UK politics – Page 73

Paxo Bamboozled By Minister-Bonking Newsnight Editor

Published on January 23, 2007

I watched this interview on BBC2 the other night and I wondered why Jeremy Paxman had given the pensions minister such an easy time of it.

Now I know why:

Minister’s fling with BBC girl who booked him for NewsnightBy PAUL REVOIR and GORDON RAYNER –
Last updated at 22:07pm on 22nd January 2007

When pensions minister James Purnell appeared on Newsnight, viewers were mystified by the ‘easy ride’ he was given by the normally pugilistic Jeremy Paxman.

Licence payers complained to the BBC that Mr Purnell had been allowed to “get off lightly” instead of being thoroughly grilled over the nation’s pensions crisis.

Now it has emerged tha the BBC has held an inquiry into the role of Newsnight producer Thea Rogers, who booked Mr Purnell to appear on the show – and who just happened to be in the middle of a fling with him at the time.

Mr Purnell, 36, also faces questions over whether he broke ministerial rules by using his chauffeur-driven government car to whisk his glamorous 25-year-old girlfriend off for a romantic meal immediately after the programme.

The ministerial code of conduct clearly states that ministers should not use their cars for “private business”.

Last night Mr Purnell, regarded as one of the brightest young stars of the Blair government, insisted he had done nothing wrong in using his ministerial car to take Miss Rogers out for dinner, but Tory MP Mike Penning said: “That’s not for him to decide. Only his permanent secretary can decide if there has been a breach of the ministerial code.”

The ambitious Miss Rogers, who worked for Labour during the 2005 election campaign and is said to be on first name terms with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, did not tell her Newsnight bosses that she was dating Mr Purnell at the time she was asked to book him as a guest on the show last October.

At least no falafel were involved, as far as we know at this point. But that’s about the best you can say for this scummy behaviour.

Comment of the Day

Published on January 22, 2007

I don’t really have much in the way of criteria for CoTD, other than it makes me laugh or go “Exactly!”.

This comment falls into the latter category.

I had been planning a long post on the legal issues surrounding the cash for honours inquiry and arrests but it’s a dismal Monday morning, threatening to snow, and I really need to go and at least stock up on bread and milk before all the shelves are cleared by the waddling, babushka’d, apple-dumpling-shaped grandmas who, with unexpected speed, descend en masse on the shops at this time of day. But battling the sharp-elbowed old dears for bread and milk will at least take my mind off dwelling on the stench emanating from Westminster.

Call me a starry-eyed old legal idealist but every time I think about this enquiry I get angrier and angrier at the way Blair and his circle of sofa-sitting incompetents treat the law as yet another infinitely malleable tool to prop their power up with. Then I become incoherent.

So thanks Downsman. whoever you are, for saving me some angst with your comment to columnist Jackie Ashley in the Grauniad, .

downsman

January 22, 2007 01:27 AM

My own collage of New Labour this week would consist of the following:

1. The entirely normal practice of arresting a suspect on a ‘conspiracy to pervert the course of justice’ charge being met by allegations of ‘theatrics’ from a twice discredited former Home Secretary who knows perfectly well it is standard police procedure. A man whose sensational autobiography sold in pitiful numbers because no-one can tell when he is telling the truth.

2. The same line being plugged by the Culture Secretary, a woman guilty of serious non-disclosure of personal interests, cleared only by the intervention of Mr Blair. A woman whose family wealth is mainly based on setting up carousel tax-evasion measures around various tax-havens, then admittedly lying about it. A woman who then proceeded on Any Questions to state her absolute confidence Ms Turner is not guilty of any wrongdoing, thus placing intolerable and inappropriate pressure on the police during a legitimate investigation. Making you wonder why she did not similarly intervene during the Soham investigation to say that Ian Huntley was “not guilty and should be released”.

3. Reminding myself that a government which supports both ‘extraordinary’ and ‘ordinary’ rendition, and which regards Guantanamo as an “understandable anomaly” is now concerned about a suspect being arrested at home before leaving for work and released by lunchtime.

4. The Attorney-General writing to a select committee to assure it in strong terms that he will be exercising the final discretion whether a cash-for-honours prosecution, of his own close political colleagues and personal friends, will proceed to trial. Who does so despite the opinion of the Lord Chancellor that this obvious conflict of interest requires him to stand aside. Who has some form for similar chicanery, in his Iraq advice and BAE intervention.

Not a pretty picture. But this is the hypocritical, lawless, bandit Britain of Mr Blair and his cabinet in January 2007. It is one more proof of Acton’s axiom that “all power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Exactly.

