Saturday, July 18, 2009

Labour MEP Bids to be the New Harriet Harman

Does Labour MEP Mary Honeyball want to be the new Harriet Harman? I ask for two reasons. Earlier this week she was bemoaning how depressing it was attending the opening of the European Parliament.
Not only were most of the UKIP MEPs present; they were also accompanied by young women in fairly flimsy purple dresses.
And what of it? Maybe it was very hot. Does she now presume to tell other women what to wear? Today she goes one step further and writes a blogpost about the dangers of the London Olympics leading to a rise in prostitution. It's a fair point, but rather undermined by this assertion...
Over a million construction workers are set to work on the site over the next three years, when added together with spectators and athletes could a fuel a sex trade time bomb.

A million? Where on earth has she plucked that figure of one million from? She needs to knock at least two noughts off, for I am told the true figure is 10,000. If you are going to raise an issue like prostitution, at least use figures which bear some resemblence to the truth. I have no idea what proportion of men use prostitutes, but let's say it is 1%. One per cent of 10,000 is somewhat less of a problem than 1% of a million.

PS: Useless political fact of the day: Mary Honeyball stood as Labour candidate in Norwich North in 1987. This was the high watermark year for Conservatives in that constituency, which we won by more than 7,200 votes. I was working for the then Tory MP for Norwich North, Patrick Thompson, at the time.

29 comments:

Chris Paul said...

And the low water mark for Tories in Norfolk was when exactly?

gustavus said...

Ms Honeyball is a bigot, who has more in common with Ian Paisley than she does with Harriet Harman. I hope the Tories will have the good sense to ensure that Catholic voters are made aware of her views of them.

Some choice quotations:

"the Roman Catholic Church and other extreme Christian organisations"

(Source)

"the men in frocks think diktats created over 2000 years ago are more important than life on this earth in the here and now"

(Source)

"The vice-like grip of Catholicism holds fast across large parts of the continent. Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland are just some of the countries in Europe that have been subjected to interference by meddling cardinals....

Should devout Catholics such as Kelly, Browne and Murphy be allowed on the government front bench in the light of their predilection to favour the Pope's word above the government's?"

(Source)

Faceless Bureaucrat said...

As with most NuLab muppets - no real grasp of facts and figures (let alone common sense) and unfit to hold office...

Woman with no policies said...

I wonder if our Labour MEP goes to work singing the ditty:

"Whingers of the world unite!"

Answers on the back of a fag packet please.

Elby The Beserk said...

She's a classic New Labour nut job. Pathetic really.

Unknown said...

Iain, was it not so long a go you were bemoaning about what Muslim women should wear?

Personally, I feel as though anyone can be a fashion critic, we shouldn't deride someone for not liking what someone else is wearing. We all raise eyebrows on someone's fashion sense once in a while, no point even bringing it up really.

Timothy Wallace said...

'scepticism and sexism' - is that smear by implication really the best argument she can come up with against people she disagrees with?

Rob said...

Perhaps she could get the government to get a grip on immigration and the resulting human traffic that fuels the sex trade.

Arlene Fang said...

Maybe she has a record of wasting parliamentary time asking pointless questions (relating to ballroom dancing for example)

Anonymous said...

Labour resorting to exaggeration, hysteria and encouraging abuse of power to vilify men?

Yes, definitely the next Harm Man. She must be friends with Jacqui.

Dr Evadne said...

A greater percentage of these construction workers will require tea, bacon rolls, egg sarnies and custard slices than a bit of 'how's yer father'. This will fuel a Greasy Spoon type time bomb which surely will take a whole bunch of redundant caterers off of JSA. Are there any spare safe seats that Dave would like me to run for?

Anonymous said...

this all reminds me of when the perception was that the tories were obsessed about the euro.

all new labour have is whinning on about things like this.

very sad end to the whole nu labour project.

Anonymous said...

Jeez! Only 10,000 boys working here. So whats us hoors sposed to do? 10,000 is a months work.

Anonymous said...

It's HarPERSON, you sexist phallocratic patriarchal man! Just because you're gay, Dale, doesn't change the fact that you're a woman-hating potential rapist - just like all those other men, with their hats and their cigars and their interest in sports.

Mirtha Tidville said...

Honeyball is barking....totalyy and absolutely....I even think that Liebour are embarrased by her. She rose to `fame` a couple of years ago when Ryanair produced their first calendar, showing off certain of their female cabin crew. She blew a fuse ..O Leary retaliated in one of the funniest put downs I have seen for a long time.....

Funny we dont hear a cheep from her when some women were brutally flogged in Khartoum this week for the `crime` of wearing trousers in public. Her views on christianity is coming close to one of those `hate` crimes she bangs on about..

Total tosser of the sort that only Liebour can find...

wolfie said...

