Despite the certainty of massive postal ballot fraud on his behalf again, Jack Straw is particularly worried about losing his Blackburn seat this time. The reason is that well over half of Straw’s votes come from the Muslim Blackburn community. And this time, a credible and impressive candidate from within that community has emerged to run as an independent.
Bushra Irfan held an opening campaign preparation meeting at which entry was limited by ticket because of the fire limit, but all 200 seats were enthusiastically filled by community leaders. Straw cannot rely on a herd of Muslim voters this time.
But he can still rely on the corruption of his rotten borough. One of the great failings of the British electoral system is that the Returning Officer is the Council chief executive and in Labour authorities that is a highly politicised post. There was a time when you could rely on honesty in public life: that is not true now, and certainly not where New Labour are concerned.
Bushra Irfan has erected a large election poster in her own garden of her own property. Within three hours, several men from Blackburn council arrived to take it down on the grounds Bushra did not have planning permission to erect a hoarding.
What speed, and what an incredibly efficient council!
Election advertising is in fact exempt from planning permission regulations as class E of schedule 1 of The Town and Country Planning (Control of Advertisements) (England) Regulations 2007 which exempts:
An advertisement relating specifically to a pending Parliamentary, European Parliamentary or local government election or a referendum under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000(a).
However that won’t stop Blackburn Council, which has no concern at all for the law when it comes to organising Jack Straw election victories. I still recall their blank refusal to allow me the use of public rooms for election meetings when I stood against Jack Straw.
I pointed out to the council electoral administrators that not only did candidates have a right to public rooms for meetings, but the returning officer had a legal obligation to maintain a register of such rooms in state schools and community centres, and to make the list available to candidates at any reasonable time. The council simply replied “We don’t do that in Blackburn”.
When I telephoned the Electoral Commission to complain, they said enforcement of the law was the job of the local returning officer. When I told them that it was the returning officer I wished to complain about, they said there was no way to do that.
Phil,
You’ve said exactly what I’ve been trying to say but you have more expertise. This government of National Unity is being engineered in the opinion polls and the media right now and will be fixed with electoral fraud.
You don’t have to be religious to realise that what’s happening to the Palestinians, at the hand of Israel, is an ongoing crime against humanity.
I’m continually astonished at how those nice people at the BBC provide ongoing cover to these Israelis to continue their crimes.
They’re being slaughtered and ethnically cleansed in your time.
You don’t have to tell your children and grandchildren you watched and did nothing
Please use all your resources to defend these pitifully defenceless people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHy1xpznE48&feature=player_embedded#at=26
Anno, I think your analysis of T.E Lawrence and his political descendants and the nature of Orientalist colonialism/ neocolonialism is spot-on. Thank you for providing such an astute schema.
Of course, as you know, the West will also back/ install dictators – but will do so only for as long as they are controllable, useful puppets – my earlier point somewhere or other about Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin. It’s really any arrangement that facilitates economic and military hegemony. But divide-and-rule is the preferred homeostasis.
Rock on, brother!
In these contexts, see Badruddin Gowani’s excellent site:
http://globeistan.com/
“I am puzzled – the post at 12.58pm is not from me. My last was at 9.31 this morning??? Has another person of the same name joined in or is someone playing a game?” Original Mary
Original Mary, your virtual persona has been taken-over by another life-form, a silicon mirror-being who, I sense, espouses diametrically opposed views to you. An anti-matter alien, who arrived all clean and shiny in a pod from Vauxhall. A psychopoliticophysical exorcism is called-for! Anyone have a screwdriver?
I was at most of the protests outside the Israeli Embassy in January 2009 whilst the atrocities of Cast Lead were being enacted on the civilian population of Gaza.
The protests were entirely peaceful until the riot police in their gear arrived (with their barking dogs) moving forward to compress the crowd who had filled that narrow part of Kensington High Street. I observed them following orders over their walkie talkies. I had left before the violent scenes took place but it was obvious from the many videos and reporting that kettling had taken place and that there was police violence.
75 young people have been arrested (hear about the dawn raids and handcuffing in the video) and many have been given draconian prison sentences by a Judge John Denniss at Isleworth Crown Court There has been very little reporting in the MSM needless to say.
I missed this piece on Newsnight but thank goodness for Joanna Gilmore who has made a study of what took place and the sentencing.
This from Medialens –
Are The UK Police and Courts Out Of Control?
Posted by redadare on April 4, 2010, 7:46 am
In case you are thinking of joining the next free Gaza demo, prepare yourself for the full force of the UK police state.
Newsnight (!!!) reports on an investigation by Joanna Gilmore, Lecturer at Manchester University, into the protests against Operation Cast Lead last year, this is what was found.
