Another Day, Another BBC Online Pro-Labour Report

200K London Superhead? Yer 'avin a larf in't ya?

I know, I know - if you wanted to read about how bad the BBC is, you'd make your way to the first rate "Biased BBC" blog. But I just can't help it, mainly because every day with relentless regularity, the BBC - particularly its online news incarnation - confirms all my suspicions about it. The chief suspicion, of course - that the BBC is institutionally left wing, pro-Labour and viscerally Tory-hating - can hardly be called a 'suspicion' any more since so much evidence to prove this is right beyond any reasonable doubt has been forthcoming over the years. Lame BBC managerial and editorial statements to the contrary have become a joke.

You, as I often do, might be wondering to what lengths the BBC will go in pursuit of its propaganda goals. Well, today we have yet more data to show that "any" is the answer. Consider the farce of Ed Balls' entire education strategy for the past three years, given plummeting literacy and numeracy levels and ever-dumber standards in exams. Consider, for instance, the £10Bn+ that has been frittered away over and above the £30Bn school building and refurbishment programme, now being gallantly corrected by Michael Gove.

Consider also today's extraordinary news that a primary school head teacher has been raking in 200 large a year on the back of, we assume, some half-decent administration of a small school, the consequence of another Balls brainchild, "City Challenge". Jackpot! At least for Mark Elms, that is, who, it seems, is some kind of hyper-teacher, a true saviour capable of healing the educationally sick and giving the word-blind sight. At least I assume that's how good he is otherwise why is he troughing eight times more for running a primary school than a close relative of mine retired on after 35 years of highly distinguished teaching and administration in the secondary sector? No one, but no one, in the education industry is that good.

It seems the BBC's reporter, one Hannah Richardson, disagrees. I'll quote a bit of it, but you will need to read to whole thing to get a taste of just how extraordinarily one-sided it is - and I mean in favour, by implication, not of the teacher in question, but of the brains behind the ridiculously expensive but "prestigious" (according to Richardson - you betcha, girly! Anyone who can syphon off 200k from the government for running a primary school deserves some kind of admiration) "National Leader of Education" programme, Edward BALLS.

For this work, at his 400-pupil school, Mr Elms receives a basic salary of £82,417.This is well within the maximum head teacher pay rate of £109,000 for large inner London state schools.

The bulk of the £200,000 pay package he received last year was for the work he did on the London Challenge and City Challenge project over two years.

These schemes support schools in challenging circumstances and have been very successful in improving education in deprived areas of the country.

Well now, pardon me for complaining, but does this or any of the other half-baked comments she makes in her little piece remotely justify giving one man two hundred grand for running one school, no matter how bad it had become in a Labour-run inner city area. As I said, however, it's important to recognise that that's not the real purpose of this dizzyingly-spun article. The real purpose for this editorially on-message young BBC hackette is to speak out for a very expensive, and highly divisive, Labour schools policy, and therefore, by implication, up for Balls.

Gladly, if the rider at the top of the old Department for Children, Schools and Families, website dedicated to this policy from the incumbents is anything to go by, the "City Challenge" policy Ms Richardson seems to like so much, and Mark Elms obviously loves, is now as defunct and kaput as the failed government that spawned it. It goes:

A new UK Government took office on 11 May. As a result the content on this site may not reflect current Government policy.
All statutory guidance and legislation published on this site continues to reflect the current legal position unless indicated otherwise.
To view the new Department for Education website, please go to http://www.education.gov.uk

I like it! Seems Hannah Richardson was reporting on a dead policy walking, regardless of her motives for doing so.

Time she and the BBC woke up to the fact that Labour is out of office, and that their cosy world of protected political bias is no longer as safe as they might like to believe. Just as Mark Elms can expect no more ridiculous bonuses (or perhaps "bribes" would be a better word) for doing his job in a less than salubrious area of the Smoke, left wing BBC hacks, editors and managers can expect no more sanctuary in a public institution that urgently needs to be given back to the public, or go the way of the "Department for Children, Families, Schools, Pets and Wasting Money", Ed Balls and the entire, trainwreck New Labour Government.

Do you think they get that yet? I don't.

Quote of the Day: The BBC's Contradiction

Rod Liddle in the Speccy has quoted a first class Charles Moore piece to help him emphasise his own refreshing and welcome disdain for the direction the BBC has been taking for the past decade or so, especially as regards its squandering of the licence fee tax on overpaid and highly over-rated "talent". He points out that Moore illustrates the contradiction that lies at the heart of the BBC's funding-spending model and the dishonesty in senior managers' constant attempts to deflect our attention away from it. Liddle writes:

Charles’s diary in the last edition of the magazine put far more succinctly, and clearly, the point I was trying to get at in my blog about the BBC a few items down from this one. I talked about the BBC’s moral cross-subsidisation (which is never publicly admitted by the corporation) and how this is increasingly difficult to justify. Charles puts it better, with this exposition of what lies at the heart of the “endless contradiction” which the BBC exploits

Excellent, sure, but then he goes on to quote Moore:

“When you complain that it is funded in a privileged way, it says that it does things which no one else can do. When you complain that it spends its unique funding on enormous contracts with stars, it says it has to do so in order to behave like its rivals. The truth is that the concept of the star……….is incompatible with the Public Purposes expressed in the Charter of the BBC.”

Brilliantly put. What I know is that the corruption at the centre of the BBC, and its cause has seldom been more eloquently articulated than it is by Moore here, must be challenged and the corporation reformed, broken-up or abolished altogether.

Until then, for instance, more than a quarter of all criminal court actions will continue to be licence fee-tax related. People will continue to go to jail and/or be fined extraordinarily punitive amounts in their tens of thousands simply because, as is often the case, they cannot afford to fund the lifestyle of people like Jonathan Ross.

That is unacceptable, and this government had better do something about it in this parliament or be viewed, at least by this blogger, as a failure.

Named In Dispatches

Courtesy: Department of International Development (the irony)

I can't say much about this hideous thing because I'm sort of still trying to process what I've just seen. But I will say this.

I find it utterly soul-destroying that these people, all of them Labour ministers either interviewed in the sting or fingering ministers still in power in one position or another (including that sickening, unblinking crook Mandelson yet again), are so much worse as people than so many people I've met in my lifetime and career so far. I simply cannot imagine what my father thinks of it all.

The point is that these people are so corrupt, they would sooner burn this country to the ground than be forced into a position where they must confront the twin characteristics that define them all, to a man and to a woman: vanity and greed. Vanity and greed is what defines this entire government, and this government's vanity and greed is what has brought this country to the brink of ruin. We were safer in the Cold War than we are with these.

