UPDATE:
Hain has case to answer – watchdog
42 minutes ago
Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain is to face a full parliamentary “sleaze” inquiry over his failure to declare £103,000 in donations to his Labour deputy leadership campaign.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, John Lyon, has ruled that the minister does have a case to answer, the commissioner’s office said.
……….
So – what have we British subjects learned about our political elites this weekend from the Hain saga ?
Well, we’ve learned Gordon Brown is a serial bottler, saying the decision on Peter Hain’s illegal campaign donations is out of his hands. Oh, how very convenient.
We’ve learned that the media is still up the arse of New Labour no matter what they do: although The Independent’s Andreas Whittam Smith calls corrupt Work and Pensions minister, member of Brown’s cabinet and Seceretary of State For Wales Peter Hain what he is, an outright liar: publish and be damned, no ifs, ands or buts – “Frankly, I don’t believe a word Peter Hain says “ – the sentiment of the rest of the Great and the Good is firmly pro-New Labour.
Compare and contrast Smith’s blunt accusation to Jackie Ashley’s apologia in the Guardian – “If Peter Hain resigns, it should be for the crime of political stupidity, not for deceit or fiddling.” and Willam Rees-Mogg’s (no stranger to corruption and nepotism in politics he, given his role in much of Tory party history) in Rupert Murdoch’s Times: “Hain; foolish, but not a scoundrel”
The BBC, meanwhile, is busily talking up a barely-existent Tory funding scandal in order to maintain a spurious balance, while totally missing the point – that this government is corrupt to the core, both morally and in terms of competence, and the smell of it it can’t be overcome.
For all the BBC’s vaunted interactivity, having once caved in to New Labour after the Hutton report the management’s now compelled to ignore the overwhelming public opinion expressed on their own talkboards, in favour of the Panglossian appoach to politics – ever onwards and upwards to the best of all possible New Labour worlds – rather than acknowledge brewing publc discontent with this government.
But something’s got to give at some point – and when it does, whether it’s a government collapse and a shock election, or whether it’s summer rioting on the streets this year or next, the BBC will be the first to express their horror at the sheer unexpectedness of it all.
What else? This weekend we’ve also learned, as if we didn’t already know, that there’s one law for the powerful… and eternal surveillance and an ever increasing thicket of laws and petty tyranny to get fatally entangled in for the rest of us.
Woe betide us if we fall foul, however inadvertently, of the three thousand new laws New Labour has brought in – the government has plans to bag, tag and track all who transgress, whether guilty or not.
While lawbreaking New Labour politicians are busily absolving thermselves of any wrongdoing, the British government, cheered on by power-hungry police chiefs, plans to inject petty offenders and those released on bail and as yet not convicted of a crime with RFID tags. so that their every movement and activity can be tracked by satellite. As the Independent so pithily put it, those who break the law, convicted or not, are to be “Tagged like dogs”.
Dystopia – are we there yet?
No tag for Hain and other dishonest New Labour politicians, though – theirs are just mistakes, guv, nothing like the antisocial behaviour of the permanent criminal underclass their government has created. They are scum – Hain is good. Why, he was in the ANC! He fought apartheid! He’s a friend of Nelson Mandela!
However could an ally of the sainted Nelson Mandela ever commit a crime?
In any case (say, just as an example, that Hain were convicted for bank robbery under the government’s own double jeopardy laws, which reversed English common law to say that you can now be tried again for the same offence despite having been previously acquitted) Hain would need no RFID tag to track him: he can be easily detected by his radioactive glow. That and the stench of corruption.
Now New Labour plan to remove the right of appeal against a conviction based on abuse or invalidity of process. So the cops beat you up? What the hell, you were guilty anyway, it doesn’t matter..
Government disregard for the common law – or even common decency – combined with blatant ministerial corruption and the perpetual creation of new, petty rules for the rest of us is breeding utter contempt for democracy and the law by everybody.Why should the young obey the rules when their elders so obviously have nothing but disdain for the law?
What we’ve learned from this weekend, most of all is that there no illegality or injustice that the new New Labour establishment will not connive at or condone if it keeps them where they want to be.
scans and x-rays and tests and readjusting to medication changes, on top of the expensive, time-intensive household disasters that tend to break out at this, the most inconvenient time of the year. 