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.

Brenda "SOGAT '82" Dean Shock

Brenda Dean (you know, her of SOGAT '82 fame), now Baroness Dean of somewhere or other, has claimed that she was 'shocked' to find out that Lord Ashcroft was a non-dom, (or maybe it was she was 'shocked' she hadn't been asked by her party to be 'shocked' sooner. Who knows? Who bloody cares?). She's a dyed-in-the-wool Big Union Labourist who's been recruited to try to keep the Ashcroft non-story bubbling along, so she would utter all this disingenuous claptrap wouldn't she.

The surprising thing, therefore, (possibly), is that The Times and, briefly, The Daily Telegraph, thought this to be front page news. The MSM's dodgy, increasingly naff judgment strikes again, then.

There was, however, one MSM source who was having none of it - namely Paul Waugh of the Standard. He joins the historical dots and sifts through Dean's place in the genealogy of the biggest union in Britain:

Baroness Dean gave evidence today on Lord Ashcroft failed to uphold his undertakings on becoming a peer.

The noble baroness was not asked why Lord A should be treated differently from Lord Paul.

But something that many Tories would have wanted her to mention is this:

Brenda Dean made her name as the gen sec of print union Sogat 82.

Sogat 82 later merged with another union to become part of Amicus....which is these days part of...you guessed it....Unite.

Given that tomorrow's DT has evidence that Unite were given £18 million of taxpayer's money, of which £11 million went straight back to the Labour party in what looks increasingly like a really special kind of money laundering, you'd think these tossers, with their ennobled thicko mouthpieces like Dean, would have learned when to shut the hell up.

But they haven't - and I, for one, am counting on that! I'm pretty certain David Cameron and the Conservatives are too. Play it straight, like Hague did today, and let these spinning, lying, corrupt wreckers condemn themselves out of their own mouths, just like Brown did at PMQs yesterday, and ex-Communist Charlie Whelan, who's taken over the Labour party through Unite, too in his laughable interview.

If nothing else, the next few weeks will occasionally make for compulsive viewing.

Leading Hadley Centre Climate Scientist Said: "Hide the Decline"

Hide the decline in global temperatures, that is.

I don't usually write about climate change because there's no future in it - at least that's what I used to think, until now. This astonishing revelation, made possible by braver souls than I, has changed my mind - forever.

From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@virginia.edu, mhughes@ltrr.arizona.edu
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@uea.ac.uk,t.osborn@uea.ac.uk

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Phil Jones has admitted this is genuine.

Download the hacked Hadley documents here, start reading (it'll take you a while - there's 168MBs of explosive stuff) - and stop believing in AGW. Immediately.

I have.

Hat-tip: Old Holborn

MPs' Council Tax Fraud

Tomorrow's expenses expose in the DT is probably the most gobsmackingly enraging of them all. More than 50 MPs have been over-claiming for Council Tax and pocketing the extra cash, most of them, surprise surprise, Labour. Not content with having all their utilities, mortgage interest and local taxes on their second homes paid for by us (why?), these troughers have gone a step further and actually submitted false tax claims.

Let's just remind ourselves of what the Department of Work and Pensions (you know, the department in which Kitty Ussher recently held a ministerial post, just before she entered the Treasury) says about people who try to cheat the benefits system:

Deliberately withholding information that affects your claim is stealing. That’s why we are targeting benefit thieves!

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) takes benefit theft very seriously. Although the vast majority of people who claim benefits are honest, those who steal benefits are picking the pockets of law-abiding taxpayers. In 2007-08 benefit thieves stole an estimated £800 million from public funds, that's why we are determined to catch them.

The government threats should not be taken lightly. There is no doubt that the government is serious about imprisoning benefit fraudsters - and that is what makes their hypocrisy so abject, and their fiddles so serious. That these thefts from the public purse are perpetrated by lawmakers is one thing, that so many appear to have been happy to misappropriate tax funds is quite another. Let's take a look at what the government says about tax fraud:

Tax fraud is when someone pays too little tax, or wrongly claims a tax repayment by acting dishonestly.The government can prosecute people who commit tax fraud, as well as anyone who helps them to commit the fraud.