Just remember, prior to this devastating Blair/Brown era, governments were brought down for far, far less than this, and rightly so.

I can't think of anything else to say just now. I'm just too depressed by the level of venality and decay this country has been brought to thanks to a desperately serious, though perhaps innocent in the case of a fair few million voters, false step that we took in 1997.

A lot of people were conned by Labour, but all are punished.

To me, though, there is some kind of hope. The Conservative Party, under Cameron, I believe has genuinely sensed the mood of the people (the people that count, that is - the vast majority of people - and not that small minority of dumb, insolent, loudmouth Labour activists who just don't care because their obsessive political prejudices always take precedence over truth, justice and common decency).

The Conservative Party, under Cameron, really will mend our broken politics, mainly because they had bloody well better! So thank God for that, because, as this terrifying Dispatches programme shows, our politics is just about as broken as it could possibly be.

And Labour broke it.

Byers' Song

Loving the National Express as Stephen Byers clearly does - after all, he saved that company £300million by putting the fix in with "Lord" Andreas Adonis, who obligingly let it off the hook precisely in the way Byers describes he'd arranged with him in the undercover Channel 4 tapes, by nationalising the rail franchise they were contracted to run, but had comprehensively ruined (at a cost to you and me of, you guessed it, £300million) - I thought he might appreciate this bit of Divine Comedy brilliance (sort of). The video is set, appropriately, in a nuthouse.



What's emerging here is the sheer scale of these crooked, Labourist, overpromoted socioeconomic demolition experts' blatant, abject, systematic, chronic corruption. You would be forgiven for receiving this information with a sense of total disbelief. Well, if you are tempted to do that, don't. It's all true, and, what's more, all we're really glimpsing now is the tip of a very big iceberg.

Ever wondered where all the money went? Well, now you have some idea.

Jail really is too good for them.

Troughers To The Bitter End

In tomorrow's Mail on Sunday and Sunday Times, two stories reveal just how venal former Labour ministers are. It simply beggars belief that these four, Geoff Hoon, Patricia Hewitt, Margaret Moron (sic) and Stephen Byers will almost certainly escape at the very least some form of criminal investigation for corruption.

One other thing is certain, unless the Tories get tough on this issue and threaten to seek prosecutions for what amounts to the worst sleaze probably in modern British history, we, the long-suffering public, will simply never know to what extent we have been comprehensively fleeced by the most corrupt and disastrous regime we've ever experienced in Britain.

Cameron, if and when he wins, had better be genuinely 'whiter than white' or I guarantee that this time around there will be bloody hell to pay. He needs to be concentrating on making sure any government he leads is unimpeachable by reviving the principles of collective and ministerial responsibility which have withered and died under Blair/Brown; that any future parliament is beyond reproach by making sure any pocket-lining MPs forfeit their office; and that the sins of the past, especially by these Labour criminals, are not simply forgotten, by resisting any pressure for an amnesty. I'm sure Gordon Brown would be pleased to return the favour given half the chance - but that's not the point.

This should be one of the major focuses of a new Cameron government, and definitely not woolly headed, watermelon carbon taxes that will severely damage the economy, justified on the basis of a now pretty thoroughly discredited scientific theory, itself a trojan horse for a socialist agenda.

Nothing less will do.

Fawkes On Whelan

Enjoyed the McBride fact or fiction thing. Not sure what that 'Eric Tickles' thing was all about, though.

But Whelan. Sheesh, what a real piece of work that scumbag is. In terms of being a total stranger to the truth, and being as corrupt as a gambling copper with a serious drinking habit, he's second only to Brown himself. Well, the Labour wheels have come flying right off this time. There's one thing people never, ever forgive and that's being taken for mugs.

Unite's funding of Labour with public money, and 100+ Labour MPs, again with public money, and its subsequent war on BA (which does not serve the interests of its members) makes Brown's - and Labour's - position untenable. Unless Brown gives the £11 million back - not to Unite, but to the taxpayer - people will rightly feel robbed. But he can't do that because first it would be an admission of guilt, and second, it would bankrupt an insolvent party.

Checkmate.

Misquotes and Trainwrecks

Having now had the chance to see Brown's worst performance yet at PMQs (and that's saying something), I absolutely agree with Iain Dale who said of it:

Cameron was on fire and pulverised Brown, who was almost reduced to a wimpering wreck. Jack Straw's face said it all. "Why didn't we get rid of him when we had the chance?" was what he was clearly thinking.

Well, if that was what Straw was thinking, a few more examples of Brown's - or Brown's team's - nightmare bungling will give him yet more food for thought, or cause for regret.

Here's one. Christopher Hope, in his Daily Telegraph blog, has just pointed out that he was the one who wrote about Cameron's attempts to open a dialogue with the unions, and that he was totally misrepresented - and pretty much misquoted - about it by Brown during those self same PMQs, while the old fraud, who had just finished admitting to lying to the House and the Chilcot enquiry over defence cuts, was trying - and spectacularly failing - to turn the tables on a rampant Cameron.

He told the Commons today: “The right hon. Gentleman [David Cameron] has come a long way from a few months ago, when The Daily Telegraph reported: ‘David Cameron has launched a secret mission to win over Britain’s trade unions…

“The trade unions have also been asked to help draw up opposition policy, The Daily Telegraph can disclose’.

“It also stated that ‘party officials have met with the unions more than sixty times since the spring.’ One day they are for the unions; the next day they are against the unions. The only consistency is in their total opportunism.”

Brown is wrong on a couple of points here. Cameron’s links with the unions did not emerge “a few months ago”. In fact my Telegraph story he was quoting from was published on the frontpage of the Telegraph in August 2008 – a full 18 months ago.

Since then, David Cameron confirmed the talks in an interview with the Telegraph and covered his plans to curb their links with the Labour Party just last month. Not much that is opportunistic here either – given Cameron had also hired his own “union envoy” Richard Balfe.

Anyone would guess there was an election around the corner.

Well, there is an election around the corner, and Brown's latest in long, long line of trainwreck performances might well prove decisive in determining its outcome. As Cameron struck home with devastating point after devastating point, and Brown's parries became more and more feeble, you could almost feel the votes hemorrhaging from Labour, and what remained of Brown's already ragged credibility draining inexorably away.

The most devastating blows Cameron struck, however, he saved until the last, of which the best was the damning charge that at least one thing is now absolutely crystal clear. Brown has been almost exclusively serving the interests of his paymasters, Unite, for years now, and not the interests of the nation. In addition, Cameron also managed to make it fairly clear that it was the interests of these giant, Labour-sponsoring union leaderships Brown had been serving, and absolutely not the interests of their members - or, indeed, the nation.