“Disproportionate number of people arrested”
“Of the 75 people arrested, 65 were charged with violent disorder, … is one the most serious public disorder offences”
“Jake Smith was lucky to have a laywer who’d spent hours unpaid going through the videos, yet the lawyer was then legally forbidden from sharing what he saw with other defendants”
“People were charged separately with seperate trials … an undertaking that which I’ve not seen the like of before, that we were not allowed to disclose our video evidence to anybody else”
“Almost all of those charged were Muslims. They were generally young Muslims”
“Most people were arrested in dawn raids, where the police targetted particular communities ”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzGGoM4zHpI&playnext_from=TL&videos=Zsk1Elb90Vs&feature=sub
a~
Definitely a deterrent to future protests. Is there a police state? Have we got a Fascist government? Are NuLabour pro Israeli? Is the Pope a Catholic?
Again, MJ is right. Although postal votes are not directly observed, the probability of a postal vote being fraudulent can be strongly inferred from exit poll results. This is the rather interesting area of ‘forensic statistics’ and can be surprisingly powerful. As a curious example, in WW2 troops were asked to record and report the serial numbers of any captured or abandoned German tanks. On the reasonable assumption (if you think about it a bit) that there are probably as many serial numbers above the highest seen as there are below the lowest seen (and you know how many there are below the lowest seen) you can work out how many tanks have been built. The Germans found out, and began to to randomize their tank serial numbers.
Statistical arguments are sometimes easily waved away, however. Before re-organistaion, the old Monklands area (east of Glasgow) had 17 (Labour) councillors, all of them Catholic. The probability of getting 17 out of a sample of 17 of one particular type from a population containing 20% of that type by chance alone is 1.3 x 10^-12, or about one in a trillion. Nevertheless Labour have always insisted that their selection procedures are not sectarian.
‘Definitely a deterrent to future protests. Is there a police state? Have we got a Fascist government?’
No, this is the British method of implementing a totalitarian regime. They’re avoiding a head on collision by not banning demonstratrions outright. Bit by bit they’re putting people off demonstrating by kettling, injuring, murdering and now with their compliant judges handing out the longest sentences possible. Well it won’t be much different living outside prison from inside.
The Miners’ Strike, 1984. Cable Street, 1930s. Special Branch was founded around 1919, I think, as an anti-Irish-Independence explicitly political police force. The Peelers were set up by Robert Peel in the mid-C19th to protect the property of the new bourgeoisie. Nothing new, in essence, but it is new in the sense of there being an intensification of the systemic politicising of the already-politicised police in favour of global imperial war.
Laz Taz’s mother stinks.
When you think about it, if Craig has put up this blog for sensible discussion and someone uses it just for trolling, then new tactics have to be employed.
In fact, moral relativism demands a change in strategy, relative to the disruption, even if moral absolutism doesn’t.
There’s no point being stuck in a marriage where your partner male/female goes out everyday shagging, while you sit at home looking after the children and earning your living. The nasty side of feminism/male chauvinism is when one party is abiding by the rules, and the other isn’t. You have to escape and establish moral absolutism again. Believe me, you do.
I have to abide by the rules as an electrician, but there are plenty of competitors and customers who want to cowboy it while they sit on benefits. They are not going to get penalised by the rules.
Bankers who control the money supply know when to sell and when to buy because know the timing of the highs and lows. Any body who sits comfortably above the law, such as superpowers who ignore the Geneva convention, political agitators who are given asylum in the West while civil war rages through the country they have escaped from, people on benefits who don’t have to conform to work rules, priests and imams who collaborate with authority against the people who adhere to their religion, and indeed trolls on liberal blogs, – they have all got you by the goolies. You can not and must not just sit there following the rules yourself, while your name is passed on to the authorities, which are in the various examples given above, your own family, your bank, your Building Inspector, your government, your MI6 anti-terror department, or even your blog owner.
” Do you have a lead for that blog, Sir, during the lambing/election season?”
What to do? Abandon moral absolutism and adopt moral relativism? Temporarily maybe while you make your case and try to understand your situation. If you see yourself caught in a trap and consistently having to break the rules, or if your case for removing the annoyance is rejected, you have to move on, and find a place where absolute values are respected and protected by an honest regime.
The blog owner can if he chooses sit above the blog not participating in the thread except to regulate the discussion. Larry’s race card, of anti-semitism, or any other false victim excuse is a last resort of a lost cause.
Gordon Brown lets off the bankers by accepting their statement that they are poor little suffering bankers in a world-wide recession.
Call a spade a spade. The UK and US establishments have conducted three devastating, totally illegal, genocidal invasions, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. The same UK and US criminal class as bankers have destroyed the Western economies. Then they have the gall to claim that they are the victims.
