DEAR MRS MAY...

...CAN I PLEASE HAVE A JOB?

I'm not going to be getting into the rights and wrongs of an English railway company's policy in transferring responsibility for the opening and closing of doors on their trains, becasue frankly I don't know enough about how they operate to make an informed decision on safety, or on the likelihood of the guards being paid off, or having their hourly rate reduced, because of lower levels of responsibility.

But I really never thought to see a Labour man encourage the Tories to crush the unions, unless of course he thought that in highlighting the problem he could perhaps encourage some votes for Mr Corbyn to transfer to the right winger Owen Whatsit.

I wonder what McTernan does for a living these days. 

I know he was employed by Jim Murphy in the run up to, and the duration of, his extremely brief period as leader of the Scottish branch office. What happened when Murphy was, shall we say, less than successful in that role, is unclear, but McTernan seemed to be persona non grata at the court of Kez. And who could wonder at that...she didn't have 40 seats to lose. (Although even without McTernan's help she managed to lose 13!)

He now writes a column for the mad twins at the Daily Telegraph, but we suspect that that would hardly keep body and soul together. Private Eye reported that the remuneration for his ex-colleague, "Bomber" Tom Harris, doing exactly the same job, was as little as £20,000. 

He is also an "associate" of this organisation!

But who knows. Maybe McTeacake has desires to return to the front line. And why not the Tory Party? After all he can be credited with a few massive coups for them already as Scottish Labour will testify.

And... While describing himself as a "socialist", McTernan has expressed an extensive range of views inimical to traditional Labour ideology, such as advocating privatisation of the NHS and London Underground, calling for the widespread closure of libraries, opposing the Living Wage, demanding a third invasion of Iraq and opposing renationalisation of railways, despite those positions being contrary to official party policy). In 2015 the left-wing Labour MSP Neil Findlay accused McTernan of being willing to "say anything in the media for money"

And his Wikipedia page (above) shows that his soul is already theirs!

"WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF ENTERTAINMENT"

I've always believed that newspaper columnists' jobs (and more recently the jobs of subs and editors on news pages) was to feed the prejudices of their readers. If not exactly lying, they were at least very selective in the way that they presented the facts.

Wings has repeatedly talked about how the headline (which is what we all may see on newsstands even if we'd never buy the paper), doesn't necessarily reflect the truth. That is only revealed in the 6th paragraph on the page 6 continuation.

People want to read what they already believe. "National" readers want to hear good things about the Greens and the SNP; "Daily Mail" readers want to read bad things about them. Their job is to give their readers a fat dollop what they want to read, and in so doing, confirm that they, the readers, were right all along to believe that Nicola Sturgeon is indeed genius, or all foreigners are evil... depending on what paper they read.

We all tend to judge people (sometimes wrongly, but frequently correctly), by the papers they read. Intellectual ability, political bent, class... is all supposedly easily discerned by a quick look at what your neighbour is reading on the train of the bus. Although in more recent times with Murdoch's acquisition of "The Times" and the Barclay's of "The Daily Telegraph" this has become more difficult. And what used to be considered the "middle road" papers like "The Daily Mail" and  "The Express" have are now more or less indistinguishable from "The Sun" and "The Star".

What they all have in common is that they twist the news to suit the way that their readers expect to hear it.

Frank (one of the Munguin Press Empire's highly remunerated photographers), noticed this comment in the "Daily Mail", which both he and I thought illuminating.

 "The columnist is expected to be a master of the grand and pompous proclamation – of the Olympian assertion of how things are and how they will be, the sharp-bladed conviction that one is right and that anyone who disagrees with one is not just wrong but clearly a blithering idiot.

"In short, we are ghastly: the kind of cocksure oxygen-thieves no one wants to get stuck with at a party, the people who talk that bit too loudly in restaurants to ensure the surrounding tables can appreciate our genius. 