This is a key distinction that has to be rammed home from here on in. It will resonate, revealing, as it does, the trade union, anti-democratic power grab that's been going on behind the scenes relentlessly, if not furiously, since Brown usurped Blair. Cameron was right (again); this is a return to the handwringing, lame governments of the Seventies, who, as he memorably said, caved into the unions rather than talking to them.

Overall, this is a narrative that will ring true with hundreds of thousands of people who have been virtually disenfranchised and misrepresented for decades by left wing union leaders who now, it seems, have regained control of the Parliamentary Labour Party. And the reason why it will ring true is because it is true.

No one, bar the more rabid loony lefties of the Grauniad class, and Labour's new militant tendency itself, wants to go back to that sort of grim world, with a stagnant nation held to ransom by an unelected politbureau of bitter old union Trots. And people are quickly realising that Brown is so compromised, so reliant as he is on union money and largesse for his power, that he is not on their side. It's also becoming vividly clear how he survived all those coup attempts. The unions weren't willing to lose their puppet just yet - or, at least, until he's served his purpose.

Point is, there is so much new and powerful ammunition for the Tories here, it'll be hard for them to know which grenade to lob first.

And, of course, the ultimate, happy upshot of all this is that we have all taken one more agonising step closer to the downfall of the Brown regime, and towards a reforming Conservative government, attempted Unite coup d'etats and atavistic Big Union international syndicalism notwithstanding.

Libyan Health Service - Best In The World

He was wasting away from prostate cancer in a Scottish prison hospital, so the Scottish government, in a shady deal involving the Foreign Office, Lord Mandelson of Sleaze and flatulent nutcase Gadaffi's son, released the only convicted Lockerbie bomber on 'compassionate' grounds. He had an absolute maximum of three months to live, after all, said a couple of hired quacks. The poor man would have become an ex-bomber by the end of October 2009, so we were told (and didn't believe). Sorry to quote myself, but this was me back in November (three months after the Megrahi release):

Al-Megrahi: the convicted Lockerbie bomber might still not be dead as all the Labour stooge doctors and this Labour government ghoulishly promised everyone he would be (he's a full five days overdue now), but he's still about to come back and haunt at least one of them. Yes, you guessed it, the King of Sleaze himself, Lord Mandelson of Tripoli.

Now we learn from a number of sources that six months on, Megrahi is not only still alive and free, but he's actually recovering - and free. Clearly, something is amiss. Instead, however, of branding this whole, stinking affair a web of deceit motivated by a Big Oil deal and reaching right up to the highest levels of the British government, let's just praise the Libyan Health Service. Megrahi's almost miraculous cure in the capable hands of Libyan doctors offers pretty conclusive proof that Libyan health care is comfortably the best in the world.

Toby Young, however, is rightly livid about the whole, grubby, insulting episode, just as everyone else should be. He also argues - and I think this is very important - that Megrahi's conviction was absolutely safe, according to a relative of a victim who understandably took a very close interest in the trial.

Given the fact that Megrahi is a convicted terrorist, and given that thanks to these legendary Libyan healthcare professionals, he's now on the road to recovery, isn't it nearly time for him to be put right back in jail? We could even settle for a Libyan jail.

I suspect that that wasn't part of Mandy's backroom sweetener BP deal, however, so I won't be holding my breath.

Truly sickening.

Imported Labour Votes

This article, in today's Telegraph, explains why this country has five million plus more people, born and brought up overseas, living in Britain now than in the year 2000.

And this statement from the report tells us all we need to know about why Labour opened the national floodgates:

Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour.

No Ellis Island, birth of a nation altruism here. Vote rigging? Social engineering? Well, yes, and much worse than those two evil practices - this is just another example of the straightforward corruption perpetrated by the most utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt government ever inflicited on this country.

Vote them in again, and watch your country - and your democracy - vanish. We only have one chance of ridding ourselves of them. Don't blow it, tempted as you might be, by voting for someone other than the Conservative Party. For all the Tory Party's frailties, do not lose the focus (ridding ourselves of Brown Labour). All sane folk must vote for Cameron. Not to do that is to invite catastrophe out of mere self-indulgence.

Do that - vote for someone other than the Conservative Party at the next GE - and we might just end up with more of the same, which would, quite literally, be an absolute catastrophe for what's left of the United Kingdom. Get it?

So get a grip (especially Kippers)!!

Monckton: IPCC Chief Is Going To Jail

Not "should be going" you will note (when you look at the video below), but "is going". The modal and tense choices are very telling and, I can guarantee, deliberate. Railway engineer and non-climate scientist, but very dodgy chief of the IPCC scam-mongers, Rajendra Pachauri "is going" to jail, says Lord Monckton. A philosopher and logician as precise and vigilant when it comes to language as Christopher Monckton would never have said, publicly or privately, that in this way unless he already knew there was strong enough evidence to permit him to say it without inviting some type of legal challenge.

It's fair to say, therefore, that things are about to get a lot better for us, the long-abused, stolen-from taxpayer - and much worse for Pachauri and his crew. That would, of course, also implicate this Labour government. What a surprise.

If in doubt, vote them out!



Hat tip: Climategate

Climategate - The Scale of the International Stitch-Up

Ah, life. So much to do, so little time to do it. But I can always find time to flag up another emerging revelation in the increasingly appalling (is that possible?) Climategate saga.

This time, we find that former railwayman, "Dr" (of diesel locomotive engineering, lest we forget) Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has about as deep a conflict of personal business interest as it is possible to have, while chairing what is meant to be an independent and objective scientific oversight committee, without being laughed out of the job. The reason, apparently, why he hasn't been laughed out of the job, however, is that his conflict of interest is merely the tip of the proverbial - and truly vast - iceberg, when it comes to the whole nefarious and really rather sinister new industry known as carbon trading.

James Delingpole, naturally, has the story. Read it here - and weep (some more).

Meanwhile, winter storms are hammering much of North America (what, in winter!) and we ourselves are about to experience a pretty significant cold snap (no, you mean in winter! In Britain!! Surely some mistake). There's a multi-meter deep, rich covering of snow all over the ski resorts of Europe, as always (never, in the skiing season!!); glaciers at the poles stubbornly keep on growing and the sea has risen not one millimeter anywhere around this vast globe of ours (as far as we know - it's just about impossible to measure it to that degree of accuracy, remember, in spite of what MMCC, nee AGW, scientists claim).

