A brilliant bit of blogging here from Dan Savage, who’s found disgraced “pastor’ Ted Haggard up to his old deceitful tricks trying to bilk the public:
[…]
…the man who heads up the defunct charity Families With a Mission—the charity that’s going to take a 10% cut from all “tax deductible” donations to the Haggard family—would appear to be a registered sex offender.
Scratch any given fundy, find a crook.
Many left bloggers in America and in the UK wrote about the blatant theft of billions of dollars in cash and antiquities by US contractors and others in Iraq while it was happeniing; we also wrote about the fact that the looting was only made possible by the incompetence and collusion of the fundy-staffed, Paul Bremer-led Coalition Provincial Authority (aka ‘What Liberty U students did on their gap year“).
But, as has become usual in Bush’s America, it’s taken years for big media to actually notice ( or to be more accurate, to have the guts to write about it) and to get the story to Mrs and Mrs Average Glossy Mag Buyer.
Vanity Fair’s account of the mercenary free-for-all following the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation (however odious its regime), Billions Over Baghdad, although it’s a day late and a dollar short will, I hope, deeply shock those American voters who still have residual faith in the probity of their politicians and government officials and in the good intentions and morals of the senior ranks of their military. These are not the Good Guys.
[…]
Over the next year, a compliant Congress gave $1.6 billion to Bremer to administer the C.P.A. This was over and above the $12 billion in cash that the C.P.A. had been given to disburse from Iraqi oil revenues and unfrozen Iraqi funds. Few in Congress actually had any idea about the true nature of the C.P.A. as an institution. Lawmakers had never discussed the establishment of the C.P.A., much less authorized it—odd, given that the agency would be receiving taxpayer dollars. Confused members of Congress believed that the C.P.A. was a U.S. government agency, which it was not, or that at the very least it had been authorized by the United Nations, which it had not. One congressional funding measure makes reference to the C.P.A. as “an entity of the United States Government”—highly inaccurate. The same congressional measure states that the C.P.A. was “established pursuant to United Nations Security Council resolutions”—just as inaccurate. The bizarre truth, as a U.S. District Court judge would point out in an opinion, is that “no formal document … plainly establishes the C.P.A. or provides for its formation.”
This isn’t just about the criminality and greed of the Bush administration but also about the incompetence of Congress and the corruption of the civil service and the military.
Not only did the institutions of government fail to stop the criminality, they allowed it to happen.
Even if individual congresspersons, civil servants or army officers didn’t personally benefit from the smash and grab they didn’t speak out, except in very rare cases: Bunnatine Greenhouse, for example, should be a national hero but instead she’s demoted and vilified.
Those who knew what was happening and failed to speak out failed in their duty and are therefore in it up to their necks, as much as any apparatchik or noncom with a handy cash sum stashed in the Cayman Islands.
Accountable really to no one, its finances “off the books” for U.S. government purposes, the C.P.A. provided an unprecedented opportunity for fraud, waste, and corruption involving American government officials, American contractors, renegade Iraqis, and many others. In its short life more than $23 billion would pass through its hands. And that didn’t include potentially billions more in oil shipments the C.P.A. neglected to meter. At stake was an ocean of cash that would evaporate whenever the C.P.A. did. All parties understood that there was a sell-by date, and that it was everyone for himself. An Iraqi hospital administrator told The Guardian of England that, when he arrived to sign a contract, the army officer representing the C.P.A. had crossed out the original price and doubled it. “The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package.” Alan Grayson, a Washington, D.C., lawyer for whistle-blowers who have worked for American contractors in Iraq, says simply that during that first year under the C.P.A. the country was turned into “a free-fraud zone.”
Iraq has been the biggest home invasion of all time. Murder, rape, torture, looting; Genghis Khan would be proud. But it’s not just Iraqi money that these slime are stealing, though, it’s yours too, if yoiu’re a US or UK taxpayer – Bush has just asked Congress for another 50 billion dollars more and the UK has spent 6.6 billionpounds so far. Who knows into whose pockets it goes?
America may not be the Good Guys their self-image tells them they are, but then neither are we British and there is another, untold story here.
