I'm off to Daventry now to give a speech this evening, so I won't be updating the blog, barring Harriet Harman resigning...
So please use this open thread to discuss any political issue you fancy. Here are a few ideas...
* what does it say about the media that Northern Rock and Disc-Gate hardly got a look in at the PM's press conference?
* has Harriet Harman done anything wrong?
* should Richard Branson be allowed to take over Northern Rock?
* the state of the polls
* tomorrow's PMQs
82 comments:
Has Harriet Harman done anything wrong"
Yes. She has broken the law. She should resign
As it's an open thread, I thought I'd take the opportunity to invite views on Iain's stance towards the proposed Kent International Gateway in his putative constituency. Any thoughts anyone?
Where is Northern Rocks Golden Saviour obtaining his finance? Is it really from the open market or is the conglomerate of banks just borrowing the money from the Bank of England via the back door? The £11 billion returned just goes round in circles, whilst the Government can say it's been paid back.
Are the polls the lowest for Labour within the last 30 years? Or just the biggest Tory lead?
Ah poor Gordo.
He's just an ordinary ex chancellor trying to get along and all we can do is tell him and his gang off for being naughty when they didn't even mean to.
HH should really resign but what're the chances? Are there bets on this?
Benn received one of these dodgy donations, but refused it because Baroness Jay told him it was made through a third party by Abrahams. It was then resubmitted under Abrahams name. How did Jay know this? Presumably it can only be that she had seen the same subterfuge and the same names used elsewhere. I wonder where that might have been?
It's been sleeze from the word go. However I've come up with a great defence for DiscGate just pop on the Channel 4 news (a wholly owned joint venture between Al-Quida and the IRA) and say the discs were released under the FOI Act. Problem sorted.Why do Nu Labour ministers marry dodgy dealers?
http://tinyurl.com/3clnkm
She has not broken the law. Where are the police?
She should not reigsn she should stand strong. She is only hated by maniacs and women haters.
I'll be eligible to vote in 2010 and I'llbe voting Labour!
Labour is making a mistake if they let her resign it would just show weakness. She should just give the money back, and apologise.
DES
Um... Actually, if she has accepted donations through an intermediary then I think you'll find that a law has been broken
But don't let facts get in the way of your post-ironic ranting
This is so transparently a cock and bull story (which is the only transparent thing about the whole business). Benn and Brown both knew that Abrahams wanted to donate money secretly through proxies. So they turned down his donation. Benn said I'll accept it if it's in Abraham's name and Brown said he wouldn't accept it at all. That's what they're saying isn't it? Therefore they knew Abrahams and they knew he was using proxies to donate money. Harriet also knew but accepted the donation anyway. That's the only difference. This shower don't even seem able to spot their own contradictions. Do they think we're all fools?
Harriet Hartman is just a nice working class lady, always has a nice smile, you toreis hate her because she isn't oxbridge, well i hope your proud now, you serfs, youll never let scots rule britain will you? hope your all pleased with yourselves, haters all of you
Labour want to return the £400,000.
Return? Funny how they were keen to have the State snaffle a similar amount when a UKIP donor made a trivial admin blunder. Hypocrites!
Lets see if Harriet Harman is dragged off to the Admiral Lord West Memorial Cell in the Downing St Lubyanka.
Iain, Guido's started deleting DES's asap he posts, perhaps you would like to do the same and give us all a rest!
How many donors to different parties use "proxies" to avoid publicity? How can any of the parties know that they are breking the law (if that's what receiving such unlawful donations amounts to?)
I'm still getting my head round Cameron's new policy of building more "Good" schools. Brilliant wheeze, but who is Mr Good? Will they be followed by Prisons named after Mrs Perfect and Mr "Nil Recidivism"? and hospitals named after Mr And Mrs Clean?
DES -Harriet Harmon is a fat ambulatory lump who lives in a bubble of self-congratulatory entitlement. Cut from the same (wide) cloth as Tessa Jowell. And all the other socialist tenth raters greedy for money, power and privilege.
