Bill's Archived Comments
Monday, 18th February 2002
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Labour Sleaze and Labour's Sleazy
Behaviour
Several stories have either started or continued
this week:
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Keith Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East, was
suspended from the House of Commons for a month - basically because he's
a pretty rotten person who thinks he can get away with bullying and intimidation.
Apart from not cooperating with an investigation by the Commissioner for
Parliamentary Standards, whose report was largely upheld by the Labour-dominated
Committee for Standards and Privileges, he went on to suggest that a friend
of his wife's secretary had made 'threatening' calls to his mother. It so
happens that the friend was an ex-policewoman, a former deputy head of the
Special Branch (no less), who decided that she wasn't going to knuckle under
to his attempt to intimidate her. She asked the police to study her telephone
records and they concluded that the telephone calls complained about had
never been made. In his apology to the House of Commons, Mr Vaz said he wished
to "underline my unreserved support for the integrity of the House and its
procedures" which would have been fine if he had left it at that, but Mr
Vaz obviously doesn't think he has really done anything wrong,
because he went on to remark that he had been cleared of the "main accusations"
- as if attempting to bully the ex-policewoman wasn't a main accusation -
he said he had reported the ex-policewoman's alleged calls to his mother
in "good faith" - what a creep! Enough said.
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Tony Blair, Labour Prime Minister, tried to tough
out PMQs last week, referring to the Conservative Leader's attempts to
smear him and his government over the LSM/Lakshmi Mittal affair (a letter
signed by our beloved PM addressed to the Romanian Prime Minister asking
the latter to look favourably on attempts by LSM to purchase Sidex, the largest
Romanian steel plant, because of the firm's alleged Britishness) as
"garbagegate". It has become increasingly clear that, despite protests by
Labour that a donation by Mr Mittal of £125,000 to Labour's funds just
before the 2001 General Election had nothing to do with the
issuance of the letter, that no-one really believes them - so much of what
was stated by the PM and other Labour people (the level of LSM's connection
with the United Kingdom, the timing of the gift, the genesis of the letter,
the drafting of the letter, to mention a few) has been shown to be misleading,
at the very least, or downright false. This brings to mind the 1997
£1,000,000 donation Labour received from Bernie Ecclestone (boss of
Formula 1) and which seemed to precede closely a 'volte face' by the then
recently-elected Labour government on cigarette advertising, a major source
of revenue for Formula 1 racing. This story is likely to run for some time
yet, I think.
-
Jo Moore, Special Advisor (aka politically-appointed,
but publicly-paid, 'spin doctor') to Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, resigned
last week. She, it may be recalled, was the fine human being who sent
an e-mail on 11th September last year, less than an hour after the terrorist
outrages in the United States, suggesting that this event was an unexpected
bonus because it would allow bad news to be released in the knowledge it
would not be widely-reported, because the terrorist outrages would naturally
receive blanket coverage. Her oh-so 'sincere' apology amazingly allowed her
to keep her job temporarily. Her resignation now was precipitated by allegations
that she may have suggested using the funeral of Princess Margaret last Friday
to release further bad news (this time about rail timetables - poor adherence
to) - the evidence of her involvement is circumstantial, but in a television
interview her attempts to explain away comments she said she made at a meeting
to discuss the release of said statistics sounded feeble in the extreme.
Good riddance! It remains to be seen for how long Mr Byers, her ministerial
boss, can survive - with luck, not for long.
State Funding of Political Parties
It seems the British public is being softened up
to see if it will accept the notion that political parties should be funded
out of public funds (i.e. our tax money). The motivation seems to be that
this will reduce the need for political parties to scrabble for money from
wherever the can get it and make the likelihood of corruption less - on the
face of it this might seem like a reasonable idea. But when you scratch below
the surface, the deceitfulness of the whole project becomes clear. Why
should we be forced to pay what would effectively be a levy
(no doubt included within our overall tax bills) to political parties? For
example, until recently I paid membership dues and various other donations
to the Conservative Party of which I was a member. However, I resigned from
that Party as soon as the present Leader, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, was elected
to that position in protest at some of the policies he supports. If political
parties were funded out of the public purse, any similar protest would be
totally meaningless. We must resist this plan.
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Copyright © 2002 William Cameron