"This faux-omniscience is of course a stage show – we are, to a degree, in the business of entertainment, of making an impact, of provocation, and therefore often take our best guess and present it as something like hard fact.” (emphasis added)

The full article can be read here.

It's worth remembering that, straight from the horse's mouth, their job is to entertain, provoke and make an impact, all the time pretending that what they are saying is gospel. The word "inform" seems sadly lacking from that job description.

SNP BAD FOR HAVING DECENT (IF SOMEWHAT ELDERLY) CLOTHES

What happened on Saturday was Nicola Sturgeon and other senior politicians went out to visit some places which have been damaged badly in the floods of the last few weeks.

As you can see from the photographs Nicola went to people's houses and talked to them, hugged them, and she brought with her news that the Scottish Government will be making grants available to people who have lost goods ...to the value of £1,500. Not a massive amount, but three times what the British government is paying out to their flood victims

With people still living in houses full of foul smelling sludge, their furniture and carpets ruined and dampness everywhere... wondering if it is over or if there is more to come, you'd have reckoned that the press might have seen this as a reasonably good way for these politicians to be spending their Saturday.

But you have to remember that these politicians were SNP. Which immediately made caring about people BAAAAAAAD.

What The Daily Telegraph, from the comfort of Sark, was interested in, was how much Nicola's outfit cost. A Barbour Jacket worth £179 and a pair of Hunters Boots at £130. What an extravagance! Clearly the Telegraph wasn't in the least interested in people who have no homes, or whose homes are mainly mud. They probably think everyone in a bit of a mess goes off to their summer home in Tuscany or books into Gleneagles.

Apparently Cameron, although he had a pair of Hunters just like Nicola's, sent someone out to buy a pair of £12.99 wellies from ASDA before he visited English flood areas (I say areas rather than victims, because Dave seemed to avoid ordinary victims close up). Ever the PR man, he thought he would look too posh in his Hunters, so he spent an extra £12.99 trying to look ordinary. 

Nicola, just put on the boots she had and got on with hugging. She also dealt with the criticism of her wear with customary good humour:

Nicola Sturgeon 

✔@NicolaSturgeon

@biscuit_ersed @JournoStephen @horton_official I blame @PeterMurrell - he bought me the Barbour jacket for Christmas a couple of years ago.

3:53 PM - 9 Jan 2016

 
•  137137 Retweets
 
•  221221 likes

 

Peter MurrellVerified account‏@PeterMurrell

I confess - I bought @NicolaSturgeon the Barbour jacket. What I now want to know is - who bought her the wellies?? #wellygate

We make a lot of noise about how much politicians earn, how much they can salt away, and how much they charge us for their moats and duck houses, but everyone knows that government ministers are reasonably well paid, as they should be. We all know too, that people like Cameron is personally very rich. He can easily afford to buy expensive clothes, cars, houses. There's no point in his likes pretending that they have to wear ASDA wellies or fly Ryan Air cattle class, as he has in the past. 

As long as they use their own money, we really don't care what they wear or how they travel. Most specially if we are trying to dry out the kitchen so we can switch back on the electricity.

What was even more amusing was that, as Doug Daniel noticed,  a Labour councillor, who owns a Porsche, though it worth sharing a tweet about Nicola's millionaire clothes costing all of £309. A Porsche, if you please!

Nicola's Barbour jacket was, as she said, a present 2 Christmases ago from her husband. Ruth Davidson can confirm how much it cost. She has one the same, only it's never been the headlines in a national so probably it feels a little let down. 

Alex Salmond got no mention for not having any wellies, nor indeed a Barbour!

In the meantime someone discovered that Fluffy has, indeed been out looking at the floods. There all you Dumfries people who thought the wee soul had got lost... He was in that dub all the time... and it's not a tan, it's rust!

