Comment of The Day

You go for weeks, nothing but the usual daily outrage, then bam bam bam, it all happens at once and typically I’m forced away fropm the keyboard. It’s a bloody conspiracy I tell you.

The pustulent boil of real estate development corruption ripening beneath this latest fraudulent funding scandal, and about to erupt as a result of the fraud’s exposure, iwill show the public a New Labour venality that’s way beyond any parody Armando Ianucci could come up with.

A commenter at the BBC’s Have Your Say pretty much sums up New Labour and why it is that they are so corrupt:

This is typical of the Labour party, most of them like their leader are C list lawyers(the most dishonest profession there is) or creepy little civil servants from murky Labour town halls who don’t have any principles at all or they wouldn’t get to be M.P’s in the first place. All of those involved in perpetrating what is in fact fraud should go to jail for a spell of reality training.

L Telfer, Scottish Borders

Writing as a former C-list lawyer myself and as a former pre-Blair Labour Party member, I can say with some confidence that’s an absolutely accurate description of New Labour politicians. Cunning, small-minded, petty, not as clever as they think they are, their ambition and and greed so outstrips their competence to function at the level to which they aspire that it’s a miracle they’ve survived in power as long as they have without being found out.

The North east has always been a problem area for Labour politicians when it comes to real estate, party funding and personal ambition. Remember T. Dan Smith? Abrahams’ donations show that the, shall we say, interplay between the Labour party and big money developers in the northeast still carries on in the traditional way, decades later.

Mr Abrahams, a single man who has homes in north London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in the north-east where his father, Bennie, was a prominent figure in Labour circles.

“A larger than life character with a name that could open doors,” said one former colleague of Bennie Abrahams, who joined the council in the late 1950s and decades later became the city’s Lord Mayor.

Mr Abrahams’s mother, Marion, was also a Labour councillor and some who know him suggest that her son has spent his whole life trying unsuccessfully to emerge from his father’s shadow.

His first venture into Labour politics came in the 1970s, when he represented an inner-city Newcastle ward on the now-defunct Tyne and Wear Metropolitan County Council.

“It was the safest Labour seat on the council. Or at least it was, until he managed to lose it four years later,” said a former party colleague.

Undeterred, byIn [sic] 1991 Mr Abrahams had set his sights on representing Labour in Parliament. He arrived for the selection meeting, a former member of the constituency Labour party recalls, for the North Yorkshire seat of Richmond accompanied by a “a blonde-haired lady and a young boy” who were introduced as his wife and son. Mr Abrahams, who claimed to be 41, duly won the nomination. and personally approved a press release which stated that he lived with his wife and son in Newcastle.

All was fine and dandy until a woman called Anthea Bailey approached a regional newspaper to reveal that she and her 11-year-old son had posed as Mr Abrahams’s family “to boost his image” in the selection contest. The former marketing executive explained that she had met him when she was unemployed and looking for somewhere to live.

It’s at times like this I bitterly bemoan that Private Eye hasn’t put it’s archive online: through it you can follow forty years worth of local authority and regional corruption in the northeast (and elsewhere, to be fair) – it’s a region that’s always been a stronghold of Labour MP’s, not least the former PM Tony Blair and his deputy John Prescott. the story above is typical of those featured. There’s probably more there for a reporter who likes to dig. I await developments with interest.

But in the meantime what the hell are we to do for a competent, functioning government? Even if there were to be a vote of no confidence and a snap election tomorrow, the alternatives to the current gang of fools and blustering incompetents is to vote in some more, different incompetents.

Christ, what a bloody mess.