Sufficient is the Editor of the universe as a witness, that the portrayal of themselves as victims will not be accepted, but the real victims are also obliged not to be passive recipients of oppression.
I don’t think the Council has a right just to remove a poster under the Town and Country Planning Acts unless it either serves an enforcement notice (which takes ages to go through the system) or a stop notice. Has it done this? OPr have I missed something?
The landlord could remove it if it’s a council house (I don’t think Blackburn has any nowadays) or social housing under a housing association (in which case the HA would take the action not the council).
Tony Greaves
My laptop mysteriously switched itself off before I had finished. Gordon Brown also uses the race victim card when he claims this poor little country, that never did anything to hurt anybody, never stole anything or thought about using a proxy dictator to steal for it, is a victim of Islamic terror. It’s pathetic. It’s positively Larryesque. The other side of Laz is Taz. Whingeing victim on one side of the coin, ruthless aggressor on the other. We see off Larry on the blog. When is someone going to see off this creep of New Labour spin? Certainly not Her Majesty’s opposition.
Thank you Tony for pointing this out again, not many Independent new candidates know this.
I hope that we can somehow support Bushra, I hear she is yet to appoint an election agent.
The problem is that councils assume that unexperienced candidates do not know about the laws that govern election, even some experienced candidates do not know everything, including myself.
Add to this the reality of the situation as pointed out by Mary, legitamite protests is crushed with judicious rigmarole. Government is using systems designed to deliver justice, for its own agenda, covering up their misdemeanors, they use the judisciary to apprehend, divide and ostracise its society.
Jack Straw is a kin/lynchpin of this undermining of the public, creeping fascism would not be far off the mark.
Secret allegiances by Government ministers, aims of other states are more important than their domestic issues, thats wrong and Independents are partial to some of this treatment.
Once again, if you are up near Blackburn, support Bushra in her campaign, Jack Straw is wobblin’.
‘This is the British method of implementing a totalitarian regime.’
Ruth puts it in a nutshell, and it explains her parallel concern about a hung parliament. If all three party leaders agree on the victim card that we are poor little victims of 1/ Islamic terrorism and 2/ a global recession, instead of admitting that we are principle agents of these two problems, then we are in effect kettled.
Unable to escape, we have to relieve ourselves in public in a smelly underground station entrance, otherwise known as a dissident blog, and we can’t leave without giving our names and addresses. I am using kettling as a metaphor for our position after the election. Ruth is right to be worried that unity of lying by all three leaders could enable them to crush all opposition. Not just demonstrators but also blog protestation.
Just as Martin Luther found protection from within the establishment, I believe that God is merciful and will provide protection in some quarter of our political establishment. The solidity of the global oppressors of our time looks stronger than it actually is. Who dared criticise the mighty Maggie about the Poll Tax. Just three M.P.s, one of whom was true blue William Benyon, whose library books I spent many weeks repairing. But who wasn’t ready to stab her in the back after she was gone?
We are standing at the threshold of a revolution as important as the removal of Papal domination. It is an unstoppable force, in spite of apparent strength of the establishment. You only have to think about the icons of their power, Prince Philip, corgis, electronically-gated mansions in the English countryside, penthouses of power in the City, to know that their time has finished. It is spring and new ideas are pushing through from outside this country, from Japan, India and China, as well as from Islam.
Vronsky Re your 9.44 post:
Your tank serial-number story is an example of the practical use of what scientists call the principle of mediocrity.
While I usually agree with the things you write, I must take issue with your probability estimate in the second paragraph. When attempting to calculate probabilities, it is good practice to make a list of the assumptions that one is making. In this case you are assuming that the Labour party membership has the same proportion of Catholics as the general population. Given the tendency towards sectarianism in that part of the UK your assumption is unlikely to be true. If one starts off with a figure based on a dubious assumption the result can be completely meaningless. It seems far more likely that at that time the local Labour party membership was mainly Catholic.
@MarkU
Thank you for the intelligent response. Of course you are right, and there are many pits and traps between a simple observation and what it might or might not mean. My more considered view is that there is a nexus between the Labour Party and the Catholic community (to which I belong) which at one time was functionally practical, and politically and morally positive – or at the very least defensible. Indeed there are cultural and important (if depressing) historical reasons why the membership of the Labour Party in the central belt is unrepresentative of the population at large. But I’m a maths freak. Tune the the numbers as you please, but you can never arrive at a score that says anything except that the Labour Party in the West of Scotland is a sectarian cult.
Just had a knock on the door from the New Labour agents, ( Pakistani ) of the exceedingly racist Liam Byrne M.P.
