This is a genuine offer. I will pay £100 to any person who can provide a convincing reason why Denis MacShane’s expense fiddling, involving his creating false invoices, was not a criminal offence. Your argument does not have to be unanswerable – merely respectable. Up to three prizes will be given, for the three first and not essentially the same convincing arguments.
This competition specifically is open to employees of the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service; we would love to know their reasoning. It baffles me. I confess I can think of no single circumstance in this case that would prevent MacShane being convicted for theft and fraud. What is the answer?
Denis MacShane is a criminal. If he wants to try his chances with a jury, the libel courts are open to him and I am here.
I think Craig although you may not know it you answer your own question with the your posting directly below this one
“Schmarotzer”…lol. Exactly.
Exemplum, exemplum:
http://www.niklaus-heeb.ch/Bilder_links/Vign_Schmarotzer_02.jpg
Meanwhile in the land of whoops –
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/at-a-glance/main-section/moves-to-see-if-there-is-criminal-case-against-macshane-welcomed-1-5093296
See also:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12159955
@Jay
5 Nov, 2012 – 7:40 am
Sufficient numbers of the voting sheeple are informed enough today to realise that they and their needs are not represented in a so-called representative democracy:
http://mierleeu.blogspot.be/
David Cameron arrives in the Gulf for defence talks
{http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20202058}
Oh yes. ‘Defence’. Orwell again. UAE = Straits of Hormuz
A reminder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hormuz_map.png
Habbabkuk, I envy your obsession but it would be better for everyone if you found some other channels for appeasing it. I did not want to spend hours looking for la grammatica italiana on the internet so that I sent you the first entry I found. That you are not satisfied is your problem not mine. Apparently, you are convinced that no proper Italian is spoken in Rome. An interesting idea indeed. Try
http://italiangrammar.blogspot.cz/2010/09/uso-dei-tempi-e-dei-modi-verbali.html
if you can read it. It actually says it all in the title, you do not even have to open it. But perhaps It may be simpler for people like you to type “amici dei amici” into your google window. This morning I got 11 800 entries. Should you try to claim that they are all fake, then you will receive a letter from my lawyer in Milano and we can have a nice libel case. Are you a teacher or a zionist by any chance?
Off Topic
I see that David Cameron is playing his role as Head of Sales to British arms dealers in the Gulf States. He wants to keep press coverage restricted though.
From the Guardian today:
“David Cameron has arrived in the Gulf at the beginning of a low-key arms trip aimed at persuading regional powers upset by Britain’s response to the Arab spring to buy more than 100 Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets.”
“Cameron, who is irritated by claims that he uses his overseas trips to sell defence equipment to countries with questionable human rights records, has made arrangements to minimise the media coverage of the trip.”
“No 10 is restricting media coverage partly out of sensitivity to Saudi Arabia, which has been upset by Britain’s response to the Arab spring. Prince Mohammed Bin Nawaf Al Saud, the ambassador to London, recently broke with diplomatic protocol to say that Saudi Arabia was “insulted” by the decision of the Commons foreign affairs committee to investigate Britain’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.”
”Downing Street denied that the prime minister was seeking to limit press coverage of the trip.”
There is an old saying: Nothing is true until it is officially denied.
He’s a troll, Karel. His mission is to post nothing remotely on topic but pick fights with other posters. Don’t feed him, tempting as it may be.
Rowan Bosworth-Davies (rowans-blog.blogspot.com) does his usual forensic analysis of the situation and concludes that MacShane should and can be prosecuted.
.
He pertinently also notes that “earlier MPs who were also prosecuted for false accounting for expenses fraud, had their claims of Parliamentary privilege denied them”. Indeed so.
Komodo,
you are right. he is probably one of the friends of israel. A hasbara troll, to be more precise. It would be more amusing if they could find less stupid people. That man is either so ignorant to write his assumed name with an extra b or he wants to confuse us.
And see mine earlier, MikeR-
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/11/the-denis-macshane-prize/#comment-377388
Eric Illesley, ex-MP … was not reported to Labour’s disciplinary “star chamber” in 2009 unlike other MPs who have been charged, and thus was not told that he could not stand at the general election for the party.
It was only after he was charged in May last year that the party acted, withdrawing the whip leaving the MP to sit as an Independent.
He has now admitted he fraudulently claimed more than £14,000 in parliamentary expenses.
Appearing at Southwark Crown Court, he admitted three charges of false accounting.