HOW ORDINARY LIFE ON AN IDYLLIC ISLAND CAN BE SPOILED BY OAFISH BILLIONAIRES

...and their minions 

THE GRACELESS TELEGRAPH, THE NEWSPAPER OF STAB IN THE DARK TORY JOURNALISM

Following the publication of an article in The Daily Telegraph on 4 April 2015, headlined “Sturgeon’s secret backing for Cameron”, the Office of the First Minister of Scotland complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that The Daily Telegraph had breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice. (Pretty serious then. After all, if a NEWSpaper isn't accurate, then what the hell use is it, except a propaganda tool of a political party?)

IPSO established a breach of the Editors’ Code and has required The Daily Telegraph to publish this decision as a remedy. (IPSO appears not to have required an apology of any sort, because none appears.)

The article reported the contents of a leaked Government memorandum which claimed that at a private meeting the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon MSP, had told the French Ambassador that she would rather see David Cameron win the general election than Ed Miliband. The memorandum had been written by a senior British civil servant a week later, after a conversation with the French Consul-General.

The article said that these comments undermined Ms Sturgeon’s public support for a “progressive alliance” with Mr Miliband.

The complainant said that the claims were categorically untrue: Ms Sturgeon had not expressed a preference for a Conservative government or any views about Mr Miliband’s suitability as Prime Minister. The complainant regarded the newspaper’s decision not to contact Ms Sturgeon for comment prior to publication as a breach of Clause 1.

The newspaper said it had confirmed the authenticity of the document with two well-placed sources before publication. (Both of whom, it appears, either misunderstood what had been said or lied, so Telegraph, beware in the future. Politicians and their staff, in danger of being parted from their expenses, and cushie numbers are inclined to be economical with the truth!)

It was a contemporaneous note made by an experienced civil servant, and the newspaper had no reason to doubt its accuracy. (Except that it was wrong adn if they had just asked someone else for confirmation they would have found that out. However, that would have ruined a superb chance of undermining the SNP.) 

It denied having any obligation to contact Ms Sturgeon for comment before publication: it was entitled to publish an accurate account of the document. (It might not have had an obligation to ask Ms Sturgeon for a comment, although clearly both good manners and sensible journalism would have indicated the wisdom in so-doing and obviated the need for the later climb down.)

The Complaints Committee noted that the memorandum represented – at best – a second-hand account given a week after the meeting, which contained the serious implication that Ms Sturgeon had been disingenuous in her public statements.

The newspaper did not know whether the account contained in the memorandum was accurate. Nonetheless, it had published this as fact, without having taken additional steps prior to publication – such as contacting the parties involved for their comment – to verify its accuracy. (Given that one of the parties was the First Minister of Scotland, the other was the Ambassador of the French Republic to the Court of St James, and that there was a General Election campaign under way, it would probably have been prudent to check that this wasn't a dirty political trick...as indeed it turned out to have been.)

The committee established that the newspaper’s presentation of the account contained in the memorandum, in this context, represented a breach of the Editors’ Code. 

(The Daily Telegraph was always a solidly Conservative supporting newspaper. It's editorials were strongly Tory friendly. But until the mad twins, who don't live in the UK, took it over, it was an excellent paper for all that. Conrad Black may have been a crook and a fraudster, but he ran a tight ship. Now it is as ridiculous as the tabloid Daily Mail or Express. Its content is dumbed down and the standard of journalism is abysmal. Small wonder its circulation is falling like a stone. 

Even Carmichael, the disgraced former Scottish Secretary apologised to Nicola for his part in what was clearly a pre-election slur on the SNP and on Nicola. It's a pity that the Barclay Twins couldn't manage even that meagre level of good grace. Clearly infinite amounts of money cannot buy manners.) 

I wrote this last night, since when Wings has written an altogether better piece on the subject to which I direct you.

WHO WAS THAT LARD-ARSE WITH THE COMB OVER?

Talking of austerity (as we were in the last post), it seems that whist the rest of us are wondering what the hell Osborne is going to cut next to save the next tranche, Mr Cameron is considering an "austerity" version of Air Force One to transport him or the Queen around.