The Biter Bit

Published on January 21, 2007

Just an idle thought… it’s wryly amusing to consider what actually happened at the police station after Blair toadies Lord Levy and Ruth Turner were arrested by the Met.

Were they, like so many others, compelled to have their digitalised fingerprints and DNA samples taken, to be retained for ever in the megadatabase their own boss planned ?

UPDATE: It just gets better and better…. it’s looking like Scotland Yard has used the draconioan and much protested Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, that allows unprecedented snooping by police into electronic communications, against Downing St.

The arrest of one of Tony Blair’s top aides in the cash for honours row was made after fresh information was uncovered during a search of the Number 10 computer system, according to reports.

The investigation put police at loggerheads with politicians after Ruth Turner was arrested in a dawn swoop on her home.

The News Of The World said it was informed by sources within the Crown Prosecution Service that a “mole” within Downing Street told the police about potentially incriminating emails.

An independent IT expert was then sent in by detectives, with the permission of Downing Street, to look through communications records, it claimed. But the Sunday Telegraph suggested that detectives had obtained high-level permission to “hack” into the IT system remotely.

Bwahahahahaha.

That ‘high-level permission’ thing is just a figleaf to soothe Downing St’s wounded pride. The Met don’t need no steenkin’ high-lvel permission, those authoritarian idiots in New Labour already unthinkingly gave the police the tools to use against the government.

Linky, Linky

Published on January 18, 20071 Comment

Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Leaky Leaky

Published on January 14, 2007

it make look like government by fiasco, but is New Labour playing a long game with all these Home Office leaks to the media?

The latest is that records of British criminals convicted abroad are ‘sitting on a desk’ at the Home office and the police don’t know if there are murderers loose.

LONDON (Reuters) – Home Secretary John Reid faced mounting pressure on Sunday over his department’s failure to log overseas offenders’ details after it emerged that a convicted armed robber committed murder on his return to Britain.

Political opponents accused Reid’s department of incompetence and called for an independent inquiry into the latest Home Office controversy.

Career criminal Dale Miller, 43, killed a man in Newcastle in 2000 after being released from prison for armed robberies in Germany and Switzerland, The Observer newspaper said on Sunday.

How many leaked scandals is this now?

Once is accident, twice is suspicious, three or more times is looking decidedly conspiratorious.

For the non-UKian, the Home Office is a huge historical portmanteau of a government department, one whose remit includes criminal justice, policing and terrorism, prisons, immigration and citizenship and last but not least, race relations. It’s overseen by a Cabinet member, the Home Secretary, who’s third in seniority and influence to the PM and Chancellor.

Labour’s most recent Home Secretary is alleged Scots hardman ( Nu-Lab speak for office bully) John Reid, who’s been very vocal in running his department down, saying it’s ‘not fit for purpose’, the idea being he’s the new broom who’ll sweep it clean and it’s all the civil servants’ fault. A little background on the man to give you a taste of his style:

I Really Like John Reid, I Really Do, Honest

John Reid, the newly appointed Home Secretary, has my deep and unalloyed admiration, he really does. Not only has he gone into the Home Office, his 27th Cabinet job in as many years or something, and told them they are all a bunch of cunts, which is palpably true, but he is an old Stalinist tankie of the first order. “Red” Reid does not mess about, and is just the comrade to supply the sort of smack of firm Government that this country needs. Thank heavens he does not drink, and is no longer the man who once consumed possibly 10 whisky and lemonades at lunch. And no food. The lemonade, I think, was a very stylish touch. And his deep admiration for the Bosnian Serb freedom fighter Radovan Karadzic (whereabouts, I believe, still unknown – I’d suggest starting at John’s house – if they can find a sliver of cannbis, they can find a large former pyschiatrist, surely?) is something that can only affirm one’s awe for the man’s judgement. If only he would rename the Home Office the Ministry of the Interior (MiniTer) then we could all certainly sleep safer in our beds.

If you add up all the stories about Home Office leaks and incompetence that have appeared in he tabloids over the last year an overwhelming preponderance are about lax information management, with the blame placed firmly on the shoulders of the staff and not the ministers for their endless barrage of management consultants and badly-drafted kneejerk legislation.

If anything Reid seems almost to relish the scandal. I wonder why?