What was the role of the British military and diplomats in the CPA? They were as deeply involved as the Americans in the invasion – what were they doing while this as happening, sitting on their hands and going ‘Oh, dear”?
Take Basra: who handled the money for Basra province? Where’s it gone and to whom and for what? Has there even been an accounting?
I note that British diplomats, in concert with the US, pressured the UN for the CPA to be accepted as a valid interim government. They worked hand in hand with the Pentagon: do we really think our diplomatic staff and senior military had no inkling of the wholesale theft that was going on? Can we believe that if they did know, that they were so morally spotless as not to have been tempted to have a dip themselves? Of course it may not have been necessary to be quite as crude as that: there are other ways to benefit from criminality. Turning a blind eye can be quite rewarding, as our country’s record on rendition has shown.
But surely, if there are any malefactors, heaven forbid, in the ranks of our government, diplomatic corps or military, good old British justice will sort it out. Won’t it?
I mean, just look at the way George Galloway has been hounded by New Labour for being a bit equivocal reporting a donor in his paperwork for the Mariam Fund (total value 1.4 million) – that’s how punctilious New Labour is. They’d never do something sio venal as to take cash for honours or anything like that, oh no.
Shorter Uk government – criminals and war profiteers? What criminals and war profiteers? We’re British! We’re honourable!
Hardly. Some of our recently retired generals and diplomats are now issuing their own revisionist versions of recent history – what they say, in short, is that they were against the invasion all long, really, and it was all the fault of those naughty Americans. They didn’t want to do it – a big boy made them do it and ran away, wasn’t us, guv, we said it was a bad idea.
Unfortunately for untold thousands of dead Iraqis they weren’t so honourable as to say so at the time. Only now, when there’s autobiographies to be sold and the information is of no earthly use do they come forward. There’s the honour of our glorious military.
Meanwhile the Iraq war continues to be highly profitable – for some.
Aegis turnover soared from £554,000 in 2003 to £62m last year – three quarters through work in Iraq, including its role coordinating all private military and security firms operating in the country. Aegis is led by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, who broke a UN arms embargo on Sierra Leone with his former company Sandline International, and was jailed in Papua New Guinea for earlier activities. The firm DSC, now part of British company ArmorGroup, was implicated in providing intelligence that helped Colombian death squads identify groups opposed to a BP oil pipeline project. ArmorGroup, which trebled its turnover from $71m in 2001 to $233.2m last year, typifies the private military sector in hiring former government officials and officers to wield political influence. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former UK defence and foreign secretary, is a non-executive director of ArmorGroup. In 2005 the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development awarded the firm armed security contracts in the Afghan capital Kabul, as well as in the Iraqi cities Baghdad and Basra, together with control of the Iraqi police monitoring programme.
Aegis’s non-executive directors include ex-UK defence minister Nicholas Soames, as well as Lord Inge, former chief of defence staff, and Roger Wheeler, earlier professional head of the British army as chief of the general staff.
That’s the kind of moneymaking from war that goes on all the time, but no-one complains and if they do well, they’re just whiny peacenik hippies who want to curb free trade.
The difference in Iraq is that war profiteering, instead of being a covert operation, has been carried out in the open with actual cash money and a blatancy that takes the breath away.
The big question, to my mind, is if, when those alleged to be the ‘good guys’ commit crimes of such magnitude, who, if anyone, is to step in and enforce the law? The Democrats don’t seem to have the bottle for it and neither do either of the British opposition parties.
This is a question that no-one seems to want to answer, because it would mean questioning the fundamental bases of our entire political systems, on both sides of the Atlantic. That way lies revolution – and that would never do.
A NY state Republican political thug ‘consultant’, Roger J. Stone Jr., is alleged to have been harassing the 83 year old father of the Democratic attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, with threatening late night phone calls – traceable directly back to aforesaid thug “consultant”.
True to GOP form, Stone is denying everything despite a lot of alleged proof against him. As is his right, of course.