The air of triumphalism surrounding these people is quite an emetic. They certainly give me the heaves.
its so typical, all the tory rags ganging up on the labour party now, the party has done nothing wrong. so what do you do, you pick on mr brown because he is scots and not oxbridge, ooh horror, can't have that can we? and you pick on the women, on hillary benn and harriet harman, just because they are women. well tough luck you oxbridge types, hilary and hariet may "only" be women but they are labour women and i can see hilary being briian's first woman prime minister one day.
you have won this round, but you wont win in the end, oxbridge or no.
4:37 4:43 I agree.
4:41 Can't cope with different view. Grow up.
I now have ghost writer, who is writing stuff for me. I agree with it. It will save me some time.
Watch Harriet Harman cling to office like a limpet whilst her fingers get prised one by one from her car.
Always an edifying spectacle, and this from the Minister for Equality!
I suspect DES suffers from tourettes syndrome. He just can't help himself.
DES - Hilary Benn's a man.
Harriet Harman's "just a nice working class lady", whose father was a Harley Street physician and whose mother was a solicitor. Well, I guess they both worked.
DES is a silly little troll.
During the lection the tories set up a company which basically did Advertising work for the tories. Hmm will we hear the press going on about that Nope. Cos it is Oxbridge stuff. Oooh by the way who ran the last tory election. I find the vindictive glea of the tories grotesque. Is this an English trait. I do not suffer from it. If Cameron lost his work i would feel sympathy. The nasrt party is alive and well. the tories feel pleasure in another man's pain.
"Harriet Hartman is just a nice working class lady".
Yes, lots of proletarians have Harley Street doctors as fathers, solicitors as mothers, and attend very expensive public schools like St Pauls. Source.
oxbridgeboy
If iain removes DES, then he'll have to remove Veritee, who's flea-ridden rubbish has given me the dry boke for months.
I find Mr Dale's attitute better and more gentlemanly than most of your tories. You tory trolls take pleasure in the suffering of women.
Yes I am sure you will bully here out of office.
Why do you hate labour women was your heart broken by one once.
Mr Dale is proud to be gay, and does not suffer from this heart breaking illness to gain renvenge on a labour women who broke his heart. He does not suffer from the sikcness you lot do. Mr Dale is a man of honour you are maniacs with a bitter vengenful rage.
If i was asked to put a labour women in saferty. I would gladly accept Mr Dale to do this work. To escort her back to her car, with safety. If you tories trolls did it. I would probably find the women splatted on car with blood. You mad mad maniacs.
When is someone going to section DES?
Advice to David/Dave Abrahams/Martin 53/62.
1. Stop weeping for Peter Watt and get your act together.
2. Everybody knows that Labour didn't turn down your money. They encouraged you to use a loophole.
3. Loyalty from Labour to you? Don't delude yourself. You are the scapegoat. Unless you get your side of the story over asap, you're over.
4. Call the newspapers and don't tell anyone where you are. Don't allow yourself to be alone.
Good luck.
Apparenlty is is nastiness which is the best thing to have in politcis now. When IDS resined i fealt sorry for him. Just as I did with the next tory leader and the one before him. I don't mean hate filled pity I mean nice pity.
How do you take this pleasure in her resigiing. You are deepl distrubed people. I mena that. I doubt Mr Dale would take pleasure in her resignation. Now wonder the best oppositions are often filled with hate and deeply evil and sadistic views.
My analogy is still there. I bet you tory trolls are not safe people.
The suggestion that the Labour party donates the £600,000 to charity is a splendid idea....how about the Smith Institute?
Verity, agree Hilary Benn is not especially feminine but no need for the spite is there? Cant help being nasty can you tories, at least she's not oxbridge though, got to give her that.
anyway what about all that money bernie ecclestone gave the tories, never gave that back did you, wonder why not! no we know why dont we!
If the tories had their way they wouod paint the PM as a paedophile, gay, bullying, corrupt, bottling, drug addicted, incompetent, English hating, boring, murdering, autistic, OCD suffering, idiot.
Any evidence for this, No.
