Citizen Smart: Labour Pie

Showing posts with label Labour Pie. Show all posts

22 Nov 2009

14 Jun 2009

Today's Sunday Herald carries and excellent feature by doyen of diarists, now returned reporter Tom Shields. I recommend a full read , but below for me are the most striking paragraphs, especially as we mark ten years of devolution: The infamous 1998-99 selection process, when a Blairite London appointed committee, chaired by Rosemary MacKenna, supervised by Jack McConnell, and fully endorsed by Donald Dewar and Gordon Brown, ripped the intellectual and independent soul out of the Labour Party in Scotland before the new parly even met. Where it all started to go wrong for Scottish Labour, what in big measure explains where it is today. Tom Shields takes up the story:

"....The party does nothing to encourage or recruit energetic, colourful or independent-minded individuals. The default choice is for the candidate who will be a safe pair of hands. Which usually means docile and biddable. The decline of personality in the Labour ranks is a legacy of the infamous selection process of 1999. The great and good of the party were supposed to choose the brightest and the best for the Scottish parliament. They singularly failed to do so.

"Applicants with a spark were excluded in favour of people who had made no mark and would make no mark. People in their 30s and 40s who had left no fingerprints of achievement were put into our national legislature. We were landed with legislators and tribunes who were ineffectual and unaccomplished, with no track record as strategic thinkers or ability to communicate. They were never going to bloom. It is a legacy which affects Labour and Scotland. ........."

Full article

18 May 2009

Vote Labour!

............How did the once oh so media savy Labour Party allow the day of its Scottish European election campaign launch - where it is rightly fighting for its life - be dominated by this pair? I have no political sympathy for them at all, but having done it countless times in the distant past, I do have a certain personal sympathy for Labour canvasers knocking doors tonight. paticularly in areas of need, "Labour areas". You are though now reaping what Gordon Brown has sown. And do please keep this pair, indeed this trio, praise them, protect them - long may they reign! Alternatively, you might ask - "what am I doing here?"

15 May 2009

For Foulkes Sake - step forward The Red Baron

With speculation gowing on Speaker Michael Martin's future, pundits have started to ponder the prospects of an early by-election in his Glasgow North East ( Springburn) constituency

Maybe Baron Foulkes could be Labour's candidate. He could stand on his chum Michael's unimpeacable record. And The Baron needs that third - or is it tenth? - salary.

He could get the law chaged to allow him to sit simultaneously in the Lords. Genius should know no boundaries.

One problem? - would the Martin familly let him stand? I think some auntie has been promised first refusal.

But "The Red Baron of Springburn" - unstoppable. A worthy heir to John MacLean! .

......Unless Carrie Gracie presented the hustings programme

Margaret Beckett

Margaret Beckett takes the biscuit. I remember her as Margaret Jackson in the 70s and 80s, a self styled "Bennite". Yes a Bennite, though she used the term selectively - she dropped it when it got in the way of her career. Today she is a Brownite , previously a Blarite and a Kinnockite. I do wonder what she would have been were she brought up in Germany in the inter-war years? Not in jail, that's for sure.

But today, she is English Housing Minister, presiding over the worst housing crisis in living memory. I'll give you the figures for Scotland, but in England they are as bad, in some places worse: Over 30,000 Scots classified as "priority homeless" and over half a million Scots on housing association or council waiting lists, figures more than double what Nulab inherited in 1997 - yes , twice as bad as the Tories!

Nulab will of course claim times are tough, they are doing all they can, but as ever the poor need to wait as the rich are bailed out. But adding insult to injury is surely having a Housing Minister charged with solving the crisis having three homes! Two of these have been wholly paid for by the taxpayer - a taxpayer who apparently can't afford help the homeless. As Foreign Secretary she had a grace and favour free flat in London, but she also managed in this same period, to claim £72,000 for a "second" ( third!) home in London as well. Illegal wars, illegal expenses?

This is graft, pure and simple. Unnaceptable. Margaret Beckett should resign now and retire from politics today. And the police should investigate.

And leaving aside any potential crime, just think how people on housing waiting lists - over 5 million across the UK - feel about having a Housing Minster who, in addition to her own home ( paid out of her £110k Government Minister salary) and her free Government provided town house , also claims another £72,000 of public money for a third home in London over a four year period? That's almost eight times the rent they would willingly pay out their own pockets - if Margaret Beckett could provide them with just one home to rent.

Beckett - an MP since 1974 and grade one career politician, has totally lost it. Unfit for purpose . Go, and forever. And take your corrupt colleagues with you.

Don't believe me? Watch her pathetic arrogant performance on BBC Question Time last night. The years have not been kind.

1 May 2009

For May Day - and for Scotland

30 Apr 2009

Swine Flu - A Damien McBride Conspiracy?