And yet, the schitzoid media and utterly dishonest government keep on pushing the warmist, Copenhagen, stitch-up agenda, with, for example, Sky News's prepackaged (all the graphics were done long before Climategate but they've stuck with them nonetheless - they were jolly expensive, after all) "Turning Up the Heat" nonsense, complete with big red thermometer and reports from their man going live every night from the dwindling Brazilian rain forest (huh?); and making stuff up about "sunken" villages on tropical islands (the one in question was wiped out by a tropical storm many years back, folks - as they tend to be when they are, er, built along the coast in tropical storm zones) and generally trumpeting as much alarmist propaganda as is humanly possible for one rolling news outlet to churn out. Well, hey, it's all about the ratings, after all.

I could go on, I guess, but what's the point? I'm sure you get the idea, and what an hysterical one it is too. Just please read the Delingpole piece and make your own mind up. Suffice to say, my own view is pretty straightforward by now: climate change alarmism and what is now emerging as "Carbongate" are a global travesty on a scale never before seen. Conspiracy? Not really. Just an unfortunate combination of a basic contempt for the human race and an unhappy convergence of several vested interests, many of them fanatically motivated, all able to rally around the same myth of imminent human destruction (or was that planetary destruction - it's so hard to tell with these clowns). But, as is always the case, the biggest motivation of all for continuing to peddle and push this utter nonsense is, as it turns out, also the oldest one of all: simple greed.

As someone once said, always follow the money.

Blair's Millions

Excellent piece from the Renegade Economist today which traces some of Tony Blair's labyrinthine collection of funds, holding companies and legal entities that he's started since handing over his mandate to Gordon Brown. According to the Renegade, he's created a "complex web of structures involving 12 different legal entities handling the unprecedented millions he is receiving since he stepped down from office in 2007."

The article goes on:

So mystifying are the former prime minister’s financial structures – which involve highly specialised limited partnerships and parallel companies – that the Guardian today launches an open invitation to tax specialists and accountants to attempt to explain the motivation behind such structures. We have published the Companies House documents and other legal papers regarding the structure of the partnerships at guardian.co.uk and invite expert comment via our site at guardian.co.uk/politics/series/blair-mystery.

Thereis no suggestion Blair is doing anything illegal. But he refuses to explain the
purpose of the secretive partnerships.

Tax specialists say Blair could use these unusual arrangements at some point in the future to seek to transfer millions tax-free to his four children.
Blair denies, however, that the structures are such an inheritance tax avoidance scheme, known as a “family limited partnership”.

“Family limited partnerships” were being publicized to lawyers and accountants in November 2007 at the time Blair’s lawyers started to set up his structures.

Known in the trade as “Flips”, family limited partnerships are a way of getting round stricter inheritance tax rules in the 2006 budget, imposed by Gordon Brown while Blair was still prime minister.

'Flips', eh? Oh, the irony. Now, as yesterday evening's post on this blog shows, I'm not a little nervous about the Grauniad's journalistic standards, so I'm very pleased that an independent economics journal and blog has taken up the story. Indeed, the article then goes into far more detail than the Graun would ever dare about Blair's on-the-face-of-it legal but pretty irregular financial affairs, all designed (so the theory goes) to dodge inheritence tax, so little Leo will inherit all daddy's estimated, post-PM fortune of 14 million quid (and rising). "There, there. We won't let the beastly tax man have any of it." Perhaps Blair will be voting Tory in the next election (if he's actually registered to vote in the UK, that is).

Whichever way you choose to look at this, and the financial arrangements alone certainly seem worthy of the taxman's attention, it is worth remembering that Blair's pocket-lining at the expense of the British taxpayer, his early retirement (a breach of both a manifesto promise and of trust with 'the nation' - or 9 million suckers, rather- that gave New Labour under Blair, not Old Labour under Brown, a mandate to govern) and his subsequent ruthless exploitation of his ongoing popularity in the United States (if only they knew him as we do) are just the tip of the iceberg. They were (are?) all at it!

There can be no forgiveness for Blair for so many reasons, and he should be investigated for his dodgy businesses and questionable tax arrangements - just after he's been arrested over Iraq - but we must never forget that an awful lot more parliamentarians have been doing this under this Labour government for more than a decade and the worst, criminal offenders have been of the Labourist stripe. Now we know why. A management culture begins at the top. If the person at the top is a money-grubbing, ruthless exploiter of tax and expenses loopholes, the entire organisation's likely to follow suit. They're just copying the boss. Indeed, for the boss to feel OK about being so venal, he will positively (though quietly) encourage it. And that, folks, is called corruption.

And we've had 13 years of it. No wonder we're bankrupt: the country financially and parliament morally. Thank Brown for the former; Blair for the latter.

Megrahi: Still Not Dead - Meanwhile Banks Rejoice

Al-Megrahi: the convicted Lockerbie bomber might still not be dead as all the Labour stooge doctors and this Labour government ghoulishly promised everyone he would be (he's a full five days overdue now), but he's still about to come back and haunt at least one of them. Yes, you guessed it, the King of Sleaze himself, Lord Mandelson of Tripoli.

Incidentally, this partridge shooting party thing of Lord Rothschild that Mandelson attended with, among others, Saif Gaddafi - I can't help but wonder whether there is any connection between this and today's "Supreme" Court ruling enabling banks to continue legally to steal however much they like from customers that their extortionate, punitive charges turned into debt slaves in the first place. After all, at least one of the judges was a Rothschild banker.

The point is that wherever you look there's some sort of Labour shadiness going on - or has been going on- so often with Mandelson right at the very heart of it. Be it Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, the banks, education, health, PFI, Europe - the list is seemingly endless.

If and when we kick these ruinous crooks out, the Tories will have to uncover anything and everything about Labour's record of betrayal and deceit, however damaging it might appear potentially to be to the reputation of the country. Hiding it will only cause the rot to creep ever further. Revealing the truth about these long years of Labour corruption and sleaze is the only way gradually to draw Britain out of shadows into which it has been cast by the worst government it has ever had inflicted upon it.

Another Day, Another Disaster For Brown

TUC-Labour: "Britain Stitched-Up"

Aside from being utterly horrifying - just how much damage has Labour done to democracy in Britain! - this story in The Times is timed to perfection (Brown's about to grunt through his much-leaked, pathetic TUC speech) and potentially is political dynamite. It will generate a great deal of indignation, not to say indigestion, in people nationwide who read it over their Monday-morning Cornflakes.

Don't take my word for it, though. Read on and make up your own mind about whether you think the people who represent us in Parliament, however useless they might be, should at the very least be elected by us to that position, or professional civil servants with no public political affiliation. Labour has utterly corrupted that, just like they have corrupted everything else in Britain during their cataclysmically corrupt and incompetent period of power.