But Stone’s not satisfied with barely-believable, tissue-thin denials, oh no – he’s doing the classic Republican projection thing and accusing Democrats of setting him up by invading his apartment and using his phone:
Mr. Stone, a seasoned practitioner of hard-edged politics who worked for Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and for George W. Bush in the 2000 recount battle, adamantly denied the allegation in an interview, calling it “the ultimate dirty trick.” He asserted that allies of Governor Spitzer may have gained access to a phone in his Manhattan apartment to make the threatening call.
The message, left at Bernard Spitzer’s Manhattan office just before 10 p.m. on Aug. 6, says that Mr. Spitzer, 83, a wealthy real estate developer, would be “compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms” to testify about “shady campaign loans” he made to his son during Eliot Spitzer’s unsuccessful campaign for attorney general in 1994.
Mr. Winner’s committee has been holding hearings into a scheme by some of Governor Spitzer’s top aides to use the State Police to embarrass the Senate Republican leader, Joseph L. Bruno. Senate Republicans have said they were considering reviewing Bernard Spitzer’s 1994 loans to his son.
“If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany,” the message says, according to a transcript. The message also calls Governor Spitzer a “phony” and a “psycho.”
Bernard Spitzer’s lawyers hired Kroll Associates, the private investigative firm, to trace the message, and their report was included with the letter to Mr. Winner. The firm traced the number that appeared on Mr. Spitzer’s caller identification system, linking it to listings under the name of Mr. Stone’s wife, Nydia.
“The review of publicly available records,” the report says, “strongly suggests that the number is controlled by Roger Stone.”
“Nice family you got there, shame if anything happened to it…”
Who is Roger Stone? Here’s his entry in Sourcewatch:
Roger J. Stone, Jr. is a long-time Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush president in 2000. He was also a campaign strategist during the presidential campaigns of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. He is the chairman of the Fort Hill Group, a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs firm.
Stone was also a strategist for the 1981 and 1985 campaigns for governor of New Jersey by Thomas H. Kean, who was later appointed by President Bush to chair the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission). [1]
During the 2004 presidential primary, Stone served as a behind-the-scenes consultant to black firebrand Al Sharpton’s campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination, prompting speculation that Sharpton’s campaign was actually a stealth operation to weaken the party’s chances of winning in the general election. Writing in the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett noted that Stone was “financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton. … Sharpton has a little-noticed history of Republican machinations inconsistent with his fiery rhetoric. … [A]ny Sharpton-connected outrage against the party could either lower black turnout in several key close states, or move votes to Bush.” [2]
The New York Times has also reported on the strange-bedfellows relationship between Stone and Sharpton, noting that Stone was behind several of Sharpton’s most visible campaign tactics, including scrutiny of primary candidate Howard Dean’s record of minority appointees when he was governor of Vermont. [3]
In September 2004, rumors circulated that Stone was the original source of apparently forged documents related to the National Guard service of U.S. President George W. Bush. Stone denied the charge. “I have nothing whatsoever to do with this,” he said. “I’m a firm believer in political hardball, but I draw the line at forged documents.”
Nice guy, huh?
I have no idea what the rights and wrongs, if any, of Spitzer’s campaign funding troubles are, although I expect the late Steve Gillliard could’ve demystified it in a few short pithy sentences.
Even though the Democrats are hardly clean themselves it hardly matters in the face of such blatant and unrepentant bullying of a family member to put pressure on a politician.
What’s next? The kidnap and ransom of small children? Ears in boxes? The language is violent enough.
In the message, the caller says, referring to a potential subpoena: “There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”
It’s common in Europe to portray New York city and state poliitics as a real world analogue of a tv drama with an operatic title (see how delicately I tiptoe around the potential libel of a whole population, some of them Italian and touchy with it), crossed with a particularly lurid episode of Law & Order. But after a 70-odd year diet of movies glorifying gangsterism and violence as the the epitome of the free market in action, can you blame us?