The idea has been flagged up by Airbus's boss in England, said that Mr Cameron had been let down by the aerospace industry when he arrived in the Far East on a plane built in America and owned by an Angolan company. Downing Street is said to be interested...you bet your life it is.

The plane wouldn't be the flying palace that the president has, but presumably it would be done out to a standard that would be suitable for a man of Mr Cameron's breeding.

So... I read all this in the Telegraph, and of course it is always a laugh to glance at the comments in that paper, so I read down at a few of the usual right wing blethers, and then I came across this piece from Sticky2TheMan, which I thought was hilarious:

Cameron really is the Heir to Blair, isn't he?

Didn't His Toniness claim that the Queen's aeroplane was as much his as hers and steal the keys to fly off to Cliff Richard's paradise island or some such nonsense?

Is it not a tradition now that as soon as a prime minister comes back from playing with the Americans, he puts out feelers to see whether 10 Downing Street can be tarted up to look like the set of West Wing?

However, perhaps we should be less churlish and let our dear leaders have their way.

Perhaps we should allow them to have  their own chamber orchestras dressed in monkey costumes like Louis XIV.

Or - since Cameron has or had his own private photographer funded by the taxpayer - their own propaganda film-maker, like Leni Riefenstahl, with a fully-equipped Hollywood studio.

Maybe a private theme-park and zoo, like Michael Jackson. After all, he was a mere popular music crooner, not a global statesman.

How about a continuous stream of teenage prostitutes, like Silvio Berlusconi?

Or perhaps a private bakery producing nothing but the finest Cornish pasties, to which Cameron is known to be utterly addicted?

Why shouldn't our prime minister show how completely and utterly detached he is from the lives of ordinary people?

The only problem with trying to ape the POTUS is that there is such a vast gulf between the power of one and the other.

After Obama met Cameron, it is said that he asked one of his minders:

"Who was that lard-arse with the comb-over?"

DOES SCOTLAND EXIST, OR IS IT ALL A DREAM?

The Daily Telegraph at its English-centric best!

BRITISH schoolchildren, it says, have slipped down the OECD tables, coming 28th for Maths along with a many other impossibly bad figures.

It goes on to blame Labour for the fall in standards since 2000 and to complain about how much GCSEs have been dumbed down.

Strangely there is neither mention of the blame being on the SNP government nor any mention of standard grades.

What on earth are they talking about?

Ahhh, “chink”, a light has just gone on....

I wonder if the Daily Telegraph in its infinite wisdom has any idea that there is a country to the north of England, called Scotland (you know, the place they sell the so-called “Scottish Edition” of the paper). I wonder if they understand that that country (to its continued determent) is a part of Britain. And that that country hasn’t had a Labour government in charge of its education since 2007. And that that country does not set GCSEs nor has it ever done so.

As an afterthought. I was driving home listening to the BBC (big mistake, I know) and they tell me that the Justice Minister has announced a whole raft of new policies. But strangely his name is no longer Swinney (late correction, see below...MacAskill); they've given the job to someone called Clarke. Odd that!

Pics (1) OECD: The world’s most developed countries... or so THEY say. Some might think otherwise. (2) What Tory Cabinet minister does a pair of scruffy brown (Hush Puppies?) represent? (3) Kenny MacAskill getting a few minutes shuteye. (Eck works them hard)

MARGARET MORAN MAY FACE CRIMINAL CHARGES

Oh Joy.....

At last the police are to investigate the behaviour of Margaret Moran, surely one of the worst offenders when it came to expenses.

Of course when the Telegraph released some details of how she had been fiddling, she was tout de suite on the telly saying that she would sue. That bravado (like Phil Woolas’s) disappeared when someone a bit brighter than her pointed out that...well, as she was guilty of all the Telegraph had printed and a good deal more, it might be better to shut up and hope it would go away.

It didn’t.

So today the Telegraph gets its own back on Mrs Moran for her little outburst by celebrating the fact that she is likely to be the 5th MP to be charged with abuse of taxpayer funded expenses. And in a lengthy article goes back over all of her little misdemeanours, including her most recent one, which unfortunately was caught on camera by undercover reporters working for a television programme.