Just who the hell is in charge here?

Labour is funding trade union activity inside Whitehall with millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, The Times has learnt.

Government departments are paying the salaries of dozens of union officials, some earning more than £60,000 a year, who do no work for the taxpayer.

The Conservatives expressed horror last night at the “cadre of union officials” embedded across Whitehall.

Ten departments have revealed that they employ 46 full-time and 87 part-time officials to work exclusively for the unions at taxpayers’ expense. Their salaries cost between £150,000 and £4.5 million per department. They are also given access to office space, computers and photocopiers worth an estimated £1.2 million each year.

A Whitehall whistleblower has told The Times that union officials spent time on “far-left political campaigns and making up false claims about the Conservative Party”. Civil servants are bound by impartiality rules.

The whistleblower also claimed that union officials are given promotions worth thousands of pounds, despite working outside their departments’ remits. The source added: “This is a two-tier system where ordinary civil servants work for a living and strive for years to get promotion, while political cliques in unions get their chums into taxpayer-funded jobs where there is no job.”

One senior official with the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), Karen Abram, lives in Lancashire but has her travel and hotel bills paid by the Department of Health so that she can work in London. The department said that Ms Abram was a “home worker” and that her expenses complied with internal guidelines.

The disclosure, which comes the day before Gordon Brown addresses the TUC conference, has revived accusations that Labour has done favours for its union paymasters.

Several departments, including the Treasury, did not respond to requests for information, which means that the total value of assistance could reach £10 million a year.

According to Electoral Commission records, union donations accounted for £5.4 million, or 69 per cent, of Labour’s fundraising in the first six months of the year.

The scale of the union assistance has caused surprise. One union source said that in an ideal world, there would be one full-time official for every 2,000 workers. However, the Home Office has 83 full and part-time union officials for its 70,000 employees: one for less than every 1,000.

Francis Maude, the Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, said: “On top of office costs, it is now clear that the Government is bankrolling a cadre of full-time union officials across Government, costing millions of pounds a year. There needs to be full openness and transparency on these costs so taxpayers can know whether this is appropriate public expenditure and represents value for money.”

A spokeswoman for the Cabinet Office said: “Since 1996, departments and agencies have been able to set their own levels of trade union facilities time, but we do not collect this information centrally. Like many employers, civil service departments follow the Acas code of practice — time off for trade union duties and activities — when agreeing facilities with their trade unions.”

Senior union officials, including Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB union, have regarded attempts by Mr Maude to uncover information about trade unions’ work in Whitehall, as a declaration of war [it damn well should be!]. He told The Times that unions were more heavily regulated than the banks.

The three unions that work inside Whitehall are the PCS, Prospect and the FDA (First Division Association).

Trade union representatives are in theory banned from interfering in the formulation of policy, although some officials suspect that this may take place informally. This was denied by a spokesman for the PCS. “Typically these individuals take up personnel complaints and negotiations with management. In some departments, this is negotiating and some take people on full-time,” he said.

(You can't touch me, I'm part of the union this Labour government.) Do they think people will be pleased about this? Do they seriously think that we don't know that they have debauched democracy with their insidious, endless hand-greasing and egregious, shameless use of union placemen to shore up their control of the civil service and the levers of power? Do they suspect they might have done something wrong here?

The answer to all those questions is, of course, "no". They have no idea how much fury this latest piece of evidence of the corruption that lies at the blackened heart of this Labour government will generate. Or how much further damage it will cause them.

They are that arrogant; they are that stupid.

How many more nails does Brown's coffin need hammered into it before we finally get to bury him, one wonders?

Libyagate: As If We Didn't Know...

BP Libya: The motive
SNP collusion: The opportunity
Release of Megrahi - lies: Brown's crime

The British government did decide to release Megrahi to sweeten a BP oil deal, the Sunday Times has revealed. So, they lied - to everyone. And Brown has pulled his usual trick of scuttling off to talk nonsense to our soldiers in Afghanistan when the heat's on at home. Only, it won't fly this time for him because marines are dying this time while he's "in country".

The British government decided it was “in the overwhelming interests of the United Kingdom” to make Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, eligible for return to Libya, leaked ministerial letters reveal.

Gordon Brown’s government made the decision after discussions between Libya and BP over a multi-million-pound oil exploration deal had hit difficulties. These were resolved soon afterwards.

The letters were sent two years ago by Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to Kenny MacAskill, his counterpart in Scotland, who has been widely criticised for taking the formal decision to permit Megrahi’s release.

The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests

In a letter dated July 26, 2007, Straw said he favoured an option to leave out Megrahi by stipulating that any prisoners convicted before a specified date would not be considered for transfer.

Downing Street had also said Megrahi would not be included under the agreement.

Straw then switched his position as Libya used its deal with BP as a bargaining chip to insist the Lockerbie bomber was included.

The exploration deal for oil and gas, potentially worth up to £15 billion, was announced in May 2007. Six months later the agreement was still waiting to be ratified.

On December 19, 2007, Straw wrote to MacAskill announcing that the UK government was abandoning its attempt to exclude Megrahi from the prisoner transfer agreement, citing the national interest.

In a letter leaked by a Whitehall source, he wrote: “I had previously accepted the importance of the al-Megrahi issue to Scotland and said I would try to get an exclusion for him on the face of the agreement. I have not been able to secure an explicit exclusion.

“The wider negotiations with the Libyans are reaching a critical stage and, in view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom, I have agreed that in this instance the [prisoner transfer agreement] should be in the standard form and not mention any individual.”

Within six weeks of the government climbdown, Libya had ratified the BP deal. The prisoner transfer agreement was finalised in May this year, leading to Libya formally applying for Megrahi to be transferred to its custody.

Saif Gadaffi, the colonel’s son, has insisted that negotiation over the release of Megrahi was linked with the BP oil deal: “The fight to get the [transfer] agreement lasted a long time and was very political, but I want to make clear that we didn’t mention Mr Megrahi.

“At all times we talked about the [prisoner transfer agreement]. It was obvious we were talking about him. We all knew that was what we were talking about.

“People should not get angry because we were talking about commerce or oil. We signed an oil deal at the same time. The commerce and oil deals were all with the [prisoner transfer agreement].”

His account is confirmed by other sources. Sir Richard Dalton, a former British ambassador to Libya and a board member of the Libyan British Business Council, said: “Nobody doubted Libya wanted BP and BP was confident its commitment would go through. But the timing of the final authority to spend real money was dependent on politics.”

