Alistair Darling, You Really Have No Shame

Guido Fawkes reports that this morning Chancellor of the Exchequer and El Gordo’s BFF, Alistair Darling, is co-hosting a New Labour fundraising ‘power breakfast’ with international financiers Deutsche Bank at their City HQ in London – cost 80 quid a plate.

That New Labour and Darling are still shilling for money (only public opprobrium made Harriet Harman cancel her own proposed fundraising comedy ‘n cash night this week), after admitting criminal offences and while the funding scandal rages on amd more and more senior Labour figures are implicated, is bad enough.

That the party’s supporter base is now those who can afford 80 pounds for breakfast is bad enough.

That the supposedly objective Chancellor, whose job is to to manage the public purse and economy in the best interests of the country, rather than short term party goals of the Labour Party, is going cap in hand to a foreign bank for party political reasons is bad enough.

That the Chancellor is essentially promising influence for cash ( and cheap at the price) is bad enough.

But Darling is begging for handouts at the Bank that is, with Richard Branson’s Virgin, one of the preferred bidders for failed building society Northern Rock, over the eventual disposition of which the chancellor has not a little influence.

How much more openly corrupt can this government get?

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.

What’s Behind Brown’s Phony Election

A UK General Election?

There was never going to be a bloody election – todays ‘Brown bottles out’ story, that the media and Westminster insiders are all chattering and plotting and gosiping about and enjoying so much, is as usual just so much smoke and mirrors to obscure what Brown’s really up to.

Iran.

According to the report by Tim Shipman, “Pentagon officials have revealed that President Bush won an understanding with Gordon Brown in July that Britain would support air strikes if they could be justified as a counter-terrorist operation. Since then discussions about what Britain might contribute militarily, to combat Iranian retaliation that would follow US air strikes, have been held between ministers and officials in the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence.”

The report follows up another report Friday by The Daily Mail.

“What’s on the table right now is tactical strikes,” Vincent Cannistraro, intelligence chief on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council and erstwhile head of operations for the CIA’s counter-terrorist center, told Shipman.

“The British Government is in accord with plans to launch limited strikes on facilities inside Iran, on the basis of counter-terrorism.” While the US Air Force and naval jets could carry out raids without help from the RAF, the Pentagon is keen to have the Royal Navy’s cooperation in the event of an attack, to prevent Iran from sowing mines in the Gulf to block oil exports in retaliation,” he added.

Downing Street wouldn’t comment on the story,

More….

Well, it wouldn’t, would it?

UPDATE

Actually Downing St did comment, to the China Daily:

A Downing Street spokesman said, “While we won’t comment on the specifics of conversations between the Prime Minister and the President of the United States, this is not a version of events we recognize.”

Which means precisely nothing. A typically Brownian non-denying denial.

Comment of The Day With Modifications

I didn’t blog at all this weekend, though there was no dearth of topics in UK politics not least the election that never was. But it’s hard to keep up and get a coherent picture : thiings seem to be happening so helter-skelter it’s all getting very morally swempy. So I thought I’d take a step back, have a good read, and see if I could write some sort of summation this morning.

Luckily someone saved me the trouble.

PeterWakefieldSault. [Links added by me]

October 7, 2007 5:41 PM

The world according to war criminal Gordon Brown:-

When the government of Burma suppresses public demonstration, that’s BAD. When the government of Britain suppresses public demonstration, that’s GOOD. When the military government in Burma asserts its authority over the people, that’s BAD. When the military government of Iraq asserts its authority, in order to protect mass-murderers (Blackwater thugs), over the democratically elected government of Iraq, that’s GOOD. When the artificial and racist state of Israel puts indigenous Palestinians into de facto concentration camps and proceeds to commit genocide upon them that’s GOOD, GOOD, GOOD!!! When the heroin stops flowing from Afghanistan (as it did under the Taliban), that’s BAD. When the heroin is available everywhere on the streets of Britain, that’s GOOD.

Have I missed anything?

Well, quite a lot actually, but that’ll do to be going on with.