Best Easter Sunday news day I can remember

Garp · Best Easter Sunday news day I can remember

Brilliant reading and listening the way this has unfolded, and a great insite into the underhand sleazebags that oil the wheels of democracy in the UK.

Hope a few more names fall in the coming hours and days. Not bothered where they are left or right, just want to see them all outed for what they are......A load of juvenile manipulating scum bags that have the audacity to take tax payers money in reward for their pathetic agendas......How dare they insult us with this behaviour in the name of governance!

http://www.order-order.com/tag/derek-draper/

....and a good write up here too:

From The Sunday TimesApril 12, 2009

Sleazy smears that soil Downing Street
It was supposed to be a new era. When he accepted the Labour leadership and the premiership of this country two years ago, Gordon Brown promised “a different kind of politics”, one that was more open and honest. He would be guided, he said, by the “moral compass” that had been provided by years of listening to his father’s sermons.

Just in case anybody did not get the message, Harriet Harman, his deputy, filled in the gaps. “In future, under a Gordon Brown regime, we need to have no spin, no briefing, no secrets and respect for parliament,” she promised. Blair-era tactics would be consigned to history in this new era of honesty.

Now we get the reality. A dirty tricks operation has been operating inside Downing Street with Damian McBride, Mr Brown’s former spin doctor, at the heart of it. Mr McBride, who was in charge of “strategy and planning” and earned the sobriquet “McPoison” when dealing directly with journalists, has been living up to his new name.

Today we reveal that he intended to drip poison about senior Tories into the public domain via a Labour-sponsored political web-site called Red Rag. It included entirely unsubstantiated smears about the private life of George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, and his wife. It suggested that embarrassing disclosures could be made about David Cameron’s medical history. Any bit of rumour or tittle-tattle was apparently fair game for Mr McBride, the more embarrassing the better.

The prime minister, having promised a new era, is knee deep in the worst aspects of new Labour spin. The recipient of the McBride e-mails setting out these allegations was Derek “Dolly” Draper, once Lord Mandelson’s right-hand man, who became embroiled in the “lobbygate” scandal over access to ministers by political lobbyists soon after Labour took office. Copied in to at least one of the e-mails was Charlie Whelan, Mr Brown’s notorious former spin doctor, whose resignation was forced by Tony Blair as long ago as 1998 over the Mandelson home loan affair.

The e-mails showing how the prime minister’s head of strategy and planning was intending to spread dirt on the Tories date from January. This was the time when tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was being handed out in a desperate bid to prop up the banking system. The very next day the government announced a £20 billion plan. It was when, according to Mr Brown, he and the entire government’s attention was focused on solving the banking crisis and dragging the economy out of its worst recession in the postwar era.

Now we know it was not. One of the prime minister’s most senior lieutenants, whose salary came courtesy of taxpayers and who composed the offending e-mails from his Downing Street computer, was spending his time researching ideas, in his words, “intended to destabilise the Tories”.

This was a disgraceful abuse of public money and of a public position. Why should we have been paying the salary of somebody whose idea of “strategy and planning” is to spread scurrilous rumours about opposition politicians? What kind of operation is Mr Brown presiding over in Downing Street?

It was never enough for Mr McBride to apologise, as he tried to do in advance of the publication of the e-mails. So last night, belatedly, Downing Street announced his resignation. He will not be missed. But the culture in which he operated survives him. If the prime minister wants to remove the poison from British politics, he has to ensure he has eradicated it from Downing Street.

raveydavey

Is it any wonder that not one person I know has any respect for our current crop of politicians?
It would seem that the days of serving the electorates interests are long gone and it's everyone for themselves (expenses and all) and if things are looking dicey, sling some mud rather than actually address the real problem.

And on a related note, Derek Drape is married to GMTV's Kate Garroway, so can we expect the the same fawning from that station over this story as they usually do when Labour are in bother?

Garp

GMTV will behave in the same way that the BBC and most of the press do, ie, how they are told to by their owners and administrators - Levers being pulled by government associates.

Brown claims to have known nothing about the Emails, or Redrag......I doubt this very much, but if he didn't, then clearly he has lost control of Downing Street.

It has been posted before, but I find it not surprising that with the return of Mandleson and Campbell, standards decend back into the gutter. No coincidence that Draper pops up like a bad smell, him being one of Mandelson's chronies.

wewantourdarbyback

Only one politician I have respect for these days. The rest give truth to the phrase:

Power Corrupts.

Garp

This made me chuckle

http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/04/11/a-short-story/

raveydavey

John Prescott (of all people!) made a good point last week, that he is one of the last of a generation on politicians who've actually worked in the 'real world' before going into politics, rather than leaving uni and getting a job straight in the political (researcher, local government employee, etc) or legal spheres - Google how many politicians were 'lawyers' of one form or another.