Then we hear the tories trying to take the moral highground.
5:21 I don' get it where is the punch line.
DES is a student, studying post ironic blogging bollocks, and his rantings on here and Guido's form part of his thesis. Just an idea. There must be some reason for it.
Oh, come on, chaps! DES is the funniest poster we've got going at the moment. He's either stark, staring bonkers or he's having a bit of a larff.
Dirty European Socialist, you are Craig Brown & I claim my £5 reward.
DES - thanks, you made my day!
Until I realised that not even a socialist could be as stupid as you! And then I twigged you are simply trying to be amusing, but utterly failing due to your apparent lack of wit, and the utter absence of you actually saying anything mildly amusing.
So you must be a Lib Dem then?
I see that "youths" are still burning Paris, as is their wont. I would have expected Sarkozy to have had them shot by now. This man is turning out to be a serious disappointment.
BTW, these "youths" referred to across the entire media, I wonder what religion they are and whether it's French indigenes who are burning down their capital city.
Jest askin' is all.
Guido links to this http://www.spectator.co.uk/stephenpollard
/374026/mr-abrahams-and-the-labour-party.
thtml
It pretty much exposes the background to this Abrahams character and exposes as a lie any claim by Culpability Brown not to know who he is.
DES
They're all laughing at you.
Do yourself a favour mate: switch off your computer, get into a clean pair of pyjamas and go back to bed.
This is probably just the run-up to the festive car burning season throughout France. I believe there were over 400 burned on last New Year's Eve alone. Although, like people who don't get around to taking their Xmas decorations down until long after Christmas, the "youth" continue to burn cars well into summer. Something like 3,000 in a year.
Why don't the Gendarmes - whose name, after all, means 'men of arms' shoot those suckers through the head?
"Yes, lots of proletarians have Harley Street doctors as fathers, solicitors as mothers, and attend very expensive public schools like St Pauls."
Didn't do her much good, still thick as shit.
And fat. I see, after implying that they'd have to rip that £5,000 out of her cold dead hands, she seems to have been persuaded to do the honourable thing, completely of her own accord. No pressure, or anything.
Has Harriet Harman done anything wrong you ask? How could she when she doesn't know the difference between right & wrong!!!
If Harriet Harman did not know that the donation was given by a third party then she has not broken the law. Otherwise people could set up political figures all the time by making donations through respectable people that the recipients could not possibly know of their original provenance.
The difference with Watt is that he actually KNEW about Abrahams.
[7:10] -You mean "Baroness" Jay failed to confide in Harriet Harman when she confided in others? Why do I have this strange niggle of doubt about that?
Why would Baroness Jay have had any knowledge of donor's to Harriet Harman's campaign?
I have just seen G. Hoon getting lacerated on the channel 4 news. Jon Snow made it plain that he did not believe Hoons story.
How can Labour and Harman just 'hand the money back'? It is potential evidence of a prima facie illegal transaction. Shouldn't the authorities impound it? Oh, they are the authorities. Sorry, I forgot.
Well that's Hoon in the clear ! Although he's not advanced Harriet's cause probably just the opposite. Jon Snow was incandescent and completely "beasted" poor Geoff ! At one point Snow almost said " Yes but we've heard all that rubbish before from Labour on numerous occasions" He didn't of course but his tone was caustic and left the viewer in no doubt that's what he thought.
Geoff will be off to give somebody a good kicking for putting him up for the interview no doubt.
I'm not sure Harman, or in fact any MP, will go because of this but I can guarantee that at some point someone will say
"I accept full responsibility for this situation but I feel that I owe it to [insert stakeholder group here] that I stay on in my post in order to fix this problem"
as that seems to have been the script over the last decade.
dirty european socialist said...
its so typical, all the tory rags ganging up on the labour party now, the party has done nothing wrong.
You clearly have not been listening to people in the last ten/eleven years.
