BBC told to axe Clarkson over ‘one-eye’ Brown

Benedict Moore-Bridger
06.02.09

The BBC was engulfed in another huge row today after Jeremy Clarkson called the Prime Minister a “one-eyed Scottish idiot”.

She's right, good on yer, sport!

Tory treasurer takes Marchioness to party ball

Michael Spencer, the joint Conservative treasurer, has chosen a star-studded Tory ball for his first public appearance with the new woman in his life.
The 53-year-old billionaire, a close friend of David Cameron, split with his wife Lorraine last year after starting a relationship with Sarah, Marchioness of Milford Haven.

The chief executive of ICAP, the world’s largest money broker, is one of the Tory Party’s wealthiest and most generous donors and a regular at Conservative social occasions.

Last night he confirmed that he will be taking the Marchioness, 47, to the Black and White Ball instead of his wife.

The £450-a-head event is the highlight of the Conservative social calender and the couple will rub shoulders with guests including the Camerons, Zac Goldsmith and Liz Hurley.

‘Michael usually attends this sort of event with Lorraine,’ explained a member of the
event committee.
‘Michael and his wife usually sit with the Camerons on the top table. But this year it’s causing a stir because Michael is bringing Sarah.
‘They will be on separate tables but they are definitely attending as an item.’

Interesting to know what appeals to a billionaire, is it a red dress concealing a few bones, supporting a slightly worn body, or is it this lady’s title …”Marchioness of Milford Haven” is this the appeal? Immediately placing him higher in the social structure, which is the bottom line, high enough to ignore his wife, who doubtlessly has had the rough end of the stick over the long years. The man himself looks not unlike Captain Mannering, quite likely the same blustering, overbearing mentality. His choice, if passed in Sainsbury’s, no one would look twice.

There is little attraction in Milford Haven, it being a rather dark, dank, depressing corner of the “European State” ( think I am being politically correct in saying this) Then, every man has his price and is quite willing to over look certain aspects of the price paid.

The boast that shows the ignorance of Mandy 'Antoinette'

By Peter Oborne, Daily Mail
Last updated at 9:03 AM on 02nd February 2009

When Gordon Brown brought Peter Mandelson home from Brussels three months ago and appointed him Business Secretary, the move was hailed as a masterstroke.
of this ocean-going, chateau-bottled, 24-carat Euro-fanatic at the helm of British industrial policy.
YesBut as the recession deepens, the Prime Minister must surely be starting to regret the presence terday this unelected peer surpassed even himself by coming forward with the strong hint that British workers protesting outside the Total oil refinery on Humberside ought to look for jobs abroad.

Pictured: The barge of Italian workers at the centre of wildcat strikes

By Tammy Lovell and Nick Pisa, Daily Mail
Last updated at 1:53 AM on 02nd February 2009

Moored in a corner of Grimsby's vast fish docks, this ugly barge is at the centre of a bitter dispute over the use of foreign workers.

The floating hotel houses around 100 Italian and Portuguese workers at the Lindsey oil refinery at Killingholme in North East Lincolnshire.
Over the last week around 5,000 protesters gathered outside Britain's main oil refineries in wildcat strikes, angered at the exclusion of British workers from construction contracts.

UK inspectors 'quietly sack' 200 Romanian Olympic site workers

By Andy McSmith, The Independent
Monday, 2 February 2009



Two hundred Romanian construction workers who were helping to build the 2012 Olympic Park have been "quietly sacked" in the past two months during a clampdown on illegal foreign labour, it has been alleged by a senior source.

You can go and work in Europe, Mandelson tells strikers

Unions furious as ministers take aim at Britain's wildcat protesters

By Jane Merrick and Brian Brady, The Independent
Sunday, 1 February 2009

'Out of control' wildcat strikers use text-messages and Internet to bypass unions

When I started work, at the age of 14, for Hackney Borough Council, the trade-union official quickly demanded one shilling and four pence from me as my trade-union due. At that time, trade-unions were sacrosanct. Today, with such creatures as Blair, Mandelson, Brown, Cameron, George Osborne, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, as far down as you like to go into the labyrinths of bureaucracy, you will find corruption. Many years ago, it occured to me that the trade-union leaders were all part of this conspiracy of greed.
Evidently, the actual workers of the country have stopped watching Coronation Street, stopped watching football, and concluded, as I have done, that they're on their own. Fortunately, with modern technology, it is easy to by-pass those union barons who live in great splendor and are recipients of the occasional brown manilla envelopes.