The civil servants are represented by a left-wing union, the PCS, who new Labour hate like poison precisely because it is left-wing and its leader has led the fight to decouple his and other unions from funding Labour – so it’s not just about modernising a creaky department, it’s about purging the left, who oppose plans for a privately run but publicly funded massive and inclusive cradle to grave database and biometric ID system that will erase any personal privacy, make individuals the property of the state, make billions for private consultants, privatise the civil service, and be buggy and useless too.

In the light if disastrous current and previous government IT projects, this seems a reasonable position to take.

This leads me to think that the leaks are not in the least bit accidental, no matter how it looks on the face of it. For instance we even had a tethered goat set out in the form of a junior Home Office minister on Friday’s BBC Any Questions, this from a government whose invariable press relations motto during this type of fiasco is “No-one is available for comment’.

My theory is also propped up by two worrying stories from this morning’s UK papers; first from the Independent:

Blair calls for data to be shared
By Marie Woolf, Political Editor
Published: 14 January 2007

Tony Blair will propose this week to change the law to allow government departments to share personal data, including people’s medical records and tax details.

The plan to allow Whitehall departments to share information that is currently protected by strict confidentiality rules will prove highly controversial.

The Prime Minister is likely to argue that allowing personal files to be shared will speed up and simplify Whitehall decision-making.

But the move is expected to be criticised by civil liberties groups, which will say that sensitive information could fall into the wrong hands.

Then there’s this from The Observer:

Police across Europe to share DNA database
David Rose

Sunday January 14, 2007

Police and security services in the European Union will share access to an unprecedented range of individuals’ personal data under a radical package of measures to be discussed by EU justice ministers this week.

It allows agencies in different countries to search one another’s databases – DNA records, fingerprints, vehicle details – and other personal information. Even if someone has no criminal record and their DNA is not on a database, police can ask their foreign colleagues to collect a sample.

The measures, known as the Prum Treaty, after the German town where it was signed, are being championed by Germany, which holds the EU presidency. Documents obtained by The Observer show that the Germans are also holding secret talks with top US officials in an attempt to conclude a data-sharing agreement with America – first for Germany alone, then for the EU.

Last week The Observer revealed that all British visitors to the US will have their fingerprints stored alongside criminals’ on a database linked to the FBI. ‘Prum has several dangers,’ Peter Hustinx, the EU’s Data Protection Commissioner, said. ‘Some of its definitions are very sloppy and it creates an infrastructure that may well not be necessary. The Council of Ministers has not been involved, the European Parliament has not been involved. It bypasses Europe’s normal processes of accountability and decision-making.’

It threatens to ‘trump’ a separate initiative to create an EU data-sharing system – with much stronger safeguards – which has been working its way through the Council of Ministers, in consultation with the European Parliament. ‘The framework as it stands has flaws,’ said Tony Bunyan, of the civil liberties monitoring group Statewatch. ‘But if Prum, which is much worse, becomes European law, it will be left high and dry.’

Sarah Ludford, the Liberal Democrat MEP for London and a leading member of the European Parliament’s justice and civil liberties committee, said that while she accepted the need for security agencies to share information it was ‘vital that the provisions should be transparent and decided democratically’. She said that the move to adopt Prum amounted to a ‘parliamentary bypass’. Plum began as a private treaty in 2005 between Germany, France, Austria and four other countries. Now member states can only choose to ratify or reject it as a whole.

Add this to the Universal Child Database this government is also proposing :

While the proposals for the database grew out of concern for children at risk of child abuse or neglect, reinforced by the death of Victoria Climbi?, all 11 million children in the UK are to be registered on the database. The data entries for each child are to consist of:

– name, address, gender and date of birth;

– a unique identifying number;

– the name and contact details of any person with parental responsibility or who has care of him at any time;

– details of any education being received by him, including details of any educational institution attended;

– the name and contact details of any person providing primary medical and other services specified by the Secretary of State;

– information as to the existence of any cause for concern in relation to him;
– other information, not including medical records or other personal records, specified by the Secretary of State. [1]

Margaret Hodge, Minister of State for Children, has also stated that drug or alcohol use by parents, relatives and neighbours, together with other aspects of their behaviour, may be recorded. [2].

and it all starts to look like a plan, with the leaks an integral part of the strategy to discredit an independent civil service.

A universal database plus every other personal record available in other government databases is to be available to overseas governments with no permission whatsover from those most intimately concerned. tell me what’s wriong with this picture…. This is as repressive a measure as anything Stalin himsell thought up and totally unsurprising from Uncle Joe’s (supposedly reconstructed) supporters in New Labour.

Of course none of this, though it was at least reported, made the actual front pages; the fading glories of David Beckham took precedence. Sometimes I think we deserve all we get.