To be honest I can see his point - we have a load of politicians now who have no life experience and have achieved little, if anything, of note before deciding that they know best how the rest of us should live our lives.

WWOBD, I'd be interested to know which politician you have respect for, if you feel like enlightening us?

Garp

A valid point re:life experience ravey, not that I ever heard or saw Prescott do anything useful or productive, and he resided over, and teflon shouldered his way out of a few disasterous departments in the latter years of his "career".

raveydavey

About the only politician I can think of who has stood by his principles and remained true to his beliefs is Anthony Wedgeweood Benn - or Tony Benn as he now prefers to be called.

I had similar hopes for his son, Hilary Benn - a Leeds MP, but he appears to have accepted life aboard the New Labour gravy train is a preferable way to go on.

As for the rest of them? They mostly remind me of the pigs from Orwells Animal Farm.

Garp

Tony Benn, socialist through and through. Born into weatlth, married into more wealth. Lived one life, and preached another.......Socialism at its worst. Thank goodness there were not more of his kind else we would be living like pigs ourseleves

halfaperson

Either the Tunbridge Wells Angling Team are out fishing or you mean that Confused

, hard to tell sometimes Laughing

.Maybe he (TB), like all socialists wants to see everybody reasonably well off Instead of the Privileged FEW been ridiculously well off and the majority on or close to the poverty line. This involves those at the lower rung moving up, not those in the middle moving down.

Maybe he also wants total power sharing democracy where power is visible and accountable to everyone. Not an unreasonable vision id say and certainly not the exclusive ideals of one particular element of society.

Interesting also that at a time when the current government are despised for cheap spin and dirty tricks (including on this forum) regarding peoples lifestyles, TBs whole philosophy and political career is denigrated because he enjoys the odd lobster and married a posh bird. Conscientious humanitarian ideals are not the sole right of people born into working class

His socialist beliefs may not be to everyone’s liking and that is fair enough, that is what democracy allows but in terms of integrity, honesty and consistency of ideals he is head and shoulders above any other politician and id rather have a government of TBs than a government of Thatchers, Majors, Blairs, Browns and especially Camerons.

Garp

Twat's are not out mate.....Believe me. Tonbridge was until recent years a Benn family seat, and Benn Publishing had their head office in town. I know some family and have inside track on your hero......He is one who lives a life and preaches another.

Now we have once touched very briefly on politics when we met, and I consider myself fairly open minded, if not a little outspoken at times Wink

. I believe in a reasonable distribution of wealth, I also believe that there are those that can and those that can't and those that won't, and reward should be according.

For clarity, I am not any flavour of party, and I find it small minded and pathetic that any individual with one vote should line up square behind a colour. I float and I vote, I blogg and I mix......I will not vote for Brown.....Not sure where my cross will be going. My ideals are global, obviously my upbringining has its influence, and so does my faith and conscience. One day, over a pint, you may even discover that I am more left wing than you in many ways. Very Happy

Oh and as a footnote, what we most definately do not need is a politicised civil service whereby spotty little sumbags , and nobs from mansions with wanky Politics degrees are influencing government through Civil Service postitions at tax payers expense. Aides and servants must be non political for the sytem to work.

PS....My sig is a quote from the honourable Labour MP for Birkenhead

Garp

A decent article methinks. Displays an intent or wish for focus, honesty and integrity - sadly missing from 21st century politics.

Darkness at the Heart of the Labour Party

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.

The whole of the government's energy should be spent on governing now and building a programme from which, within and year, we will be seeking permission to rule for another five years.

Far from helping sketch out a new roadmap, the McBride activities shine a searchlight on the paucity of the government's programme.

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of. Even the debates that are put on to fill in time are ones that deny MPs a vote. The whole exercise is vacuous.

Labour MPs are left staring into the abyss - that nothingness of Harold Wilson's statement. There is a wish amongst all sections of the PLP for the government to start governing. We wouldn't care too much whether the ideas were Blairite or non-Blairite, as long as we could give the impression of supporting a government that was using the next year to mark out why we should stay in office.

We have lived through an age of record public expenditure provision, but are now entering one of increasing cuts. There have been some beneficial results from this huge tax-payer largesse, but they in no way match up to what radicals predicted would be the outcome.

Have we been on the wrong track, and if so, what should now be our approach? Or is the task to look much more carefully how each pound of tax-payers' money is spent so we get a much bigger bang for our buck? Instead of this debate, we see the energy at the heart of Number 10 going into trying to smear the opposition.

It is this contrast between how we should be behaving, and what has been exposed, that is the real killer. A necessary government information machine has been corrupted by a spin that seeks not to inform but control and, if needs be destroy. And it has been in existence for over a decade.

McBride sat on the Prime Minister's political War Cabinet. If this is the war the Prime Minister thinks the country wants he is in for a very rude awakening. In the meantime, Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.

Poor old Labour party.

Frank Field MP

raveydavey