But our recieved wisdom is out of date in certain respects.These days the mob aren’t wiseguys in slightly-too-loud-suits with vulgar accents: no, they wear Brooks Brothers suits and Hermes ties and are attached to political lobbying firms and go to church and the country club on Sunday. They’re respectable consultants – but although the faces and the brand image may have changed, the criminal methods are just the same – lie, cheat, steal, blackmail, and when all else fails threaten violence. Dirty tricks and ratfuckery are the regular MO of the NYGOP.
Take former Westchester County DA, Jeannine Pirro, who hired Judith Regan’s corrupt former lover (remember them screwing in the apartment for the resting 9/11 firefighters as the ruins still smouldered), Giuliani blue-eyed boy and former candidate for Homeland security chief Bernie Kerik to bug her allegedly adulterous husband’s boat so she could divorce him and run for governor.
This is the woman that the Republicans put up for NY state attorney general against Spitzer, the guy whose father their goons are now harassing:
Jeanine Pirro was desperate to prove her husband was cheating on her.
She came under the scrutiny of six different law enforcement agencies, including the New York Police Department, the city’s Department of Investigation and prosecutors in the Bronx and Westchester.
According to documents now in the hands of several defense attorneys, Pirro and the former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik were apparently talking about planting a hidden device aboard her husband’s boat. Her possible motive may have been to see if he was having an affair.
Sources told NewsChannel 4 that in one conversation, Pirro complained that one of Kerik’s employees was reluctant to board Albert Pirro’s boat.
Jeanine Pirro suggests, “We can just simply say, if there is an issue, that I am redecorating it for our anniversary.” She complains that Kerik’s man is, “uncomfortable with that.”
Kerik responded by saying, “But Jeanine, I’m having the same f——g problem with everybody. Everybody is panic stricken because it’s you. I’ve gone out on a limb. I had two other people looking at this. It’s a problem.”
Pirro said, “What am I supposed to do, Bernie? Watch him f–k her every night? What am I supposed to do? I can go on the boat. I’ll put the f—–g thing on myself.”
Minutes later, sources said Kerik called a contact at Giuliani Partners, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s consulting firm, asking him to find a recording device.
Sources said the FBI and Justice Department have been asked to look into whether Pirro and Kerik also might have violated federal laws.
In the wiretapped conversations, Pirro appeared to discuss how her husband’s alleged indiscretions hurt her politically.
Without her husband, sources said she told Kerik, “I move into the governor’s mansion.”
Republican politicians are now the acceptable face of organised crime. Mob loyalty runs right through the GOP from the top to the bottom, like the lettering in a stick of rock.
When it comes to the arms trade the British government are the deranged offspring of a Ferengi and Franz Kafka, insatiable greed and bureacratic ineptitude combined in one nightmare package.
Here’s a nice encapsulation of the sick situation by activist/comedian Mark Thomas at the 2007 Birmingham Police and Security Fair :
[…]
In the middle of the hall was Mr Xia, a Chinese man with three electro-shock weapons on display for all to see. He demonstrated them for me while I filmed him. A bargain at £3.25 each. At least, I thought, it shouldn’t be hard to find a cop at the police and security fair. How foolishly naive. The Association of Chief of Police Officers had a stall around the corner from Mr Xia, but with no one there. The nearest Customs officer, I was told, was at the airport. The closest thing I found to an on-duty officer were two life-size cardboard cutout cops, on sale as a deterrent to thieves. Eventually, I found the fair organiser’s office.
Mr Xia was arrested, and two weeks later I got a phone call from Solihull CID. “Mr Xia has pleaded guilty to the possession of prohibited firearms,” said the voice, “but I think it is illegal to try and sell these weapons.”
“You would be right.”
“And I think Mr Xia was trying to sell them.”
“He was at a trade fair.”
“Would you give us a statement and let us see the film you shot at the fair?”
“Yes, I would be happy to.”
“And one more thing – if you wouldn’t mind, could you bring up copies of the relevant legislation?”
While it’s long been an open secret in Britain that our national earnings are underpinned by international arms sales – we make 46 billion a year out of it – what’s not often mentioned is that we’re also one of the biggest enablers of the worldwide and domestic trade in illegal small arms and torture equipment.