Bob Monetti of New Jersey, whose son Rick was among the victims of the 1988 bombing, said: “It’s always been about business.”

It's not the "national interest" excuse that jars, or even the deal itself. People might or might not regard these as justifiable (I don't). It's the obvious collusion that's gone on behind the scenes with the Scottish executive to lie about the real reasons for releasing the terrorist in question using the "compassionate grounds" legislation as nothing more than a convenient loophole. It's the constant lying to the British people - even when they know we know that they are lying, but go on doing it anyway. It's the attempt, incompetent as ever, to cover-up their misdeeds in the most brazen manner possible. It's the cynicism, the dishonesty; it's the corruption and, no doubt (because crooks like Mandelson are involved), the sleaze.

Above all, it's the sheer, world class stupidity of this government that people will no longer forgive.

This scandal should bring down this Labour government. It's rotten to its core. It was only a matter of time before it deceived not just the British people, but the world, once too often. That time has come.

If political corruption on this scale can't force the chief perpetrators out, then there is something seriously wrong with Britain. I fear that that could well be the case, so I won't hold be holding my breath.

Perhaps Gordon can explain to the troops while he's out there why he is doing deals with the type of people they are trying so hard (indeed, have been ordered) to defeat. Of course, it'll be too late for about 200 of them, and rising.

He, and all those who support him, sicken me.

Another Fine LibyaGate Blog

Bomber: "Reports of my death..."

This time from some excellent chap named Daniel Korsiki in the Speccy. (Makes a pleasant change from Alex Massie's nonsensical interventions, at least.) If you really can't be shagged to click on the link, I've lifted the entire text - purely for your convenience, you understand - (and certainly not because I'm the internet equivalent of a parasitical growth feeding off the good ideas of others. Some might disagree with that, of course, and that's just peachy. They can bog off, can't they :)

One of the oddest parts of Libyagate is what it says about Gordon Brown’s notions of devolution. The Prime Minister does not want to comment on the affair because, we are told, he sees it as a matter for the Scottish government, not the British government.

So, if the actions of a devolved but subordinate level of government go against the state’s interests, the leaders of that state should stay mum? That's certainly not the view taken by successive US administrations; they have often condemned state-level actions, even when the federal government has been legally powerless to do anything in practice.

The UK has no written constitution as in the US, but a clear constitutional settlement nonetheless. Now I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand it, the UK Parliament retains sole authority to legislate over so-called reserved matters. This can only be altered by further primary legislation of the UK Parliament. Within the Scotland Act 1998 reservations to all devolved matters are those concerned with the UK as ‘a state’ and include e.g. the Constitution, foreign affairs and defence.

Let's play a little thought experiment. What if a devolved level of government takes an action that is within its legal competence but which leads to war with the state and a third country? Would the state have the right to curtail the otherwise legal actions of the subordinate level of government to defend the whole country's interests and security? Most people would say so.

That was an extreme example, but the point is serious and recognized in international law. Under the so-called laws of state responsibility, a state is responsible for the actions of its officials and organs, even if the organ or official is formally independent. It is even responsible if the organ – in this case a devolved level of government - is acting ultra vires, that is, “beyond the powers” of the state. Indeed, entities not even classified as organs of the state may still be imputable, when they are otherwise empowered to exercise elements of governmental authority, and act in that capacity in a particular instance. So the UK is legally responsible for Scotland’s actions.

In other words, if the power to conduct foreign relations is truly an exclusive competency of the UK government, with no role for the devolved bodies, a logical consequence is that some devolved actions and indeed laws impinging on foreign relations are invalid, even in the absence of already-established UK government policy. Libyagate is not only about Gordon Brown's politically-calculated absence, or Kenny MacAskill’s misguided notions of compassion, but about a constitutional grey area that should be explored further, at the very least by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which is responsible for legal matters arising from Scottish devolution.

Interesting. It seems quite conceivable to me that the Scots would want to try to get their own back on, I assume, the "English" for dragging them reluctantly into umpteen wars, including two of the global variety, by doing exactly the same thing.

What is certain, though, is that this moral and political travesty perpetrated by the unhappy, well-connected, corrupt-as-hell, Scottish political sets that are the SNP and the Scottish Labourists, like Brown, is not going to go away any time soon, Brown's attempts at pretending it never happened (and that he had nothing whatsoever to do with it) notwithstanding.

One simple reason why this is true is last night's revelation in the Telegraph about the freed terrorist himself, Megrahi. He's not quite as close to death's door as these idiots had led the world to believe. He was not in need of quite as much compassionate leave from justice as the sanctimonious SNP windbag who did the deal with Labour to let him go would like us all still to think.

[Cancer expert] Dr Richard Simpson said that medical reports show there is “significant doubt” that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi will die within the next three months.

The Labour MSP accused Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, of failing to conduct sufficient checks before deciding to release the terminally-ill bomber last week.

This attack was echoed by the Tories, who said that the most recent medical consensus was Megrahi would live eight months, too long to be eligible for compassionate release.

The row broke out as Gordon Brown finally ended his silence on the controversy, but refused to say whether he agreed with Mr MacAskill's decision.

The Prime Minister stressed he had “no role” in the release and he was “angry and repulsed” at the hero's welcome that greeted Megrahi on his return to Libya.

A storm of international condemnation has met Mr MacAskill's ruling last week to release Megrahi, who is suffering from prostate cancer, on compassionate grounds.

Scottish Prison Service (SPS) guidelines suggest that inmates are only freed if they have less than three months to live.

However, Dr Simpson, who specialised in prostate disease research, said: “It is clear to me from the medical reports and the opinion of the specialists that Megrahi could live for many more months.

”Kenny MacAskill released him apparently on the advice of just one doctor whose status is not clear and who is not named.”

Dr Simpson, a former member of the British Association of Urological Surgeons' prostate cancer working group, said the minister should have sought a second opinion from a specialist in palliative care.

A health assessment compiled by a SPS medical officer for Mr MacAskill, states that last autumn Megrahi was given between 18 months and two years to live.

Who'd have thought it? He's not quite so poorly after all. Aside from the legal implications for the Scottish Injustice Secrectary, the political and moral implications of this man's survival beyond the bizarre three month life expectency limit imposed upon him by a two-faced Scottish system are severe for the pathological liars and cowards involved in this whole, stinking affair, like Brown and, of course, Mr "Higher Power" himself, MacAskill. They are now, for example, in the unenviable position of wishing this man dead - in a hurry. Very compassionate.