As far as I am concerned, the redaction of the original document where these claims are revealed by MPs, who did not know that an uncensored copy would reach the press, shows intent. At the very least it demonstrates that many MPs felt they had something to hide and then tried to hide it. This fact alone merits extensive investigation. Simply repaying money because you've been found out is insufficient - and the police know that, so why are they not acting on information received?

All in all, though, this rotten parliament, as if this needs repeating once again, is morally bankrupt, has lost all authority to make law, is poisoned, paralysed and must be dissolved. Shout it out loud, folks. Every day from now until the dissolution. Many of these people are simply crooks and only a general election can rid us of them once and for all.

The Fattest Piggy Of Them All

Nick Brown Feeding

Latest piggy news from the DT reveals that "Nick Brown, the [Labour] Chief Whip, claimed £18,800 over four years in unreceipted expenses for food consumed at his designated second home in Newcastle."

For sheer, spectacular hypocrisy this one is hard to beat. This is (one-eyed) Brown's pitbull who suspended fellow Labour piggies Morley, Chaytor and Malik for those fraudulent mortgage claims.

But this trougher is so high and mighty he couldn't even be bothered with the minor detail of receipts, effectively making the nearly 19-large for grub a tax-free gift from the general public. Nice work.

One more smallish matter: I wonder how much of the 19k's worth of 'food' came in liquid form. Maybe it doesn't matter much any more - the scale of the pocketlining has been so massive that this parliament is dead anyway - but for some reason the thought of Nick 'Cowburner' Brown filling up on fine wine at my expense makes me feel like exploding.

Tell you what Nick my boy, I'll settle for a police investigation into your £18,800-worth of suspicious expense claims and possible fraud. See you in court, Brown.

Average Nick Brown barbecue. Fat bastard.

Latest Piggy Caught In Mortgage Fraud

Chaytor (left): Receiving Stolen Goods

Bury MP David Chaytor is the latest Labour backbencher to have swindled the taxpayer over a phantom mortgage.

According to the Telegraph he admitted last night that he had claimed almost £13,000 in interest payments for a mortgage that he had already repaid. The report goes on:

Lawyers said that his claims, which were similar to those made by Elliot Morley, the former environment minister, could constitute a criminal offence under the 2006 Fraud Act and the 1968 Theft Act.

Jesus H Christ! Enough is enough!

It's time for parliament to be dissolved, a general election to be called and the prosecutions to begin.

==Update==
Swiss Bob on that encyclopedic source of political gossip, The Daily Politics, did some superb research earlier today. He has demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the piggies have a criminal case to answer. The crime? Malfeasance. Here's that law in action:

Under English law malfeasance in public office is also a tort. In the House of Lords judgement on the BCCI Malfeasance Case it was held that this had three essential elements:

1. The defendant must be a public officer
2. The defendant must have been exercising his power as a public officer
3. The defendant is either exercising targeted malice or exceeding his powers.

The Crown Prosecution Service guidelines on this offence say that the elements of the offence are when:

1. A public officer acting as such.
2. Wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself.
3. To such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust in the office holder.
4. Without reasonable excuse or justification.

We're the public. Do we still trust them? Exactly. It's time for the police.

International Laughing Stock

Parliament: Time's Up

Tip of the hat to That's News for the link to Time magazine's coverage of the expenses scandal. It makes for excruciatingly embarrassing reading. A journalist for Time's affiliate, CNN, a veteran of the UK political scene, put it thus:

I spent more than 30 years at Westminster as a political correspondent...now when I hear them call each other "honorable members" I am constantly reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum: "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted the spoons."

Neatly put. Britain and its parliament, thanks to our utterly hopeless little piggy MPs, has once again become an international laughing stock (you know, just like the last time Labour were in charge).

It's also further clear evidence, as if any more were needed, that this parliament - and Brown's God-awful government - is finished. Brain dead and paralysed, it is simply sucking up money and oxygen while we wait for it to dawn on someone that there's no chance of a recovery. It's time - and I mean right now - for cold common sense to kick in, a powerful demand for the life support machine to be switched-off to be shouted long and hard by everyone and a quick burial (in a pauper's grave) organised.

Then maybe the process of rebuilding the economy, the civil service, society, parliamentary authority and the reputation of this country in the wider world can finally begin. What is beyond doubt now is: the process cannot start until this parliament is gone.