The British government’s attitude to arms sales is hypocritical to the nth degree. On one hand it subscribes to the “Guns bad, mmmkay?” school of thought for domestic consumption; on the other it allows illegal arms and torture weapons to be sold under its nose to pretty much anyone from at home and abroad, so long as they have the money.
You’d be surprised at who has a financial interest in the arms and repression industry:
45 UK UNIVERSITIES own over £15m worth of shares in the arms trade. Three institutions – University College London (UCL), Trinity Hall Cambridge and the University of Liverpool – each own shares worth over £1million.
British academics, MPs, police and media alike bemoan the growing gun culture that leads to the murders of so many young men and shed crocodile tears even as they condemn: “Tsk tsk”, they say. “Oh dear, black drugs and gun culture, tragic isn’t it? Oh well, at least it’s not our children.”
Yet while all that international money is sloshing around London they’ll happily turn a blind eye either by passivity or ineptitude,to the international gun culture that is the Daddy of the gun culture in our cities.
As a spokesperson for the University of Liverpool explains; “The university has a legal obligation to maximise returns on its investments as it is accountable to its beneficiaries. We would not choose to invest in arms if other opportunities to fulfil our financial obligations were equally available.”
Oh well, then, that’s fine. Profit trumps morals, my duh.
It’s a sad fact that in our post-imperial and industrial days of decline we are a fading, insignificant offshore island in a big scary world. Our only remaining diplomatic bargaining chips are a] guns and b] money. These days we can only wield power in the world by
a] enabling, supporting and protecting the international trade in arms and weapons of repression, come what may and
b] by having a whole city full of handy banks for managing the subsequent profits and lots of accountants and lawyers to evade any inconvenient legislation (that’s when they’re not actually orchestrating it on a massive scale).
and
c] By knowing where the bodies are buried. *Cough* Banco Ambrosiano.*Cough*
that last’s influence probably outweights the first two.
Mind you, the relevant laws are such an absolute dogs breakfast as to be almost totally ineffectual anyway and of course lets not forget that we in our turn are mere passive instruments of US foreign policy, just another tool to be used by Washington to do politics by the back door.
The voters have expressed their justified disgust with this hypocrisy by demonstrating peacefully yet forcefully, only to find themselves subjected to the most draconian of the post-911 terror laws. A state of terrorist emergency was first declared in metropolitan London in Feb 2001, but no-one knew until the law was used not against terrorists but against legitimate arms trade prorestors.
The Metropolitan Police are using anti-terrorist legislation against protesters demonstrating at Europe’s biggest annual arms fair which was opened today by Geoff Hoon, UK defence minister, in London’s Docklands. The police have invoked Section 44 of Terrorism Act 2000 which allows assistant chief constables (or the commander in the case of the Metropolitan police) to authorise extended stop and search where they
“consider it expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism”
Section 44 was also used extensively during the protests and peace camp at Fairford RAF airbase in the build-up to the Iraq War (1). This is contrary to clear undertakings from the Home Secretary to the House of Commons that Section 44 notices would only be used where there is good reason to suspect terrorist activity. Protestors have already won a judicial review of police mass detention tactics during the Fairford protests (2), while Liberty has said it will seek a judicial review of the Met Police’s use of Section 44 in the Docklands.
There has been much made in the press of how the police have “braced themselves for violent protests” (e.g. The Guardian, 6 September 2003) and the £1 million pound cost of the policing operation. Sixteen arrests were reported on the evening news, while inside, cluster bombs, which the exhibition organisers had last week said should not be included, were among the exhibits.
That that state of emergency hasn’t been lifted since and it was what eventually resulted in the effective ‘shoot to kill’ policy that then allowed the extra-judicial murder of Jean-Charles Menezes by trigger happy police.
Which makes the persistence of anti arms-trade protestors all the more admirable.
A nondescript large industrial unit in Lenton, Nottingham had its anonymity taken away by local Disarm DSEI / anti-arms trade protesters on Tuesday when they descended on Heckler and Koch’s UK headquarters.