I provided them with an A4 photo of their candidate with a two-pronged snake’s tongue protruding from his lips. Their argument is that all parties have the same foreign policies. Last year I called them munafiq, which means hypocrites. I don’t have a worse word to call them. They know about Islam, but they side with those who attack Islam.
Liam Byrne… forgive my ignorance, which constituency is that, anno? You did well, sending away election agents for a govt with the record of the current one, esp. if your MP isn’t anti-war, etc.
Liam Byrne is M.P.for Hodge Hill. His meteoric rise to being a member of the cabinet is due to his skill at arranging popular meetings which are opposed to immigration and claiming that these meetings represent majority opinion.
Rule not of mediocrity but of downright lies. His style, like Hazel Blears’, is to draw the conclusion that because one or two unscrupulous local councillors agree with New Labour, it follows that they are representative of the silent majority who disagree.
He isn’t local, he is a New Labour nerd. He gets local projects done and sends out questionnaires about our concerns. My main concern is that known war criminals are able to live and move freely around the UK without being arrested and tried. Nice bloke, shame about the hissss.
Anno
“Saddam Hussain was a thousand times better for Iraqis than the present democracy. The problems came when politicians backed by Western powers, challenged the dictator.”
Wait a moment wasn’t everyone saying that he was gassing Kurds and Iranians when the US was his ally. You guys need to get your story straight.
But at least there we have it gassing your own citizens is a thousand times better than democracy. And I’m the one who is accused of being a fascist!
Last post was from me
I’m loving it Anno. I’m calling him Kaa from now on.
Why did Rothschilds give him an interest free loan?
Why did his ‘venture’ EDS get a Govt contract?
etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liam_Byrne#External_links
I bet that if he had been in the HoC in 2003 he would have voted for the Iraq war.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/liam_byrne/birmingham,_hodge_hill
Look at his voting record and his Register of interests entry.
See how he rose very quickly to a powerful position. Students’ Union, MBA from Harvard, Accenture, Fulbright scholar, employee of Rothschilds, advisor to Bliar,MP, Govt. Minister…a well worn path.
No slouch but I would love to see the smile wiped off his smug face.
Stephen it is to do with numbers. what you call democracy, non-Zionists call genocide.
In 06 the Lancet put the death to 655 000.
So how much is it now, and how high would it need to get before you stop using the word democracy and start using genocide like everybody else?
Now even the British and the American government have realised that it was completely wrong to invade, even some of the people who pushed for the invasion have now recognised it was a crime.
But to you Zionists it is a democracy!!
Just like you lot call the genocide the Zionists inflicted on the Palestinians the creation of a new democracy.
Stephan, stuff your Zionist democracy up your arse!!!
Interesting, Mary, thanks for providing the info. Byrne is clearly another brick in the wall. I assume, btw, that you are the ‘original’ Mary again and not the interloper.
I simply used your own words – not mine.
So who should challenge fascist dictators who gas their fellow Muslims, or those who blow up innocent Muslims and others as suicide bombers. Or can these crimes against humanity be excused by the crimes of others including the Zionists using the perverse logic in which you revel?
BTW you seem to have something of an anal fixation which you need to get sorted out.
Love and kisses.
PS I think in future I will just ignore your obnoxious and ignorant postings.
“So who should challenge fascist dictators who gas their fellow Muslims”?
The people living under that dictatorship, Stephen, I suggest.
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
Technicolour
And what if they need some help??? Would you have applied the same argument for not fighting the Germans in WW2. What do you think Orwell would have made of that argument when it came to fighting the fascists in Spain?
You should perhaps remember that the appeasers used the very same arguments in the 1930s.
Dental hygenist
I bet you do – you can almost hear the grinding of teeth!
What I wrote on: arsalan at April 4, 2010 10:26 PM
Makes me me look like a real Nazi doesn’t it?
Unless it was typed by a Zionist Nazi who is too thick to type his own name in the “Name:” box?
What that Nazi is saying is, because a dictator killed some people during a war it is ok for America to go in and kill about 10% of the population?
What kind of Nazi are you?
I have said it before, and I will say it again, Zionists are Nazis!
Each and everyone of them.
No one else would use that type of logic.
People here should look at what stephen writes and realise, Iraq wasn’t invaded for oil, it was invaded for Israel.
Everyone recognises that the numbers that were killed invading Iraq was too much. Everyone except the Zionists!
All they have noticed is one of Israels enemies are gone. Every Iraqi death is seen as a victory to the Zionists, as they view each death as one less potential enemy.
It was the Zionist Neocons who pushed for the war. They were on the left, and when they saw the left didn’t want wars for Israel they changed sides to the right.