The litany of alleged crimes for which she may be charged would make a lifer at H M Prison Barlinnie blush. False invoices, nonexistent companies, invented VAT numbers, work transferred from one address to another, some in houses which were not even hers, invoices for work which was never done, rejected claims re-presented with different wording...

...And of course turning up on a tv programme, being secretly filmed applying for a job as a lobbyist where she could use her influence (all girls together with Harriet Harman and Tessa Jowell) to help a private organisation seeking to have influence with the government. And all this, if you please, when she was signing off long term sick from parliament on full salary (having supposedly had a nervous breakdown over the expenses affair)...

Ho Hum... I can’t wait for this trial. I wonder if she will wear one of these idiotic hats (she must have got a job lot on expenses, orange, red....) to impress the judge...

A BITTER WINTER IS FORECAST

I’ve just read in the Daily Telegraph that long range weather forecasters are expecting a very cold winter with temperatures falling as low as -20C.

At the same time Ofgem is predicting that energy prices may rise by as much as 13% during the winter.

So if you put these two things together it looks like this winter will see many poor families and of course older people in real difficulties. The reduction in services forecast by many after the announcement by the Finance Secretary on the 20th of this month will also mean that pensioners will have a harder time coping. It is also a possibility that, despite a categorical denial prior to the election, winter fuel payments, or their scope, may be reduced.

It makes me sad, and ashamed to live in a country where on average somewhere between 2500 and 3000 old people die of cold related illness every winter, with a higher proportion being in Scotland due to the longer and colder winter.

Why can’t the British government do what the French government does and limit the increase in fuel prices to the inflation rate? That would at least put people’s minds at rest a little.

Private companies are only in the supply of energy business for one reason... and that is to make a profit. If they do it on the backs of pensioners, or poor people, who have to choose between eating and heating, so be it. Shareholders still expect their dividend and directors need their bonuses. Governments have to step in and make sure that their people don’t die of cold. We expect no less of them. Labour didn’t. Perhaps the Tories will

The article linked here gives some very obvious advice about getting boilers checked and insulating homes, so it may be worth a read if you can afford the expense involved in the suggestions.

Let’s hope that the weather forecasters and Ofgem are wrong... and that the government has the decency to look after the poor.

IF YOU HAVE BEEN HIT BY THE TAXMAN, MUNGUIN'S GOT THE ANSWER......

A couple of days ago I wrote about Revenue and Customs’ new computer having made a mess of the tax of millions of people.

The Daily Telegraph has prepared a letter with the aid of its legal experts which, if you are one of the unlucky ones, I hope you will find useful.

Clearly Munguin’s Republic takes no responsibility for the likely reply of “sod off and pay up” that you will probably get.!!

Dear Sir,

I have received your tax calculation for the tax year [enter year(s) here].

You will appreciate that your letter came as a shock to me. I had every reason to suppose that my tax affairs were in order. I had thought that all the tax that I was due to pay was deducted under PAYE. I believe that the underpayment has arisen because you failed to take action upon relevant information already in your possession for the year(s) in question.

Then, if you owe money from the 2008/09 tax year, use this:

You are asking me to pay tax in respect of the year to April 5, 2009. It is therefore more than 12 months since the end of that tax year. Therefore, I believe that I am entitled to make a claim under Extra Statutory Concession A19 for this tax to be waived. I feel that you failed to make proper use of the facts you had been given about my sources of income. You allowed the arrears to build up by failing to make proper and timely use of information that you had been given.

Or, if you owe money from the 2009/10 tax year, use this:

You are asking me to pay tax in respect of the year to April 5, 2010. You may have informed me of the arrears within 12 months of the tax-year ending, but I feel that the ‘exceptional circumstances’ condition of Extra Statutory Concession A19 applies to me because you failed to make proper use of the facts you had been given about my sources of income.

