Bit of a scandal in the baking industry right now. It’s been revealed that a few years ago a baker received a batch of flour that had been contaminated with caustic soda. He knew about the contamination but used the flour to bake bread anyway. The baker had to balance the risks with the ‘life-saving’ benefits for hungry people. He didn’t tell anybody about the contamination.

Anyway, there was a hell of a to-do - many of his customers died painful, lingering deaths.

There was a happy ending however. It was all hushed up, the baker wasn’t prosecuted but was allowed to retire and was later knighted for services to the baking industry. He had been working in good faith and made his decision based on the best available evidence at the time.

After all, there were precedents.

It was nice while it lasted, I suppose.

Gordon Brown has rejected calls to block a controversial move by MPs to get out of freedom of information laws.

What was all that shit about humbleness and humility? Hilary Benn managed to call for a ‘more straightforward kind of politics’ with a straight face. It was an idyllic two days.

Democracy? You can fucking stick it.

Update: Jamie:

Well, there is an upside. Taking a pop at Blair was in some ways difficult because there were really no plumbing his shallows. It was like trying to hit fog with a mallet. Taking a pop at Gordon will be much easier. More like shooting a Walrus with a bazooka, I think.

Update updated: For want of a better word, scum:

Only one MP spoke in support of the bill: David Maclean, the former Tory chief whip who has pushed it through with great tactical skill. But 95 other MPs came to vote alongside him. That turnout was in itself unusual for a sunny Friday afternoon, with England well set in the Test match at Lords and constituency work awaiting members’ attention at home. For many other private member’s bills - say the ones on runaway children or cluster bombs which ran out of time yesterday - a handful of MPs would have attended. Only the indulgence of protecting their own interests kept the numbers up.

Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 requires the Home Secretary to publish his estimate of the ten-year cost of the ID scheme “before the end of every six months”. The first Dobson report was published on 9th October 2006. The next report is now more than two weeks overdue.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s National Coordinator said:

“What’s the big secret – why the delay? It can’t be lack of resources as there are dozens of highly-paid consultants doing nothing but planning the ID scheme. These latest cost estimates matter to local government and yet the Government is hiding the cost to councils, even from its own candidates.

“The elections on May 3rd are a test for policy and the ID scheme is unpopular. 1 in 3 people across the UK, if we are to believe recently-revealed government figures, are expected to resist it. Labour Party candidates, whatever their personal views on the scheme, suffer when public attention is drawn to it. Is this yet another attempt to bury bad news?”

read the rest

The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) - against the advice of the Electoral Commission, an independent watchdog, has decided to play fast and loose with the election process and commission a spate of experimental voting and counting procedures which have not been properly thought out. Worse, some of the experiments have been predicated on laws that, ministers have just discovered, were not properly drafted in the first place.

read the rest

Bye then.

(Although, is lying to Parliament considered a resigning offence in these debased times?)

Rule Britannia:

The UK is covertly trying to oust the head of the world’s main anti-bribery watchdog to prevent criticism of ministers and Britain’s biggest arms company, BAE, the Guardian has learned.

David Cameron has been found guilty of abusing parliamentary privileges by using his Commons office for party fundraising - in the first serious blot on the Tory leader’s copybook.

Why don’t the Tories rename themselves ‘Continuity New Labour’ and have done with it? I’m increasingly coming around to Mr Bridger’s world view: ‘Camp Freddie, everybody in the world is bent’.

(Link via Tim)

In trouble with the police? Here’s all you have to do. Doubtless they will look favourably on your predicament.

‘All this, lest we forget, concerns a serious criminal inquiry, not some squabble about who moves up or down the cabinet rankings. The attorney general might have a case for arguing we should put a lid on it, given the dangers not only of prejudicing court proceedings, but also of unjustly blackening the reputations of the suspects, several of whom may soon need new jobs. But Lord Goldsmith, as I wrote last month, has tolerated reporting about terrorism suspects (much of it inaccurate) that goes far beyond legal conventions. When it’s a Muslim living in a Birmingham terrace house, the press is allowed to tell us (or invent) anything short of how often he changes his underpants.

…

‘I am not privy to whatever tortuous reasoning led Goldsmith to seek his injunctions, and the high court still refuses to allow the proceedings against the BBC to be reported. But I suspect Goldsmith’s actions betray an establishment mindset. What we, the little people, get to know about our rulers is to be carefully controlled. However, when we, the little people, are in trouble, almost anything can be said and written about us.’

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‘…petition the Prime Minister to sell honours openly and use the money to complement the national lottery’s good causes. To make them accessible to all we suggest a starting price of a pound a peerage.

