No, it’s not wise to wind up the very officers able to put you in jail by effectively cutting their pay while a police investigation is pending against you and your civil servants, from whom the police wil get the evidence against you, are on strike,
But then it is all of a piece with New Labour’s general incompetence that they’d commit suicide without even realising it.
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?
Nah, not really, though the announcement of the members of the panel Gordon Brown’s appointed to make yet another ‘inquiry’ with yet another inevitable, predetermined outcome, this time into the Labour Party funding fraud, does sound as though it could be the beginning of a particularly lame joke
What the bishop and the judge are actually walkiing into isn’t a bar, it’s a steaming pile of horseshit.
They may as well not bother with the enquiry and save their reputations. The Lib Dems and the Electoral Commission have at last called in the police.
Maybe Yates of the Yard will get some co-operation this time. Maybe.
At least we can now guess what it was No. 10 were being so obstructive with Yates about in the Cash for Honours investigation. That makes the Crown Prosecution Service’s decisiion not to prosecute anyone in Blair’s government for selling peerages much more understandable – they must have known, or at least suspected from Yates’ investigation, that New Labour corruption is much deeper, widespread and systemic than a few dodgy loans from social climbing businessmen.
I agree with Jamie: mr Abrahams is quite right to threaten to sue anybody who links his contributions to the Labour party to his controversial planning application, which was approved to the selfless intervention of Douglas Alexander’s transport department.
He just thought Harriet Harman needed some extra money to help her in her deputy leader fight, so he donated 5,000 pounds to her after her election. Makes sense.
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.