Then, finally:

Payment of this tax would represent a significant hardship to me whether as a direct payment or through an adjustment to my notice of coding next year. I am therefore requesting that under the provisions of ESC A19 the whole of the underpayment as shown on the P800 should be remitted.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully

Bonne chance mes braves!!

AMATEURS AT THE TAX OFFICE ...

Why on Earth does everything in this country have to be so complex?

First issue that I can remember was the Child Support Agency. It was set up in the 90s (with huge support from a public that was sick to the back teeth of picking up the bill for lads whose idea of a good time was a quick one on and Friday night, and whose idea of a bad time was any resultant kind of reduction in their beer, cars and clothes budget). But it was made so complex, and made so many errors, that in the end the public was sick to the back teeth of it.

Then there was the (again) well meaning child tax credits. No one, not matter how anti Labour could say that it wasn’t a good idea to target the very limited amount of money on the poorest. It was of course, as was family tax credit, a subsidy to employers, and thus to jobs. But once again it was so complex that it caused more grief than it gave comfort, and people were terrified of it, lest there be an over payment, which there frequently was, and it be taken back.

Now it’s the PAYE system. It seems that few in the Revenue really understood much of what they were doing. It appears that there is likely to be an overhaul of the way that tax is calculated which probably means that once completed, no one will understand what they are doing; the computers won’t be able to cope with it and the whole system will collapse.

This latest mess means that the wrong tax has been taken from around 1.4 million people. Some have paid too much, some too little. Those who have overpaid will receive an average rebate of just over £400 which will be paid to them by cheque.

Those who have been underpaying (around 1.4 million) will, have to pay money back. The amount will be taken in installments from their pay. The average amount is likely to be around £1200 and this will be taken at about £100 a month. Tax codes for next year will be altered to ensure the money is recouped over a year. Nippy at a time when prices are likely to rise steeply and salaries are likely to be static unless you are among the top earners..

Knowing my luck, and based on my past experience with HMIR, I will get a bill for 3 times my annual income and they will refuse to accept that they could possibly be wrong. The last debacle with them took enough phone calls to pay the BT chairman’s bonus.

The coalition has blamed the labour government, not unreasonably since they were in charge during the period when it happened.


According to the Daily Telegraph a Treasury source said: “A decade of meddling and intervening made the tax affairs of millions of families and businesses across the UK extremely complicated.”

So no bias there from the Treasury!

Ministers say that the Government is now using a computer system which can match taxpayers’ records up automatically and make sure the right amount of tax has been paid. So...we now have a government computer that does what it’s supposed to do......?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ..... when will they lose all the discs then?

Pic: Clever crest concocted by mehrdad in light of IR,s lost cds back in 2007. The crest is changed to include a cd carried by the lion and the unicorn under the crown and the text changed from the original "Dieu et mon droit" (God and my right) to "Deux cds sont perdus" (two cds have been lost). It is copyright www.aref.adib.com, and I hope they will excuse my non-commercial use of it. It sums the department up pretty well.

ASIL NADIR TO RETURN TO FACE JUSTICE AND SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT

I note from the pages of The Telegraph that Asil Nadir has decided to return to Britain to face the charges of fraud that he avoided by fleeing to Northern Cypress 17 years ago.

Because Northern Cypress is not recognised by the UK, there was, is, and can be, no extradition treaty, but Mr Nadir says that he is coming back of his own free will.

Apparently he was very much a part of the enterprise boom of the 1980s, building up a company called Polly Peck, which at its height was worth £1.7 billion, but which crashed with massive debts. It was alleged that Mr Nadir had transferred millions out of the company to himself.... leaving the business with debts of £1.3 billion.

His support for Mrs Thatcher’s government, vocal and financial, became an embarrassment to her as the alleged thefts became apparent.

In an interview with BBC’s Today programme Mr Nadir said the he believed the legal ''environment'' was right for him to return. He said that he was hoping to get a fair trial. He had not, he said, felt that he would get a fair trial back in the early 1990s.