…

‘[T]hey should be sold at newsagents, from a dispenser next to the lottery scratch cards. That way anyone could walk up to the counter and ask for “Twenty B and H, a lighter and a Companion of the Order of the Bath please.”‘

New Labour, it seems, are steaming over the cash for honours investigation. You get the feeling that if Yates of the Yard doesn’t come up with something substantial, the revenge taken by the party high-command will be swift and unpleasant to watch.

Witness, for example, them still fulminating at the treatment of Ruth Turner, Tony Blair’s political adviser, arrested in a dawn raid the other week:

High-level Labour figures have characterised Mr Yates’s techniques as intimidatory, claiming that Ms Turner,Mr Blair’s head of government relations, was forced to dress in front of the police when they knocked at her door at 6.30am.

One Labour official angrily said: “We do not live in a banana republic, whatever Assistant Commissioner Yates believes.”

Yes, shocking behaviour when contrasted to the dignity doled out by Her Majesty’s Government’s immigration officials, no doubt. Witness the treatment of the Kachepa family who were deported last year.

The Home Office was informed that a fresh appeal was pending, but at 7am on Sunday March 13 this year, a dozen police and immigration officers banged at the Kachepas’ front door. The family were told to hand over their phones and pack their bags. They were being taken to Yarl’s Wood detention centre, and then removed to Malawi. “They didn’t even give us the chance to bathe,” says Verah. “We were treated like criminals.”

Natasha, who had been offered a place at university to study nursing, was still in her nightie. A male and female officer entered her room. She claims she had to dress in front of them. “I asked, ‘Can I have some privacy?’, but they said two officers had to be present: The male said, ‘It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.’ I found it degrading.” The Kachepas later lodged a complaint. The charge was denied.

If nothing else, this episode might teach New Labour’s high command some humility - give a them a small taste of what it’s like to be the little people. Maybe get them to dial back on the primus inter pares horseshit. Just a little?

A brutal moment came last Tuesday for the 15-strong team from the Serious Fraud Office, led by assistant director Helen Garlick. The team’s leaders were ordered down to Lord Goldsmith’s offices in Buckingham Gate with their boxes of files. These contained the fruit of more than two years’ digging into allegations that huge Saudi bribes had been paid by arms group BAE Systems to get weapons deals.

read the rest

Thursday, this week, was not the country’s proudest day, that much is certain. First, tens of thousands of Daily Express readers’ hearts were broken when it was announced that Diana was killed mundanely by a drunken French dickhead and not offed thrillingly by crack MI6 assassins under the orders of Prince Philip. Then we were told that our post offices - 2,500 of them - are to be culled like so many poor unfortunate badgers.

And then, despite the planet sweating like George Bush at a spelling competition, the Government announced that both Gatwick and Stansted airports are to get new runways. And then the Government announced that moody arms deals and ‘the national interest’ with Saudi Arabia trumped bribery investigations and human rights. You know, trivial stuff like that. After another body was identified in Ipswich, the announcement that Tony Blair was questioned by police as part of a corruption investigation - the first Prime Minister in history to be so - was the crowning turd on a big stinking pile of them.

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Let’s face it, we love the Saudi government. Apart from the tenants of the Whitehouse nobody makes us swoon quite like the gentle souls that are the House of Saud. We woo them with multi-billion pound arms contracts and they blow up our skirts with oil and unspecified help in The War Against Terror. We then coquettishly blink away from their human rights abuses, even when they’re committed against our own citizens. It’s a match made in heaven.

It’s been a long, stable relationship; one to make Iain Duncan Smith, with his fretting for the institution of marriage, proud. The two countries tied the knot in 1985 (although they’d been courting since the mid 1960s) after signing a pre-nuptial agreement. The deal was known as Al Yamamah - ‘The Dove’ - for that added dash of romance.

With doves of course being synonymous with peace, it was therefore obvious that Al Yamamah involved us selling the Saudis billions of pounds worth of weapons. Now, the British arms industry is special; our other so-called strategic industries - shipbuilding, coal and steel for example - have been gently ushered into oblivion and their workers ushered into call centres or onto incapacity benefit.

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More on this hopefully later, but in the meantime here’s the initial dirt. They certainly pick their moments. And other depressingly overused epigrams.

Remember this?

Saudi Arabia has given Britain 10 days to halt a fraud investigation into the country’s arms trade - or lose a £10 billion Eurofighter contract.

Well, it took just a little over ten days. Here’s this:

The Serious Fraud Office is discontinuing its investigation into a multi-billion pound arms deals with Saudi Arabia, it has been announced.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the decision had been made in the wider public interest, which had to be balanced against the rule of law.

‘It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest,’ apparently. Just what this wider public interest entails other than the massively subsidised (at the UK taxpayers expense) jobs in the British defence industry and the flogging of weapons to an oppressive regime, isn’t clear.