The only thing people with any sense are going to conclude from this latest - and worst - outbreak of Brown/Labour dishonesty is that it really is time for change. If nothing else than because we need someone - anyone - to come in and start the long - oh, so long - process of clearing up their incalculably costly, universal mess. As implied elsewhere on this blog, this latest scandal, terrible as it is on its own, has also provided further unequivocal evidence that Brown and anyone who is stupid or corrupt enough still to support him and Labour, have to go. Forever, preferably.

At the very least, perhaps a change of government will make the SNP-led Scottish "Parliament" think twice before declaring war on Pittsburg, or whatever it is they have planned as the next step in what passes for their barking, bankrupt "foreign policy".

"Brown Government Falls!" Oh, how I look forward to typing those words for real. What a great day for Britain that will be.

Fake Reformers, Fake Reform

So the first Bercow 'big reform' is to cast off the Speaker's wig. This is a laughable, disingenuous gesture designed somehow to provide a visual representation of that 'clean break' the Berk referred to in his cringe-making speech yesterday. But if you take the wig off the man, all you are left with is the man - and this man is part of the problem. Dan Hannan:

...the hairpiece isn't simply a mediaeval relic. It's a reminder to its wearer it that his office is bigger than he is. It was a bad start when Michael Martin arrogantly refused the headgear. "It's just not me," he insisted, presuming to take the job on his own terms - an attitude which prefigured his eventual disgrace. Had the old boy slapped on the horsehair, it might have inspired him to try to live up to the role, to be a bigger man.

Tee hee. But through this first, empty act, Bercow's immediately fallen into line and begun to do precisely the kind of thing that Brown-Labour wants: distracting, fake iconoclasm motivated not by any genuine principle or sincere wish to modernise - or 'reform' - constructively a parliament that has been rendered rotten only by its current members' systematic abuse of its time-honoured traditions, but by a simple, dishonest desire to stay put. And they will do anything and say anything they can to that one end. As Peter Oborne said in a TV interview today, Bercow is the manifestation of the corruption that has crippled parliament. He was forced to pay six grand of evaded capital gains tax and over a thousand pounds' worth of dodgy claims for a personal accountant.

How can this man, along with all the other MPs now tainted by serious and proven sleaze, be trusted to reform the system? The answer is he most certainly cannot. The problem is, that question is part of the distraction. The fundamental point is this: forget trust - we're well beyond that - MPs, including Bercow, no longer have the moral authority to change or create law. For Labour to think that it can install its placeman in the Speaker's chair and carry on regardless is a (further) deep insult to the electorate. It is a travesty and the so-called reforms that will be generated consequently will be no more than meaningless windowdressing and a waste of precious parliamentary time.

It has already begun. Harriet Harperson's first announcement on reform is to table legislation making it a criminal offence (a criminal expense?) for MPs to fiddle their fees or fail to declare their interests punishable by 'up to a year' in stir. Have you stopped laughing yet? Aside from the fact there's no mention of existing legislation that covers the small matter of tax evasion - or of false accounting - here we have in your proverbial nutshell the contradiction that will confront this bankrupt government and the parliament it helped to corrupt: legislation like this would not be necessary if honourable members were just that, honourable. That they deem this legislation necessary merely proves to the public that they consider themselves untrustworthy. "Well, if they can't trust themselves with public money, why the hell should we," the public will rightly think. (I do.)

They will go around in circles, new Speaker in the chair he does not merit. They will make laws to constrain a future generation of politician who might well need no such constraint, given the inevitably far higher level of public expectation and scrutiny that new generation will accept it will have to endure. What's clear is that this government and this parliament were incapable of obeying the letter and the spirit of the rules they themselves partly created. They were also incapable of exercising judgment in the realm of propriety, both individually and collectively. There is therefore no reason for them to expect people to swallow the notion that they themselves, in some sort of "reflexive lawmaking", should be permitted to make a new law that forces them to obey the rules. We say: no thanks, you no longer have the right. Besides, it will miss its target because such a law is always contingent upon what those rules actually are and those rules are made by, you guessed it, MPs. You see? Going around in circles.

The old system might be flawed, but flawed or not its basic operating premise, that MPs are honest and honourable, is essential if we are to have real democracy. It requires a degree of faith on all our parts to be successful. An honour code is the only way our elected representatives can exercise the power we give them to supervise the sovereignty of parliament, thereby ensuring the continued health of the body politic. And therein we find the root-cause of the problem: one dishonourable MP can cause enormous damage to parliament and to that health. Six hundred dishonourable MPs, including the Prime Minister, and you have a severe crisis. And the longer they stay in parliament, the graver the damage they do, by the very fact of their continued presence. But it should be unsurprising to us that these people are reluctant to leave, regardless of this damage. They are who they are, after all: they don't care.

Bercow, with his fake iconoclasm, is merely another sign of that 'graver damage' to which I refer. This man is an insult to our intelligence, with or without a wig. He's the latest symptom of a decayed, diseased legislature. The chief carriers of the disease are Gord'elpus Brown and his gang of amoral Labourists. (Tory sleaze has become a mere secondary infection, incredibly.)

The cure? It's a purgative and it always works: a general election.

They Know How You Vote

"They" meaning this government (naturally) who, for some reason, quietly decided to end secret ballots at some time during its tenure between 1997 and now. Established by Gladstone in the Secret Ballot Act, 1872, (and reinforced with the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883) it goes without saying that the motivation for the legislation was to solve the problem of intimidation or bribing of voters and/or to ensure that no data could be gathered about individuals' voting choices within constituencies by central government, guaranteeing any vote is genuinely free.

But a letter to the Mail today pointed-out to me by a family member casts serious and shocking doubt on whether that guarantee is still in force. A member of the public in High Wycombe (a town very near my childhood stomping ground, incidentally but irrelevantly) brought to our attention that ballot papers for the recent local and EU elections were each identifiable by a unique number which was then ticked-off against the voters' individual polling cards by an official. I have to admit, I didn't even notice this when I voted last week but apparently it is now national practice. Previously, there was no way polling cards and ballot papers could be connected whatsoever - the vote you cast was anonymous because ballot papers were identical with no distinguishing marks. Why is that not the case now? Why should the government know (or even want to know) the names and addresses of the people who vote for them, or, more sinister, of their political opponents? Not so long ago, this was illegal.

The letter-writer makes the point about this fresh assault on our fundamental liberties quite well:

This subtle change, apparently introduced in the underhand manner to which we have become accustomed since 1997, compromises the secrecy of the ballot and spells the end of British democracy as we have known it since 1872. I was not reassured by being told that my vote could not be divulged without a court order. Public servants have a poor track record in confidential matters.