1) The Iraq war
2) The mendacity leading to the Iraq war
3) The Honors/loans scandal and the deception
4) Having Brown as Chancellor, who has raised taxes over 90 times (so far) and destroyed the best occupational pension scheme in the world
5) The destruction of civil liberties and the relentless creation of the apparatus of a police state
6) ID cards. Loads of money wasted on something that will now never happen.
7) Made 10 Downing Streets costs three times what they were in 1997.
Other than they have failed to deliver anything and waffled endlessly for ten years, dozens of empty promises, billions and billions wasted.
Failed on every initiative. Allowed uncontrolled, mass immigration in to an overcrowded island with a desperate housing shortage.
Surrendered the EU rebate. Ignored parliament and the procedures.
Sold the UK down the river
Without doubt, the worst two Prime Ministers in living memory.
I've just been on the Adam Boulton blog and he refers to "lots of smoking guns" around in the Labour Party.
Does anyone remember the poster from "Reservoir Dogs"?
Harriet Hartman is just a nice working class lady
Oh dear DES I've got bad news for you. Not only was Harriet Harperson privately educated but she is actually the niece of an Earl - which makes her somewhat posher than David Cameron.
Why shouldn't we enjoy Labour's misfortune? It isn't as if anyone has really been harmed by this, except the Labour party who have so spectacularly shot themselves in the foot (feet?) And the point is that this is the first time since 1979 when the left haven't been either castigating the Conservatives as venal thugs (to roughly 1990), laughing at their incompetence (1990-1997) or sneering at their inelectability (1997-last October). So who's laughing now?
How is it that Baroness Jay smelt a rat but Harman's camp just took the money?
Also why was David Abraham supporting 2 deputy leader candidates?
The latest news update circulated by local Conservatives states: "In 2006, 93% of 2529 physiotherapy graduates faced unemployment. It costs £28580 to train each physiotherapist." I am appalled but not surprised by this statistic. My son studied physiotherapy for a year before deciding it wasn't for him and changing course. At that time the entire new intake was given the opportunity to change course because of the lack of future jobs. Whilst I am relieved that my son's prospects have improved, I feel desperately sorry for his ex-colleagues, most of whom seem likely to graduate with no job and a mountain of debt next summer. What a dreadful indictment of a government which has boasted so vociferously about increased manpower in the NHS.
Meanwhile back in the real world in sunny West Sussex, the government is still in the business of cockups.
I was speaking to a customer on sunday and they said their house purchase had been held up for 10 weeks because they were waiting for a Home Information Pack, apparently they are waiting on Southern Water, who have a 8-10 week backlog of applictions to do their bit.
So much for speading up the process, especially with the news that all properties are to be included.
Perhaps the 600,000 quid could be given to a charity dedicated to preserving the green belt and countryside to offset some of the damage caused by Abraham's Business Park.
He got what he wanted so why should he get his bribe returned as Ecclestone did.
I get a funny feeling about tomorrows PMQs... not sure if it will be a ha-ha funny - or an OH NO! funny.
Labour is on the rocks.
Brown should resign.
Golf Widow - Not only ranted on about increased NHS staffing (most of it "management", if I may use the term loosely) but they also made much, with a straight face, of vastly increased university admissions. Oh, and the vastly increased intelligence of all those youngsters getting 10 A-levels. This was all due to the vastly increased effectivenss of the state schooling sector.
Yes. I can see that it all hangs to together. Nice to see Brown and the cabinet all hang together, if things work out right.
Harriet Harman has committed a criminal offence.
Link
I've said it before, but a couple of weeks after Brown took over, I could see it was already all falling apart and he wasn't the man to hold it together (thank God). He will not be able to cling on by his fingertips until the election. I give him six months absolute max. He is hopeless and the gang of crooks in the cabinet are the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They even mess up their bribes.
Cameron will be preparing a good kicking for pmq's tomorrow but Brown will just plead ignorance again and promise it won't happen again.
The only potential casualty will be Harman. She may have to be sacrificed to take the heat out of the situation. Let's hope so!
As a Tory party activist, these people have managed to inspire in me a remarkable hatred of Gordon Brown and the way he is governing in a way that Blair never remotely managed - I am desperate to get rid of them.