H&K are the world’s second largest maker of pistols and machine-guns for soldiers and death squads across the world, including Turkey, Iran, Mexico, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Burma/Myanmar. Their weapons are in use in over 90 countries, including by British police, and the company has evaded EU arms controls to sell weapons to war-zones in Sudan, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. Over half a million people are killed worldwide by small-arms annually.
A productive bit of research led a couple of intrepid investigators to buzz the company and ask “Excuse me, is this the Nottingham Small Arms Factory?” Although they didn’t get a response as such, their suspicions were confirmed when armed police turned up minutes later and detained them for 45 minutes under the Terrorism Act.
The subsequent demo made it clear that gun merchants are not welcome in the city (which, by the way, has the highest gun crime rate in the UK). The peaceful protest obviously hit a raw nerve as the forty or so people in attendance attracted an almost equal number of cops, including members of the (London-based political squad) Forward Intelligence Team.
Local rag, the Nottingham Evening Post, showed just how weak its commitment to reporting is when they pulled the story from page 2 after being told by a police press officer that it would be ‘irresponsible’ for the media to publish the arms company’s address (…yes, so obviously it’s: NSAF Ltd, Unit 3, Easter Park, Lenton Lane, Nottingham NG7 2PX). See http://disarmdsei.evey.org
It’s easy to see a grand establishment conspiracy in all this but I’m inclined to think it’s more a typical mixture of jaw-dropping venality, sheer ineptitude and passive complicity.
Or am I?
When you think of a world in the grip of accelerating climate change, potential social disorder and subject to an increasing scramble, even to the death, for temperate land and resources and you consider how few natural resources we actually have, then controlling the weapons of repression and the gold begins to look less like conspiracy and more like an actual strategy.
Looked at in that light the arms traders’re doing our young a favour by training them in weapons skills for the the apocalyptic future. You could even say it’s a public service.
See what I mean about Kafka and the Ferengi…..
No this isn’t about the horrible floods, except as they’re being used by the Brown government to bury things they really don’t want us to notice.
How very convenient that the papers’re full of strong-jawed resolute Gordon overseeing natural disaster and that the usual attack-dogs, Paxman, Humphreys et al, are all off in Tuscany or Cornwall or fly-fishing in Iceland till the end of August.
Take the Guardian, for example, which couldn’t be giving Brown an easier ride; here’s Jonathan Freedland:
It’s been an intense initiation, but people are listening to Labour again
Brown’s first month, and his carefully signalled priorities, look like a success, despite the unexpectedly tough start
Gordon is sitting pretty with the media right now, which means the Brown regime can get away with being equally as politically corrupt as Blair ever was, but with hardly anyone noticing.
Item one: Brown took a leaf out of the Karl Rove playbook this week and did an info dump the day before Parliament recessed; quite a lot of important announcements were made all at once, not least the least interesting of which is that the chair of the Guardian media group has been appointed to his fourth government post. (Why don’t they just rename it the Brown Guardian and have done?)
None of these announcements can be questioned in parliament because it’s not sitting and as mentioned the parliamentary reporters are away on holiday so by the time parliament returns events will have overtaken any questions anyway.
Nod, nod, wink wink, say no more.
Item two: Leader of the House and Secretary of State Harriet Harman also tried the same trick in the Commons, waiting until the very last moment to try and ourageously push through the appointment of the odious Keith Vaz as chair of the Home Affairs Select committee, the supposedly independent, cross-party parliamentary body which oversees all executive actvity in prisons, terrorism, policing, community cohesion and so on.
It’s hard to overestimate the potential power that the Chair of a truly independent Home Affairs select committe could have to hold a rampant executive to account – so of course Brown seeks to decapitate it by disregarding the constitution and getting one cabinet puppet to interfere in another branch of government and appoint another puppet as committee chair. Simon Carr in the Independent:
{…]
…may we express some post-honeymoon scepticism about the PM’s assertions on the value of an independent Commons as well. He doesn’t believe anything of the sort.
As a result, Harriet Harman had great lumps torn out of her on the floor of the House. There was that, at least.
She had suspended Standing Orders in order to appoint Keith Vaz as the new member of the Home Affairs Select Committee (and, under the whips’ instructions, to be the next chair of it).