'Cherie's much cleverer than me' admits Tony Blair

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 12:25 AM on 31st January 2009

Tony Blair admitted today that his barrister wife Cherie was much cleverer than him.

The only truth that he ever uttered

Lord Truscott: Peers charge up to £5,000 a day to 'facilitate' law changes

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter, The Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:22AM GMT 31 Jan 2009

Lord Truscott was secretly video recorded describing how peers charge up to £5,000 per day to help clients with what he called "facilitating amendments" to the law.

Straw faces quiz on Saudi-backed firm's £2,000 gift

Paul Waugh, Deputy Political Editor
Evening Standard
29.01.09

CABINET minister Jack Straw faced questions today over a donation from a Saudi-backed firm.

The Electoral Commission was urged to investigate whether the £2,000 gift to his 2005 general election campaign was lawful.

The money from Westminster International Consultants was accepted by Blackburn constituency Labour party on the same day as it received a £3,000 sum from Lord Taylor of Blackburn - the peer at the centre of the "Lords for Hire" allegations.

Fresh disgrace for MP Conway

Evening Standard
30.01.09

MP Derek Conway suffered a fresh disgrace when he was ordered to pay back thousands of pounds in public money dished out to another family member.

Westminster's sleaze watchdog ordered the former Tory whip to apologise and return more than £3,700 that was wrongly paid to elder son Henry for research and admin duties.

When two lords went a' grovelling: Peers in corruption row apologise to the House

By Michael Lea, Daily Mail
Last updated at 11:31 PM on 26th January 2009

Two of the four Labour peers at the centre of corruption allegations have made a brazen attempt to save themselves from being thrown out of the Lords.

They made public apologies in the House as a secret recording revealed that one – Lord Taylor of Blackburn – boasted that ?100,000 a year was ‘cheap for what I do’.

The explosive tape was released moments after Lord Taylor and former Labour whip Lord Snape were told that claims they were willing secretly to amend laws in return for cash had brought shame on Parliament.

Simon Carr: Call me paranoid, but I'd be wary of Jack's charms

Sketch: Had it been possible to hold inquests in secret, would the Menezes case have been held in public?


It's the charming ones we have to watch. Jack Straw has a pleasantly partisan way with the House, but he has depths – and maybe we wouldn't want to wade out too deeply.
Talking to one of his admirers, I received a list of whistleblowers who had been caught and prosecuted, while within reach of friend Jack. That struck a cautionary note.

Straw is dragged into peers for hire mire

Nicholas Cecil, Chief Political Correspondent, Evening Standard
27.01.09

JUSTICE Secretary Jack Straw was today dragged into the Lords-for-hire scandal.
The Standard can reveal that he has received payments through the peer at the heart of the damaging sleaze row.

One was a personal gift from Lord Taylor of Blackburn, who has boasted he can earn £100,000 a go as a paid lobbyist.

The other was a £3,000 donation, solicited by the peer from a firm which is paying him as an adviser as it seeks to open a new gas storage centre.

The inscrutable Straw ... lost the key to room 101?

No wonder MPs don't want us to see their expenses - a lot of them are just plain criminal

Peter Oborne, Daily Mail
23.01.09

U-turn on MP expenses secrecy plans

Evening Standard, 21.01.2009

The Government has climbed down over plans to conceal potentially embarrassing details of MPs' expenses.

Bid to shame MPs over expenses cover-up

By Ian Drury, Daily Mail
Last updated at 12:41 AM on 20th January 2009

A last-ditch attempt to prevent the Government keeping secret how MPs spend millions of taxpayers' money was launched yesterday.

Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman ruled last week that details of MPs' £93million-a-year expenses would be exempt from right-to-know rules.

MPs will vote on whether to exempt themselves from freedom of information requests about their expenses on Thursday. It would block the publication of 1.2million receipts dating back four years.