Consider the following...
You receive a donation that you realise is being put through a 3rd party, which you know to be against the law - so you return it.
The original donor then makes a donation directly.
Do you
1) Take it, no further questions asked.
or
2) Make absolutely sure something fishy isn't going on, if only to make sure you are not being set up?
If you decide on option 2, might you ask whether the person has ever donated to Labour before through a 3rd party?
Might you check whether they had previously donated to the party directly or through the same 3rd party?
If you find that the 3rd party had been used before would you cover it up or bring it out into the open?
On a different track, when running a campaign and raising funds, do you ever look to see who is funding your competitor?
Do you check to make sure they have declared their funding properly?
If you see a name on the list that you recognise as having tried to illegally make a donation to your campaign do you draw it to the parties attention, or ignore it?
Unfortunately there are lots of questions that come from Hilary Benns refusal to accept the original donation. It is not Just Harman that has questions to answer.
High Noon for Gordon at PMQs tomorrow. He's had a good grilling today, but he's got to face Big Dave tomorrow - a mean hombre.
So, he needs to go tooled up.
I suggest a tight-fitting butt plug.
Things must be bad if Buff Hoon is the best NuLab can put up for an interview about their latest travails.
Why not Millipede or one of the Bollox family?
How the f*ck was the money actually transferred to the Labour party if some of the supposed donors claim not to even known about having donated to the Labour party. What a bunch of scumbags.
[10:29] - Brown's ghastly and ineffective and I would say marginally insane, but Blair is the more to be loathed because he is a destructive spirit and was wily enough to manage to get his horrendous agenda through.
Guido has this
verity
Last night's Al-beeb 6.00 news gave the fact that these youths are 'mainly of North African origin'. Normally a fact like that escapes from the beeb only months after the event. How bad can things be getting if the Al-beeb is telling the truth?
golfwidow
I have every sympathy with medical students who have spent years training only to find their jobs taken by foreigners. But it isn't only them.
Thousands of British IT staff, with years of experience, have not worked in IT this century. Nulab, and their corrupt friends in the civil service, have been remorseless in ensuring British jobs don't go to British people. There's a lot of money to be made from pretending there is a shortage of British staff.
Things are bad when nulab put up Buff Hoon - they are catastrophic when the put up Jack Cunningham as they did on today's Toady prog. The writing is on the wall (or should that be on the chummy letter from Mendelsohn to Abrahams). BTW Osborne was excellent - pitch perfect, despite being kept waiting an awful long time by anodyne questions to Buff Hoon and questionable 'analysis' from Nick Robinson. Robinson managed to confuse the two Janets used as intermediaries - an easy mistake given how byzantine this story is becoming but still a bad one.
What gets me is the puny sums involved. £5k is nothing, £200k is also not a huge amount --- those folks spent a lifetime getting to where they are, and then they are tempted by peanuts?
1. Either they are stupid and corrupt, which raises the question how did such simpleton oafs ever get so far without falling for the nearest monkey trap.
2. Or there are other huge bribes we're not seeing (yet) and they merely gotten casual on this one because usually it's so safe to do it.
5:38. You laughed then you say i'm not funny. ???????
5:54 Ooooo I am so hurt
9:47. Say what you like about him. But he is a very strong man. He had an accident where he lost an eye. He has faced the loss of lives of a child. He is a very strong man. And your petty insults merely so you up as what you are. A weak nonody.
* has Harriet Harman done anything wrong?
How about being born?
DES "... has faced the loss of lives of a child." And how many lives does this child have?
Given that the child's father is McCavity, I am guessing nine.
Are you suggesting that you now have to have a string of disabilities and bad luck to qualify to be PM?
[9:46] Interesting, especially given that not one print or broadcast medium, across the political spectrum, ever mentions this fact. It is always "youths".
I am still in shock at discovering that Hilary Benn is a man.
What sort of plonker would give a boy a girl's name?
Or is this another example of Labour's mendacity? Put up a man at the election but give him a woman's name to garner the votes of bewildered feminists.
Post a Comment