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:

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.
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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