Taxpayers fork out £60,000 for Minister's dinner party ... to discuss the credit crunch

By Glen Owen, Daily Mail
Last updated at 10:02 PM on 17th January 2009

Ministers have been condemned for throwing a £3,000-a-head dinner party - to discuss the economic slump.
Culture Secretary Andy Burnham ran up the £60,000 bill so he could discuss the effect of the credit crunch on 'creative industries' with 20 guests, including BBC Director General Mark Thompson and Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan.
Last night the Conservatives said the lavish bash showed how 'out of touch' the Government had become with the hardships endured by ordinary people



Dear guests: Ministers and 'big hitters from creative industries' at the dinner

Minister in sleaze row over research job for partner at taxpayers' expense

By Andrew Chapman, Daily Mail
Last updated at 10:01 PM on 17th January 2009

A Minister is at the centre of a sleaze row after failing to disclose to Westminster officials that she uses taxpayers' money to employ her partner as her researcher.
Jane Kennedy, Minister of State for Agriculture, Farming and Recycling, lists Peter Dowling on her constituency website as a member of her office staff responsible for research and parliamentary affairs.
But she failed to mention him on the Register of Members' Interests - despite new rules making it compulsory from last August, following the scandal surrounding Tory MP Derek Conway's employment of his sons and wife

Gordon Stalin Blair, the man who dismantled England

Telegraph, 18th of Jan 2009

· New Labour has been the most petty, dishonest, vindictive, reckless and downright sinister Government this country has ever had to suffer. They have relentlessly hacked into our system of civil liberties, legal rights and checks and balances built up from hundreds of years of wisdom, struggle and sacrifice. "Their plans to barcode, track and spy on the entire population are worthy of the most grotesque dictatorships. Their tentacles reach ever further into our daily lives creating hassle, anxiety and friction where none existed before. "It is as if a straightjacket has been slowly lowered over the British people this last decade and remorselessly pulled tighter and tighter. I say this a Labour supporter for 25 years; it is not enough that they lose the next election. They need to be wiped off the map as a political force. They are simply unfit to govern.
Posted by dave on May 25, 2008 5:40 PM ( Tele)

" Labour has been seen now to stand for envy, class-hatred, manipulation ( by targets),and bungling management of the economy and interference with our Society. Brown is not brilliant and neither has he been a good chancellor - evidenced for even the most myopic of Labour voters ( although, probably too many really thick voters out there for that). He ( like Harman and many of her comrades) has Marxist ideals and is cunning - his faults, daily, are being laid bare. Brown and comrades have indeed much to answer for after ten years, with their tired " more of the same " nanny-state meddling and envy (ie non-dom taxes, middle-class wine alcoholism, NHS patient "selection","rewards" for good behaviour and losing weight etc. etc.). Blaming the "middle classes" and others, and giving handouts does not work. Rewarding young single mothers with housing priority encourages the feckless and naive. This shambles of a Government has yet again demonstrated its loathing of the middle income workers and pensioners by a sneering tax hike on family cars and utility vehicles, and still tries to justify this "Green" tax by implying it is aimed at posh 4x4s. When the revised road taxes start to hit people, it should be interesting to watch Brown squirm.( At least they have realised the potential mayhem and partly reduced the rises.) However,DC's fresh, unassuming but forceful and intelligent leadership could not have shown up Brown's leaden, authoritative, almost Soviet style more thoroughly - the one reflecting a Party that wants to give back some real autonomy and self-determination to the public, and the other reiterating its desire to squash any original thought or wish to have control over one's life. Brown's mismanagement of countless budgets and financial concerns(such as tax credits, NHS computer system, Pension funds,gold reserve auction etc. etc....) and "policies" such as not allowing an EU referendum, taxing people at an overall 54%, removing the 10% band, stealth and spin, causing a breakdown in society and a massive increase in the number of young single parents, to name just a few examples, highlight starkly the reason that the Country wishes him and his Stalinist Party out. Brown and Labour have been shown up for what they really are - useless, out-of-touch apparatchiks and control freaks, with no sense of common decency nor awareness. This is just the latest example of Labour's Orwellian goals. Brown simply does not seem to understand - his implication is... more of the same. Brown has repeated the Labour mantra - more control,more "buying" of the client State, more interference by the State, and thus more tax or filling in forms to claim "credits". Labour has no idea - bullying Statism is their way forward.
Paul Butler
on January 17, 2009
at 06:47 PM

· Harman had all the advantages of the upper classes, where she came from, but she is still of very low intelligence . No amount of money or breeding can change that !
Minerva
on January 17, 2009
at 06:47 PM

· David Welch - what an absolutely classic post. I thought you were joking at first, then I realised you meant it. Bless you for making me smile today.
sydney harbour-bridge
on January 17, 2009
at 06:47 PM

· In common with all privileged people, the Harpie talks for the working class but acts for herself. The true "working class" do not need assistance to find work, in most cases they have 2 or 3 jobs and pay there way