It’s fairly clear Harriet knew Vaz was the replacement last Monday, when the appointments committee was due to sit. But as Sir George Young said, and as its chair, Rosemary McKenna, confirmed “there was no government business to conduct so the meeting was cancelled”.
Harriet then springs her surprise motion the day before the House rises for the recess.
Richard Shepherd: “To the casual viewer, this looks like the Government choosing who shall be chairman of the Home Affairs Committee… This looks like executive control over the choices of the Chamber and bypassing the very function of the Committee of Selection. It is outrageous!”
Also, “great discredit” (Simon Hughes), “withdraw the motion” (George Young), “I suppose we have to accept [it] at face value” (Nicholas Winterton), “Will the Leader of the House give way?” (Douglas Hogg, George Young, Richard Shepherd, John Bercow.) “I’m an idiot” (Harriet Harman).
Yes, all right, you’re so pernickety. It’s true that one of those quotations has been fabricated
It was just a matter of timing, she said. She wasn’t in a position to put forward his name on Monday, she said.
She’s not a real QC, you know.
Under Vaz’s leadership, we can speculate that the committee will now come out in favour of 58-day detention without charge and that the body of the acting chairman, David Winnick, will be found swinging under Blackfriars Bridge. This is for the future.
Not only Gordon Brown is trying to put the government in charge of oversight of itself he’s rubbing salt in the wound by appointing the sleazy Keith Vaz, a man with several alleged stains on his character.
In February 2000 the Parliamentary standards watchdog Elizabeth Filkin was requested to investigate allegations of undisclosed payments to Vaz from businessmen in his constituency.[1] The following year, 2001, members of the opposition began to question what role Vaz may have played in helping the billionaire Indian Hinduja brothers – linked with a corruption probe in India – to secure UK passports.
In March 2001, the Filkin report cleared Vaz of nine of the 18 allegations of various financial wrongdoings, but Elizabeth Filkin accused Mr Vaz of blocking her investigation into eight of the allegations. He was also censured for one allegation – that he failed to register two payments worth £450 in total from Sarosh Zaiwalla, a solicitor whom he recommended for an honour several years later.
Mrs Filkin announced in the same month a new inquiry which would focus on whether or not a company connected to Vaz received a donation from a charitable foundation run by the Hinduja brothers. The results of the inquiry were published in 2002 and it was concluded that Vaz had “committed serious breaches of the Code of Conduct and a contempt of the House” and it was recommended that he be suspended from the House of Commons for one month[2].
Keith Vaz was also a director of the company General Mediterranean Holdings’ owned by the Anglo-Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, who had in the past hired British politicians Lord David Steel and Lord Norman Lamont as directors. Vaz resigned his post as director when he became Minister for Europe, but it was later discovered that he had remained in contact with Auchi and had made enquiries on his behalf over a French extradition warrant, Auchi even calling Vaz at home to ask the minister for advice.
And this is the man who should have parliamentary oversight of policing?
What lies beneath the superficial veneer of Brown’s strong-jawed manly Scottish probity is the same old corrupt New Labour. He can reverse the gambling bill, take his conspicuously low-key and self-denying holidays in an eco-friendly country cottages in Scotland, he can push his ‘son of the manse’, prudence and probity schtick as much as he likes, but that’s all it is, a veneer; underneath nothing has changed. It’s just another face on the same old Labour sleaze.
UPDATE: To further reinforce my point, I jjust came across this:
NI minimum wage ‘may be reduced’
Mr Brown is believed to be considering reducing the minimum wage in NI
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is considering plans which could see the minimum wage reduced in Northern Ireland, it is believed.The minimum wage is set at £5.35 across the UK, however, if the plans go ahead it will be reduced in NI, Scotland, Wales and the north east of England.
[My emphasis]
That’s only 10,272 pounds annually for a 50 week, 40 hour week year- before tax. the national average after tax is 22,202.
For comparison’s sake, MP’s salaries are over 60,000 pounds annually (and are about to rise by another 2%, at least) plus allowances of around 85,000 pounds, plus special responsibility allowances and perks for ministers.