Chairman: What you just said was that ministers said it was okay to use torture?
Mr Murray: No; I think I said that ministers said it was okay to use intelligence from torture.
Q81 Chairman: Therefore, the inference is that it is not just turning a blind eye or “ask no questions, tell no lies”; it is specific knowledge?
Mr Murray: Nobody argued to me once that the Uzbek intelligence we were discussing did not come from torture; everyone accepted that it came from torture and the question was whether or not we accepted it. Nobody said that it was not actually torture.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa~
Mr Murray: That is a reasonable way to express it. The telegrams that I wrote at the end of 2002 and beginning of 2003 were expressed quite specifically in terms of my concern that British government ministers were acting illegally by receiving this material under UNCAT. My telegrams said that the secretary of state might be acting illegally by being in receipt of that material.
Q77 Dr Harris: Can you clarify why you think they described those telegrams as unwise? You do not quote but say that they reported in that conversation that such sensitive questions were best not discussed on paper.
Mr Murray: It is always difficult to answer why somebody said something. You can say what they said, but obviously I am not inside their minds.
Q78 Dr Harris: Did you ask why?
Mr Murray: I would like to put this to you: two telegrams were sent by a British ambassador stating that the secretary of state might be acting illegally. I did not receive any written answer to those two telegrams. It would be extremely unusual for a Foreign Office ambassador to write back on any serious policy problem and not receive any reply from the department. To send two telegrams which actually allege illegality by your own secretary of state and not get a written refutation is quite extraordinary. Instead, I was summoned to a meeting at which I was told that these things were better not put in writing. I was able to get the Sir
We are increasingly hearing the argument from our MPs that if you pay rubbish, you will get rubbish.
There are two problems with that argument. The first is that Nadira and Cameron yesterday left the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where the nurses and midwives are indeed paid rubbish, but were still absolutely brilliant.
They were motivated by something alien to so many of our MPs, a genuine care for people. They were also, for the most part, a standing rebuke to UKIP, BNP and others who knock immigrants and the role they play in our society.
The second and clinching argument is that our MPs have been looking after themselves extremely well, but they are for the most part of abysmal quality. (The same could be said of our top bankers).
In fact, the reverse of the argument is true. If you make it a gravy train, you get people who are primarily interested in gravy. Like Malik and Moran.
I was reminded forcibly on this when writing my recent post about Michael Foot. I noted that his biography of Byron, The Politics of Paradise, is one of my favourite books. He sat in a Parliament which contained scholars of the highest order. Enoch Powell, Robert Rhodes James, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland and Michael Foot are only some of the politicians of that generation who wrote books which retain academic authority. (Don’t choke. Powell was arguably the World’s leading authority on Herodotus).
In the current parliament I can only think of lowbrow effusions. Brown’s curious ghost-written monographs “On courage” are, I think, meant to point up his own courage in overcoming his (genuine) misfortunes. Michael Gove’s mad Melanie Phillips style anti-Islamic rants are astonishingly ill-researched and of no academic use except as a study in prejudice.
In fact for the vast majority of MP’s, it is hard to imagine them reading a book. let alone writing one.
That is a map of Argyll and Bute constituency taken from Wikipedia. It is huge, and as you might imagine communications around it are pretty difficult. It contains at least a dozen different inhabited islands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyll_and_Bute_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
In a straight line it is about 150 miles from its northernmost to southernmost point. As is obvious, you can’t actually travel around it in straight lines without a helicopter.
Yet those purblind London oriented fools at the Telegraph think it is a scandal that the MP, Alan Reid, claimed £1500 on bed and breakfast within his own constituency. That would be four days stay for Hazel Belars in the Clerkenwell Hotel, but it was in fact Alan reid putting in the hard miles needed to be a good MP in his wonderful constituency – which makes the best whiskies in the world.
The real scandal here is the purblind stupidity of the English idiots of the Telegraph, who thinks that North means Islington and West means Chelsea.
Michael Martin singlehandedly justifies every prejudice we Edinburgh people have against the narrow, stunted, ugly, ill-educated, self-serving, chancing whingers from the West. He shouldn’t resign. He should be ceremoniously drowned in Douglas Hogg’s moat. We’ve paid for it, so we might as well use it.
New Labour have had two Speakers in a row. That is enough. The Liberals want to foist Ming Campbell on us, but he is already as insufferably pompous as he is dull-witted. He would be a disaster as Speaker. They offer Alan Beith as an alternative, but he’s stupefyingly dull.
I am hereby declaring for Roger Gale for Speaker. He is a former Director of Blue Peter. If you can control John Noakes, Peter Pervert and Shep, then the House of Commons should be a doddle. More seriously, I worked with him on election observation in Ghana and he is dead straight, alarmingly energetic and with a real passion for democracy.
Anybody who doubts the deep, deep corruption of our parliament need only refer to the laughably light punishment given to Lord Taylor of Blackburn. He was caught red-handed offering to get legislation changed for money. He went into detail on his methodology.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html
He then, with typical New Labour arrogance, brought upon himself official criticism for the “Disdain” he showed the investigation.
His disdain was justified. They couldn’t touch him, and they didn’t. A measly one year’s suspension? Bollocks!!
Nobody outside the inane village of Westminster will think that a year’s suspension is sufficient. A year in prison would not be sufficient.
Lord Scumbag has been peddling influence for cash for decades. He has been the highest paid parliamentary “Lobbyist” for the defence industry. This site wes detailing it for two years before the Sunday Times’ investigation.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html
The modus operandus of this government, again and again, is to institute an inquiry into a scandal, with terms of reference so limited as to pre-determine the outcome. Sleazebag criminal Taylor has only been invesitgated for his willingness to go along with the Sunday Times’ fake scam.
Nobody has asked the vastly more important questions.
What did scumbag crook Taylor do for the very real millions of pounds he trousered for all those consultancies and directorships in the Defence industry since New Labour came to power?
Which of the methodologies he outlined to the disguised Sunday Times reporter did he actually use on behalf of his real defence and security clients?
Why was it worth the while of the defence and security agencies to employ this retired expert in the theory of primary school education?
How much of the influence he was peddling was actually his partner Jack Straw’s influence? How much of the proceeds did Jack Straw see apart from the admitted payment by Lord Taylor of his election expenses and by companies of hospitality events in his constituency?
We have only scratched the surface of this scandal so far.
I posted this link this morning, but it strangely vanished. I like this article. The comments are good too.
From Guido’s comments page:
Clapham Commoner says:
May 14, 2009 at 10:03 am
I walked past Harman’s house last night (Herne Hill) and there was a Range Rover outside and a ferrari in the drive.
She is a “socialist” MP and he is a union official.
Go figure.
http://www.order-order.com/2009/05/mps-crying-into-their-subsidised-beers/#comments