From now on, upon hearing the words ‘rule of law’ trip from the mouth of a New Labour hack, the urge to spit will be nigh on irresistible.

Not so much a conflict of interest as a World War II of interest.

Labour is considering calling for the taxpayer to fund the full cost of providing security for party meetings attended by Tony Blair and senior ministers in a bid to help reduce the party’s debts.

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It seems quite a few people (including someone from within the Ministry of Defence, according to the visitor stats) are looking for dirt on erstwhile Hove MP and defence minister, Ivor Caplin.

If you’ve arrived at this blog via Google in search of Caplin’s skeletons (at least the ones you’re looking for), I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment.

Sorry.

ePolitix.com - Blears: Parties have got to be paid for
In an interview with ePolitix.com, the Labour Party chairman said the public could be persuaded to give more of its taxes towards policy and candidate development.

No. This needs to stop. About the only thing Hazel Blears could persuade me to do right now is chase her across a field with one of these filled with wasp pheromone.

The reason New Labour want our money is because they’re lazy, contemptuous and want to avoid actually having to listen to people. They hollowed out their membership with neo-Thatcherite policies and overseas carnage. Remember Blair’s now-faded hopes for a million member party? Well, he’s only got 800,000 to go. He did only have 600,000 to go in 1997 but 200,000 floated away. Blears, making it up as she goes, says this is because many members saw it as ‘job done‘ after defeating the Tories. Many left however because they were pretty sure the Tories (or at least Toryism) hadn’t been defeated at all and to do so they reckoned Labour probably wasn’t the vehicle to do it any more.

So, trying to win these people back being too much of a fag, New Labour (and the rest) went on their knees, caps in their hands and dicks in their mouths, to millionaire businessmen. Now that’s all been exposed as little more than the financial equivalent of a back-alley bunk-up, it’s time for the public to grab its ankles. By taking the money rather than asking for it, the parties don’t have to bother with member and activist-attracting stuff like engagement, involvement, instilling passion, and showing that politics can be vital, exciting and life-changing.

It’s a complete circumvention of the relationship between voter and party. New Labour, in finally shedding those once-vital limbs of party membership, can finally become what it’s wanted to be all these years - an entity of pure intangibility and self-deluding, flailing improvisation. Blair must be rubbing himself with glee. No more having to go the Sedgefield meetings and pretending to like drinking bitter. No more tiresome meetings with sycophants.

So, cut out the middle(wo)men and soak Jo(e) Bloggs. It’s the same with the Labour Support Network. Sod the worker ants who stuff the envelopes and knock on the doors, says Labour, let’s cultivate those people who’ve gone to the herculean lengths of letting us have their email addresses (most of who, I might add, seem to be bloggers queuing up to dissect every worthless, witless electronic turd from Labour High Command that arrives in their inboxes).

If there were an election tomorrow you’d need to put a gun to my head to get me to vote for any of them. They want my vote and my support? Then they should come to me and earn it, not make me pay for it. Make Alan Milburn stump up some of the cash he made from shilling private sector MRI scanners to the NHS. Make Michael Howard splash out some of the money he’s making from war profiteering.

Imagine being legally obliged to pay footballers’ wages whether you wanted to or not. Christ, it’s demeaning enough paying for a flatulent national disgrace like Chris Moyles (and we have the gall to want to export our ‘values’ to other countries). Where’s the ‘choice’ New Labour fart on about all the time? Is your self-esteem really so low that you’d let them take money from you to pay for astroturfing and dogwhistle billboards? For the self-congratulatory party political broadcasts you never watch? I’d rather be the editor of the Sun before I gave a penny to these bastards - that my children regarded me as the lowest, most degraded form of life imaginable. There, I said it.

All good fun. Let’s hope there were a few squeaky bums in Downing Street yesterday. In the absence of anybody in authority with the balls to go on the record, twice-disgraced ex-minister David Blunkett was wheeled out last night to defend what’s left of New Labour’s honour (I wonder how many people the party approached before they were forced to ask a man sacked twice for corruption).

He demonstrated that sight is not the only sense he lacks. His senses of perspective and irony are also impaired:

Some MPs questioned the timing of the arrest, and the former home secretary, David Blunkett, last night urged investigators to be “thorough rather than theatrical”.

Two hundred and fifty coppers kicking down the door and shooting you. Now that’s theatrical.

To strain Blunkett’s analogy, the Forest Gate raid was a particularly hysterical performance of Aida with all the trimmings. In comparison, the Levy arrest is more like The Dumb Waiter with Levy playing Ben and Tony Blair as Gus.