This is, of course, true - there is ample evidence to support the view that the government cannot be trusted with extremely sensitive information. But that's not really the point of principle. The point of principle is that no official, elected or otherwise, should possess or have access to the private, secret vote cast by individual members of the electorate. That there could be a database of such information is truly chilling. It suggests we have not had a secret ballot possibly for years in this country and that your government quite possibly now knows how you vote. Today, there is no such thing in Britain as the secret ballot. Labour has compromised the very soul of British democracy: the free vote.

I didn't know anything about this. Perhaps you did. If so, forgive my ignorance. But if this was known widely and I somehow missed it, then why aren't people up in arms? Where are the protests? My suspicion is that hardly anybody realises just how compromised liberty and democracy have become in Britain since Labour took power. Now we have an unelected Prime Minister clinging on to office without a popular mandate surrounded by unelected peers parachuted into government, lawmaking without legitimacy. We have demanded the general election - God knows, I have enough times here - but now we can't even guarantee it wouldn't be rigged even if those demands had not fallen on deaf ears. How? Well, if they have information on a database about who voted which way in previous elections, in a general election in, say, key marginals (which means just about every Labour seat now) how hard can it be to delay the posting of polling cards to what are deemed 'anti-Labour' households, for instance?

I know, I know: paranoid! Well, I'm not suggesting a desperate Labour party led by what amounts now to little more than a demagogic tyrant and faced with the prospect of total wipeout in the next election would resort to such banana republic measures. No, really, I'm almost convinced they wouldn't.

All I am saying, and this is the key difference between 'Before Labour' and 'Since Labour', is that if they really wanted to, now they could.

(If anyone has any more information about the piece of Labour legislation that ended the secret ballot in Britain, I'd be grateful to hear about it.)

Update:
Interesting exchange recorded on Freedom of Information helpsite WhatDoTheyKnow.com. The key part for me was this reply from the Electoral Commission about vote tracing:

James Pack
Electoral Commission

3 April 2009

Thank you for your query,

By vote tracing I take it that you mean occasions where a ballot paper
cast at an election has been traced back to the elector who is supposed
to have marked that ballot paper. This can only occur on the order of a
court.

There is no central database of such applications or cases however we
are aware of some cases where this has occurred.

Two of these related to election petitions that have involved the
scrutiny of ballot papers by the Court in camera where electoral
malpractice is alleged to see who the allegedly fraudulent votes were
cast for. We are aware that it was done in the Slough 2007 election
petition as it allowed the court to show that fraudulently registered
voters had cast their vote for one particular candidate. We are also
aware that it was done following the local elections in Birmingham in
2004 where postal votes that had been fraudulently applied for or
completed were checked to the same effect. The third case was where West
Midlands Police obtained the necessary court order following a failed
election petition relating to the 2007 local elections in Coventry. One
person was subsequently convicted of two cases of Personation at two
separate polling stations.

Kind regards,

show quoted sections

Senior Adviser (Electoral Practice)

In other words, the Electoral Commission only knows about a couple of cases of vote tracing taking place for whatever reason, and these both happened in the last five years. Curiouser and curiouser. It's 'unaware' of any others because there is 'no central database' (ie: no central file) of occasions when these (new?) powers have been used. The whole letter implies, however, that it is possible to trace any voters from 'their' ballot papers, which is outrageous given this government's record on security and its abuses of anti-terrorist legislation etc. This kind-of confirms my previous point: if Labour wanted to shaft Britain in a general election, they definitely could.

Still no joy on the new law which over-rode the Secret Ballot Act, 1872 and permitted this parlous state of affairs to emerge. Anyone know anything about it? Guess I'll have to keep looking...

Update 2:
The Electoral Commission's advisory document for the design of ballot papers in 2003 makes for very curious reading on the subject of vote tracing. For instance (and sorry it's such a long quote):

4.5 The human rights organisation Liberty has argued
that the use of serial numbers or any mark whereby
vote-tracing can take place after an election should
be stopped. They also point out that other countries
manage their elections without the use of vote-tracing
mechanisms. Liberty’s concerns are based on the fear
that some voters have that security services can trace
their votes; they acknowledge that while the fear may
be unjustified it is an understandable one. Liberty also
recognises that a consequence of the discontinuation
of the vote-tracing provisions would be the need to
re-run an election where personation was proved
where the number of personated votes was greater
than the winning candidate’s majority. However,
Liberty argues that this happens extremely rarely.
4.6 Liberty takes the view that vote-tracing does not help
to deal with allegations of personation, rather it merely
enables the result to be corrected afterwards if personation
is proved and that the discontinuation of vote-tracing would
make no difference to the prevention, detection or proof of
offences of personation. In its opinion, a real safeguard
against personation would be to require voters to provide
some proof of identity when they go to vote and Liberty
has expressed its support in principle for such a measure.
4.7 The Commission acknowledges the concerns that
underpin the case put forward by Liberty and others
against the use of serial numbers. However, we also
recognise the arguments that vote-tracing can prove, and
has proved, a valuable instrument in tackling electoral
fraud. We believe there have been six cases where vote
tracing has been ordered by the courts in the last 10
years. The key judgement is whether the benefits drawn
from the ability of the courts to trace a vote outweigh any
possible concerns held by some electors that security
services may be seeking to identify individual voters’ ballot
papers to ascertain for whom they have voted. In making
this judgement, we also recognise the wider issues of
principle about the use of serial numbers (or any other
mechanism). Many international observers of UK election
practice are astonished at the use of a mechanism
designed to allow – even in controlled circumstances –
for a link to be made between a vote and an individual.
These issues need to be considered in relation to both
traditional voting processes and the new electronic
voting methods being tested through pilot schemes.
The Commission will consider separately the wider issue
of whether providing for the possibility of vote tracing in
the event of allegations of fraud is a necessary feature
of our electoral system, given the anxieties of some
voters over the possible misuse of serial numbers to
trace their vote.
4.8 As long as the present system continues, it is clearly
important that polling station staff are able to explain to
any concerned voters how the serial numbers are used,
and the exceptional circumstances in which any link
might be made between the ballot paper issued...

Fine. So here we have a mystery about "six instances of vote tracing" between 1993 and 2003. The Commission apparently declined to comment on the 'six instances'. They haven't a clue about them, in other words, presumably because cases specifically where serial numbers were used to trace votes didn't exist before 2003. Why? Because serial numbers, as my mother (who's voted for 40 years too, anon in the comments) quite clearly recalls, were not in use. She also remembers, as she says in her email to me "saying to your father in 2005 after voting in the general election that there were numbers on the ballot papers. There were never any numbers on them before, so far as I remember."