He spent 3 years battling with 'immense injustice and tremendous abuse of power in Britain', he said. It was because of this and the consequent deterioration in his health that he fled, in a private jet, to Northern Cypress to recuperate. He has recuperated for 17 years during which time he has built a business empire in the Mediterranean country which is only recognized by Turkey. There he controls the Kibris newspaper and television group and exercises notable political influence.

In the interview he said that he hoped the new Government would be "wise enough and will think highly enough of Great Britain" to clear the matter, whatever that means. He did not rule out supporting the Government financially, arguing that there was nothing wrong with donating to a political party. He said that it was only fair if you approved of the policies of a Government, if you wanted to extend their power, that you should support them with financial donations.

I wonder what he thinks has changed about English law that it will take a different view of the intelligence and evidence that was built against him by the Fraud Squad, and I wonder why he thinks that the government, which he has promised to support financially (unless he’s banged up) would have any influence over the outcome of any trial.

Of course, it may all have been a fit up. The police in the early 90s were not always to be trusted. Maybe Mr Nadir got on someone's nerves; and of course he was "foreign", always a good reason for a bit of nastiness from Plod.

Whichever, I suspect that it wasn’t a very good idea to give that interview, now we know what he’s up to... and if the government does, in fact have any say what goes on in the courts, he may just have blown his chance of getting off.

========================

WHY CAN'T WE SHOW MORE RESPECT?

I have just read with disbelief of an incident in Afghanistan which makes my even angrier than usual when reading of the UK’s involvement in that country.

Three British soldiers have been killed by a rogue Afghan soldier while on joint patrol in southern Helmand. This is not the first time have NATO trained Afghan personnel turned their weapons on British soldiers. In November last year 5 of our soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier in a training base. The President of Afghanistan, Mr Karzai has written to the Prime Minister to apologise.

As an aside, once again it raises questions about how much infiltration of the Afghan army there has been by the Taliban. Clearly, I suspect, a great deal. The truth of the matter is that the Afghan president, a former employee of ex-Vice President Cheney of America, is happy to have the forces of NATO in his country, but we should not necessarily infer from that that he carries the population with him. After all, despite our claims that we are there to bring democracy to the country we all know that Mr Karzai was only elected President of the country by a rigged election process, to which we have given our tacit approval, thereby implicating us in the corruption.

That we have lost another three of our lads and, according to the Telegraph’s reporting of the story, another two injured, is sickening enough. But what I find completely unbelievable is that this story is in the press, and not just the Telegraph, but I see it features in The Guardian and The Mail and the BBC too, and at the time of writing, the families had not been informed. The Telegraph actually carried the line: The families of the soldiers involved in the incident are being informed, but anyone worried about relatives serving in Afghanistan can call a special helpline on 08457 800 900, as if it were some minor incident.

For heaven’s sake surely, even in the dog eat dog world of competitive journalism, we should be able to agree as human beings rather than journalists, that not a world of deaths or injuries of lads putting their lives on the line in the forces should be reported by the press until immediate families have been informed and time for more distant members to be contacted. The newspapers involved should hang their head in shame (credit here to the Scottish papers and the Independent); and someone at the Ministry of Defence (preferably the secretary of state) should be hung out to dry over it*.

Can you just imagine how unthinkably awful it must be for someone to read this online and dial that number with shaking fingers, possibly to be held in a queue..... ?

I know that many of us do not approve of this war, but it is not the fault of the lads or even their most senior officers that we are fighting it. It was a decision taken by government and approved in parliament by a majority of members. So no matter how disapproving we are of it, let’s treat the people at the sharp end and their families with more respect.



* It did occur to me that I was criticising newspapers using this story before the families had been informed, and yet drawing attention to it myself on this blog, and that that was perhaps a little of hypocritical. The penetration of this blog, however, is so minute in comparison to the newspapers and the BBC, that I decided that that was probably paranoia more than instinctive decency.