Anschutz and big Australian, South African and American casino interests have reportedly spent some $100m on a campaign to open up Britain to big-time gambling. Tony Blair’s government was targeted as “the soft moral underbelly of Europe” for an industry barred from most European countries. The campaign of the British Casino Association was led by the redoubtable Lady Cobham. Despite minimal public demand for super-casinos, Blair was persuaded to move gambling from the puritanical Home Office to the more malleable Culture Department. The latter leapt into bed with the gamblers as swiftly as it did with the brewers and the BBC. Officials cruised the casinos of the world arm-in-arm with MPs, outrageously in the pay of gaming lobbyists. The head of Whitehall’s gambling division, Gideon Hoffman, even offered to leave and work for those who were lobbying him. This being modern British government, nobody batted an eyelid at all this.

read the rest…

Guardian: Labour rallies to defend Prescott over billionaire’s casino at dome
“John Prescott was still facing pressure on several fronts yesterday despite a robust defence of his own conduct and the support of Downing Street, ministerial colleagues and influential backbenchers.”

Independent: Support for Prescott fades as Anschutz row rages
“A bloodied but unbowed John Prescott has vowed to carry on as Deputy Prime Minister despite growing signs that support for him in the Cabinet and Labour Party is waning.”

How much longer can Prescott hold on? If he manages to weather the Anschutz storm (such a fragrant man to do business with, by the way) surely the next thing will do for him? I think we can be pretty sure there’ll be more. He’s the old limping wildebeest on the wildlife programme. The lions are licking their lips.

That’s if this casino business doesn’t actually do for him. The forensic examinations certainly show something doesn’t add up - there’s certainly been some frantic rowing back from the William Wilberforce crap which was the cover story a day or two ago.

The big thing for me to come out of Prescott’s interview with John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning (I’ll link to it when they put the audio on the website) is that he could not or would not categorically deny having other affairs other than his one with Tracy Temple. That, I would say, is the green light for journalists to start to dig. If the substance to the rumours (the objects of Prescott’s affections got promotions) are true then there’s a public interest in getting the details out there.

Update: You can hear the interview here (RealPlayer required).

Update update: Phil sums up:

Logically, the whole thing’s a tissue of contradictions. There are only two interpretations that make any kind of sense. Either it was a personal holiday funded by the taxpayer - including personal assistance from Prescott’s civil servants; in this case Prescott is personally corrupt on a truly Italian scale, as well as having lost any sense of political principle. Or else it was a business trip laid on to ease the path of Anschutz’s bid for the Dome Casino (si New Labour monumentum requiris…); in this case Prescott is politically corrupt, as well as having lost any sense of principle. And either way he’s a liar.

I like this, very much:

Tony Blair has said he will not order a sleaze investigation every time an allegation of wrongdoing is made against a minister.

And he said it was “important you take action on the basis of evidence and not on the basis of whatever story is in the media from time to time”.

The punchline to this, if we’re honest, writes itself, doesn’t it? But what the hell.

You have to wonder what his answer would be, if after a terrorist bombing, the head of MI5 turned up at Downing Street and, when asked why more hadn’t been done, said “I am not going to do that every time someone makes an allegation”. As it turns out, the security services do seem happy to act on mere allegations as the chimp’s tea party that was the Forest Gate raid showed.

What you’ve got here is a Prime Minister unwilling to investigate his own ministers when allegations are made against them. Why is that? Is it because he’s worried what he might find if he starts digging into some of these allegations? If that’s not the reason then what is it? Is it because he’s seen what happens when even half-arsed investigations are conducted into ministers’ conduct (Mandelson and Blunkett each disgraced twice, Jowell made a laughing stock…)?

There’s only 23 members of the cabinet and not all of them have had allegations made against them. It’s not going to take too much time or money to appoint enough (independent) senior civil servants to investigate claims made against ministers. Write a list of allegations and tick them off one at a time.

If Blair doesn’t think his ministers have done anything wrong, why not police them properly rather than have the Daily Mail do it? The media are chasing these stories because Blair won’t. Instead of a clear cut independent inquiry with an exoneration or an execution at the end of it, we get the steady drip of stories in the papers, which whether true or not, further depict this government as venal, rutting and, above all, unaccountable little shits.

If news reports and “net rumours” are to be believed, national embarrassment John Prescott’s days could finally, mercifully be numbered. And when he does eventually go, with his tail between his legs, the story won’t be how of Blair kept his house clean and his ministers accountable. It’ll be of how he let a serial sexual harasser and carpetbagger limp on in “office”, smearing more excrement not just on the name of New Labour but on politics in general as he went.

In this instance, Blair only has himself to blame if people condemn him and his ministers without a trial. Sauce for the goose and all that.

Had he lied? No. He will do something for Sport Aid. Had we been misled? Of course. Lord Hutton would have blamed the media.

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