Chris Paul

I would imagine the low water mark for Tories in Norfolk was probably fairly much the same as the rest of us.
Labour taking us into an illegal war, Labour renegaing on its manifesto committments re Uni fees and Lisbon referedum, Labour stealing our pension money, selling our gold reserves, Labour cutting the 10p rate of tax, Labour increasing the gap between poor and wealthy, labour encouraging 1.4 million immigrants to fill jobs in the public sector, spending more money in 12 years than had been spent in previous 300 years to achieve nothing, lowering the literacy of school leavers,oh and as of July 2009 having 5.4 million working age people not in work whilst leaving us a debt of £1500 billion !!!!

How low do you want to get?

Of course there's lots more but the Labour Depression Virus is taking hold now and I need to stop.

Anonymous said...

To Gustavus

I've always found that the most bigoted bigots are the bigots who call others bigots.

Anonymous said...

Gustavus: so, fundamentally, what you're saying is that even a dolt like Honeyball can see the Catholic Church for what it is.

I guess the adage is proved that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Personally, I don't share your view that the Tories should court Catholic voters. Instead, Labour should keep the whole bigoted lot of them, along with their desire to force the declarations of their particular death cult onto me and mine.

Nich Starling said...

I believe she was named in the Alliance's 101 damnations document which highlighted looneyh left tendancies amongst Labour candidates that year.

Kevin Davis said...

"Over a million construction workers are set to work on the site over the next three years, when added together with spectators and athletes could a fuel a sex trade time bomb."

Firstly, if the contsruction workers are there the same time asathletes then the whole games will be a disaster - bugger the prostitution, as it were.

Secondly the idea of 1m construction workers indulging in prostitution makes me feel slightly ill. In the words of another politician "there ill be rivers of ......."

Enough!

gustavus said...

Anonymice - if you can't even be bothered to give yourself pseudonyms so as to be able to make distinction in responding, don't be surprised if your Oatesian drivel goes unanswered.

Malcolm Redfellow said...

Now let me recall: General Election 2005, swing to Tories about 3%; North Norfolk (Tory candidate -- I. Dale) swing against Tories 6.3%.

Seems that Ms Honeyball, unashamed leftie that she was and is, hadn't done that badly in Norwich North.

I know that, for as long as they can get away with it, anything Tory is a policy-lite piece of froth, but occasionally why not (as they say on Slugger O'Toole) play the ball, and not the ...err ... person?

Raedwald said...

There is a basis of fact to all this, but she is horribly confused.

The number of workers on site will peak at around 25,000 during 2009 / 2010, and the 100,000 figure is the number of workers on site over 4 years.

The evidence is that the 2000 Sydney Olympics attracted around 10,000 sex workers of both sexes, not only to service the construction phase but also games visitors and athletes.

The athletes themselves got through 70,000 condoms so quickly that another 20,000 were provided. Even these ran out before the games ended.

So, thousands of Lithuanian tarts servicing thousands of Polish carpenters ... and a fair bit of money going into the local economy in rents, food and drink etc.

So what exactly is Honeyball's problem?

Mary Honeyball said...

Iain
I've posted my source, you could have checked, but that would have spoilt your story. See you in Norwich North?

http://thehoneyballbuzz.com/2009/07/19/iain-dale-fails-to-check-his-facts/

Best wishes
Mary

Raedwald said...

I took my figures from a Times piece that I now suspect may have followed a misleading government line; some fact-checking at http://raedwald.blogspot.com/2009/07/mary-honeyball-iain-dale-olympic-tarts.html

NB I think Iain is closest.
WV - crymen

Anonymous said...

Men: they eat of the beef and like to watch the sports. Men, with their inability to menstruate and their external sexual organs.

Men.

Dick Puddlecote said...

She's not just disapproving of girls in flimsy dresses, Iain.

Also, high heels and web-sites which accurately portray how young girls like to dress.

Dungarees and beanie hats only.

Anonymous said...

Just to be clear about this.

Honeyball questions whether Catholics, because of their religion, should be allowed in the cabinet.

Anglicans, presbyterians, muslims, jews agnostics, atheists ok- but there is a qustion mark over Catholics.

Will she be campaigning in Glasgow North East?

I sure hope so ;)

Anonymous said...

Honeyball questions whether Catholics, because of their religion, should be allowed in the cabinet.

Nope. If you can leave your straw men aside for a moment, what she actually said - raising a legitimate point, by the way - was whether it was acceptable for people in cabinet to regularly put their own religious mores and the direct instructions of the ruler of a foreign country (Benedict XVI, the monarch of the Vatican City) ahead of the democratic will of their people and the policy on which they and their party campaigned.

Given the efforts that Catholics and especially Labour-supporting Catholics have put into destroying this country through their support for genocidal Catholic terrorism in Northern Ireland, I'd say that her point is a legitimate one.

The extremists in the British Muslim community have done nothing that comes close to matching the indiscriminate violence and treachery wrought in Britain by Catholics. I will say nothing of the corruption which Labour-supporting pro-IRA Catholics have wrought in the West of Scotland, Liverpool and every other place they've infested - the state of those areas speaks for itself.