The charges related to claims for council tax, maintenance, repairs and utility bills between 2005 and 2008.
The answer to Craig’s question is: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Should that attract the prize, please donate to MAP.
Off topic, but relevant.
This from the BBC’s piece on the Gunpowder Plot:
“The foiling of the plot had been expertly engineered by James I’s spymaster, Robert Cecil. Fawkes was subjected to various tortures, including the rack. Torture was technically illegal, and James I was personally required to give a licence for Fawkes to endure its ravages.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/guy_fawkes
“Cameron and Hammond have just been shown by the state broadcaster coming down the steps from their aircraft in Dubai. Both are wearing poppies. Both display their fondness for remembering the dead but have no feelings of guilt or moral scruples in planning more deaths.”
“Selling arms to the Gulf is the best way to protect our defence industry ”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/concoughlin/100187840/selling-arms-to-the-gulf-is-the-best-way-to-protect-our-defence-industry/
Translation: Starting WW3 is the best way to distract the people of the West from the impending collapse of the economic kleptocracy called ‘fractional reserve banking’ and the crimes of the quasi-religous criminal mob that controls it, and who Dave is actually working for.
“my belief is that the best way to avoid crime is not to invite it” – Komodo. You cannot be suggesting that Saville’s alleged victims (since we we were on the subject of paedopholia) were inviting it?
“There’s no need to put up strawman arguments” – mine was a logical extrapolation of your attempted point. I don’t have a burglar alarm, as it happens, but I would not consider that a reason or justification for you to break into my home.
Mark Golding: agree generally about the utter disregard for the safety and welfare of children in Iraq, Afghanistan and, on a different level, the sink estates here.
You’ll find Illsley (see above) here:
http://nyc.indymedia.org/media/text/boycott_is.txt
Signing the Boycott Israel Campaign letter. The mist clears for a second. You won’t find Macshane here, unsurprisingly.
Technicolour. I think you are being deliberately obtuse. You are arguing as if sex were a rational activity, and as if this particular perversion did not have many of the features of an addiction. I am NOT saying (any paedophile’s) victims are consciously inviting their attention. I am saying that even though they don’t want it*, that attention is drawn by behaviour and dress imitative of adult sexual behaviour and dress. Unconsciously.
*but see various accounts of teenage girl groupie behaviour around pop stars. To pretend that, post-puberty, sex is not a major matter of curiosity and experimentation, in both sexes, is absurd.
Readers may recall the plight of Malala Yousufzai, who was shot in the head by the Taleban.
Stories are now emerging that she had not been shot at all. Perhaps this explains why:-
* when she was originally pictured with her injury, the dressing was above her left eye, but recent pictures of her in hospital show no sign of any injury in that area.
* photos of Malala in hospital show her with hair underneath her scarf? Any medial professional will tell you that her head would have been shaved as a matter of procedure before undergoing any form of surgery to that area.
* the story was dropped like a stone from the media?
I would invite readers to search for “Malala Yousufzai” on Google Images and look at the images for themselves. Seems like it could have been a psy-op to distract from the NATO murder of 11 Afghan women the previous week.
Another point, her injury was not life threatening so why was this girl flown half-way around the planet to go to hospital in the UK (where the NHS is in decline through a lack of funding) when there are hospitals all over the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE to name a few) that are packed with the latest medical equipment at the best medical training money can buy?
Karel, what’s the matter with you?
“I envy your obsession….” : actually, it’s not an obsession, it’s simply that I’d prefer people who throw bits of a foreign language into an English text (to ompress, perhaps?)to get their grammar right.
And not to try and bluff their way out once they’ve been corrected. Your latest link (yes, I can read Italian) concerns verbs – I hadn’t realised that “dei”, “degli”, etc, were verbal forms, but was under the foolish impression that they were forms of the definite article.
Stick to Flemish, dear Karel – now there’s a real dialect for you…:)
Tot ziens!
‘why was this girl flown half-way around the planet to go to hospital in the UK’
So BBC News24 and SkyNews could bring you an hour of ‘breaking news’ and live pictures of her police escorted ambulance taking the scenic route from the airport to the hospital at 10 mph.
…and as for you, Komodo : if I were a troll there would be quite a few comments I could focus on in order to disturb discussions. It’s just that I prefer to post on things I actually know something about. An example some other commenters might do well to follow.
Not a Zionist or a friend of Israel either. Sorry to disappoint!
Komodo.
.