This thought has entered my head.

On a day that the Government was humiliated over the Gurkha vote, is about to lose ( has already lost) the MPs expenses vote, and Brown has had a car crash of a performance at PMQs, what do all the networks lead and bleed on? " About thirty people have flu", or "Mexican girl dies in Texas of swine flu" - as opposed to the hundreds of Mexican that die in Texas ever year of general neglect and discrimination.

I know Swine flu is potentially serious, but is this media hype in anyway helping - other than spreading unnecessary panic? And what is the practical advice on offer other than "don't go to Mexico"

I could say all this was one big NuLab conspiracy, especially as Damien McBride has this week astonishingly been spotted in the Commons chatting to journalists - apparently still with his Downing Street issued parliamentary pass! But I wont. Instead I'll say this feels like one big pharmaceutical industry conspiracy.

Meanwhile, GB goes from bad to worse, with that "Resign" e-petition now topping his own website's petitions page, and pulling away rapidly from its rivals. I now don't even know if Brown can hang on until his planned execution day - the day after Euro Election results.

Here though is an alternative exit strategy: He could feign illness and resign on health grounds - swine flu - caught off a Gurkha in Iraq. How appropriate?

29 Apr 2009

For the Gurkhas

Thanks to Lord Elvis of Paisley's blog

26 Mar 2009

Labour Pie - Just add Tony McNulty and Wee Nigel

22 Mar 2009

Labour Has Just Lost Edinburgh South

And as if an illegal war, a recession, billions of our cash to their banker chumbs, was not taking the piss enough.

But it's the rest of us that need ID cards?

Read the NOTW at its best - a public service.

And if sex scandals ain't to your taste, try this instead. Just the average weekend in the life of our institutionally corrupt New Labour Government.

"Once started out so young and strong, only to surrender"

15 Mar 2009

Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word

Just watched Douglas Alexander - that's the guy who fucked up the Scottish Parliament elections and got promoted - on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, live from Edinburgh

Aside from just in general being a national embarassment, wee Douglie was repeatedy questioned on the lessons he and the UK Government has learned from the disasterous banking crash they have presided over. In hindsight, asked Marr "is there anything different you might have done over the past decade, anything you did wrong... maybe became too enthrawled by the magic of these bankers you knighted, fetted, appointed to high office?" Not a tweak of conritition from wee Dougie. It was all somebody else's fault - these regulators apparently.

But who appointed the regulators Dougie? Who set the regulations? Who was Chancellor since 1997?

My conclusion - apart from my long held one that this Brownose cypher is about the most overpromted politician in British history I can think of ( still astonishingly Labour's UK General election coordinator and Minister for Overseas Development) - he ( they) would do it all again, - the exact same were they ever given another chance.

Let's not

And pray for the third world - Douggie their man in Britain, their proxy voice in the UN Security council !

PS Eck on the same show far more convincing, dignified. But still strangley pro RBS, and on the backfoot when quizzed on Sir George Mathewson, - as he will continue to be as long as he remains his Government's chief economic advisor. But overall good, credible. And why is it only on UK network TV that he tones down that smugness to almost positive levels?

22 Feb 2009

Middle East Peace Envoy, US Congressional Gold Medal of Honour, born again Catholic - are there no limits to this creep's brassneck?

From Today's Sunday Times

TONY BLAIR is cashing in on his experience as Britain’s longest-serving Labour prime minister by setting up a “commercial partnership” that offers clients political and economic advice.

The business venture, Tony Blair Associates, has been disclosed by the official watchdog that scrutinises paid employment undertaken by former ministers.

The advisory committee on business appointments said in a statement on its website this weekend: “Tony Blair has established Tony Blair Associates which will allow him to provide, in partnership with others, strategic advice on a commercial and pro-bono [free] basis, on political and economic trends and governmental reform.” The committee said it saw “no reason why he should not set up the firm forthwith”, and disclosed that this had been done this month.

It is believed to be the first time a former prime minister has set up a commercial venture with the apparent intention of cashing in on time spent in office. Since stepping down as prime minister in June 2007, Blair is said to have earned as much as £15m from a variety of business deals and a book venture. He has been paid a £4.5m advance for his Downing Street memoirs, a £2.5m salary as a part-time adviser to the American investment bank JP Morgan Chase and £2m for an adviser’s role with the Swiss firm Zurich Financial Services. He has also worked on the after-dinner lecture circuit. Last year a Spanish newspaper reported that he had earned up to £240,000 for making a 90-minute speech to 2,000 entrepreneurs in Barcelona. Blair also receives a taxpayer-funded pension of £63,468 a year, plus an annual £84,000 allowance to run a private office.

This chancer makes Sir Fred Goodwin appear contrite, credible.