Guido's Good Advice for New MPs

Guido has good advice for MPs who apparently are turning up for work today with nothing much to do but find out where the toilets and the bars are.

Whoever and whatever emerges this week, the advice is sound.

The UK parliament has taken a beating in the last year or so. Its members have shamed us. It has been shown frankly to be more that half full of crooks. Some were just a tad on the dodgy side, some probably meant no harm but were careless about their accounting, while some, and quite a big some, were downright dishonest.

I completely endorse what Guido says. I’m not a supporter of the UK. I think it is a construct that came into being because the Lords in Scotland were broke and greedy, and it suited them to move to London with gold in their pockets. Scotland got nothing out of the deal, the Scottish Lords did.

There have been advantages since then of course, and there have been disadvantages. Rather more of the latter than the former in my opinion. That’s however for another post. We must deal with what we have at the moment.

Many of the people who are turning up today, like the first day at university, are brand new. But some are old hands. People like Hazel Blears, despite breaking just about every rule, and then insulting us waving a cheque for £13,000 when she got caught, are back – hopefully chastened, but who knows.

My advice to new entrants is to steer clear of advice from people like her.

We are depending on this parliament to work at bringing back some sort of confidence in MPs. They will need to act to do something about the corruption of that other place: The House of Lords. Then they’ll need to start on the BBC and the Civil Service.

To do this they will have to be above reproach themselves. They shouldn’t think for a second that the Daily Telegraph won’t be watching for every wrong move (the Daily Mail too for anything but Tories).

So keep your trousers up and your skirts pulled down, resist the temptation to turn your Westminster job into money making machine, and whatever party you are from, go and do your best for us.

Good luck.

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WHEN YOU'RE IN A HOLE MR WILSHIRE, IT'S BEST TO STOP DIGGING

Perhaps you will remember that a few weeks ago I related the story of a certain Mr Wilshire, MP for Spelthorne in England who had, contrary to Commons’ regulations, paid his expenses into a company which he and his partner owned. You may also remember that, busy man that he is, he forgot to register the company for tax purposes, or National Insurance purposes, and, I suppose in the way that these things go, the silly old sausage completely forgot to pay any of these taxes that the rest of us are burdened with. I’m sure I won’t have to remind you that his partner had some sort of animal nesting in her hair, which may account for some of their forgetfulness.

You may also remember that according to his version of the tale, he decided that he had let people down and so he decided to stand down as the MP. Not right away, you understand (thereby losing a fat parcel of goodies), but, he was so ashamed he decided to stay on till next May.

Of course the official version was somewhat different. It went like this: the Tory Chief Whip had him in and told him he was a bit of an old disgrace and just the sort of chap that gave the Conservatives a bad name, so Dave the leader had decided that he would have to go. Oh well, it was close and it’s easy to mix these things up.

So now Mr Wilshire has, on Commons stationery, and using Commons prepaid envelopes (so as not to dig into any of that profit he was making), written a 2-page letter to every single Spelthorne constituent explaining his side of the debacle. Wasn’t that kind of him?

I won’t bother you with all the trivial details of the letter, in fact I don’t even know them all, but the Daily Telegraph thought this was a particularly interesting part of the narrative, and I agree.

Mr Wilshire wrote: “The witch hunt against MPs in general will undermine democracy. It will weaken parliament - handing yet more power to governments. Branding a whole group of people as undesirables led to Hitler's gas chambers.”

I think that in the first part of that statement he’s kinda mixed things up a little. It’s the fact that so many MPs turned out to be nothing better than cheap little benefit cheats that has undermined parliament and thus democracy. Indeed the so-called witch-hunt has probably strengthened what little democracy we have left. The second half of the statement is beneath contempt. To compare what is happening to MPs with the holocaust death camps is below the level that we expect even from the likes of Wilshire.

It is a travesty that this odious little man is allowed to continue in his post as MP, on his salary of around £63,000 and make insulting statements on our stationery and deliver them at our expense.