Signing the Boycott Israel Campaign letter probably wouldn’t have helped his standing within “New” Labour, but it’s probably not the whole picture. From reading the BBC bio you posted, he seemed to be very much from the “Old” Labour camp. Thus the expenses fraud scandal would have been a welcome opportunity for the “neolabs” to thin out a few more ideologically unsound members from within the ranks.
Komodo, they don’t need to switch their burglar alarms off. You just need the access codes.A spiv from mi5 should be able to help you with this.For a small fee of course.
“Technicolour. I think you are being deliberately obtuse.”
Not at all.
“You are arguing as if sex were a rational activity”,
I was ‘discussing’ (your word, and you claim to enjoy it) your suggestions on how to minimise paedophilia, which is the brutal exercise of power over a victim. Like rape. What has sex caused by mutual attraction got to do with either?
“and as if this particular perversion did not have many of the features of an addiction.”
Do you not think that addictions can be overcome? Or that addictions which harm/destroy others are somehow less destructive because they are addictions?
“I am NOT saying (any paedophile’s) victims are consciously inviting their attention. I am saying that even though they don’t want it*, that attention is drawn by behaviour and dress imitative of adult sexual behaviour and dress. Unconsciously.”
And yet this is plainly not true. Several posts have pointed out that paedophilia is hardly a modern phenomenon; nor do a paedophile’s actions depend on the dress style of their victims.
*but see various accounts of teenage girl groupie behaviour around pop stars. To pretend that, post-puberty, sex is not a major matter of curiosity and experimentation, in both sexes, is absurd.”
To insert a ‘but’ and to suggest that the sexual exploitation of children, and the violence inherent in it, is in any way explicable with reference to the teen hero-worship of pop stars, whether the pop stars are sick & sad enough to exploit it or not, and to conflate it with consensual experimentation or sex between teenagers would be really quite disturbing. I do not think you can possibly, seriously, be arguing along these lines. So there must be some misunderstanding.
Now lets not take our eyes of the focus by making two valid points and argue over it.
I wonder how many secret messages Cameron has received such as ” David,FFS hurry up and start this war, we need to distract the public from any further revelations.”
Humans capacities to show that they are animals at heart never seizes, however much we do not agree with finding words for it.
http://www.intmensorg.info/jersey.htm
I am saying that the matter is complex, Technicolour. Not black-and white. Now: how would you like your 14-year old daughter to dress (as near as Primark permits) like (insert current girl singer here) on a publicity shoot, go down town on a Saturday night, and get pissed? Why not? It’s not as if she’s going to come to any harm, is it?
You can probably check this for validity by talking to any policeman, btw.
The citizen MUST take SOME responsibility for his/her/its own safety, surely?
What to make of this tweet? Perhaps the dam is about to burst.
https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/265373391303884800
In the USA it appears that politicians who do criminal acts that top-level politicians have been doing (torture, assassination) “in the name of national security” (and perhaps otherwise, who knows?) are assured of non-prosecution. The boys making the decisions (about last administration’s offenders) want to be assured that the next administration will not prosecute them for the same crimes.
Thus, in the USA, we have created a class of people “too big to jail”. Seems it might be so even for smaller-fry (if McShane is a “smaller fry”) in UK.
“I am saying that the matter is complex, Technicolour. Not black-and white.”
I’d like to hear you explaining that to the four year old I know (now 20) who was abused over a period of months by her nursery carer. I’d like to hear you explaining how her clothing, or the clothing of teenagers, was to blame. I’d like to hear you explain how all this could have been prevented if only teenagers didn’t have crushes on popstars. Jesus wept.
As for the case of a fourteen year old girl who goes on the town and gets plastered in Primark gear: are you saying that this feckless, reckless innocence would give anyone any justification for abusing her? Are you? Because, I tell you what, I would want to kill the adult who did anything but help her into a taxi home. And fortunately the decent, responsible adults I know of either gender would do just that. Not see her behaviour as some kind of point in a ‘paedophilia/rape is complex’ exercise.
Would that be the same Lord mac Alpine that has ‘argued, on moral grounds, that the Conservative Party should return the Polly Peck donations received, some 400K, so that the creditors could get some return?’
An avid collector of furniture, textiles, police truncheons and dolls, he had many hours in the company of a strong mother figure, Margaret Thatcher (now when and with whom did I hear her name mentioned last week, Hmm) he the servant, she the Machiavellian Prince.
Was that the man the tweet was about?