Something is Rotten....

Something is rotten and it goes far beyond Abraham. I yield to no-one when it comes to loathing Gordon brown but I cannot get over the feeling that theis scandal is a bit like getting the murderer Al Capone for accounting irregularities .The truth is that the Labour Party is corrupt at levels far beneath this squalid affair and the sickeness has spread beyond them to the country.

If the problem was only anonymity then there would be some point to Brown’s repetition of the ancient Haydn Phillips report accentuating activities of the Midland s, Yorkshire and Humber Industrial Councils .Whether by design or not they allow anonymous donors to contribute to the Conservative Party. I don’t accept the equivalence. In this sense the Unions allow anonymous donations to be given to the Labour Party , but it is a grey area depending on the size of contributions to the Council by individuals and the transparency of the process .

Let us not forget that both Parties had assumed that cash for honours was just the way it was done as did the general Public until wee Angus McNeill started mentioning that the King had no clothes . It was the scale and the direct selling that was new .In the past a life time of support would not hurt. These are potentially a different matters and yet we can see how the one fades into another. With Abraham the real problem is the reasonable assumption that he did not given money for nothing and he is a property developer who obtained a golden planning permission. If there was influence we will never prove it , it will not be written it did not need to be said . Thus we are obliged to follow up the relatively technical matter if the proxy donors .

Wendy Alexander is the eye of the storm of over £950 from foreign Paul green and the lie that she did not know about it. As the slicker pointed out recently if you look at £950 upon which the fate if the government depends and you look at £20 billion for Northern Rock and you have to wonder if this is more theatre than reality.

It is the problem of scale that has perplexed me. Labour continually mention Lord Ash croft , although he ahs given less than Sainsbury has to Labour . Lets have a look at some of the other Labour donors . Ronald Coen, is typical ; one of those wealthy people who wishes to be good as well as great . He is no doubt as well meaning as the many wealthy philanthropists which is not very. In his case his business , like many Labour donors was Private Equity. Private Equity has received a quite astonishingly easy ride from the Blair administration and no-one thinks it is a coincidence. Nigel Doughty, the internet betting tycoon Peter Coates and Jon Asbit are among the others . Consider the way the scale of bribe was unblinkingly reported

“ The scale of donations may worry trade Union bosses who are mounting a campaign for greater regulation of the private equity- who buy up struggling firms , they say , to asset strip “

Policies are not only for sale but up for auction and after the Eccles one car boot sale why not . Money given to Brown by the Unions buys them policies that is the wholly admitted purpose of it . It is paid for by the tax payer as modernisation grants . Why on earth do we accept that? I do not really want to get into the Smith institute but £100,000 of donations found its way into his campaign fund from nearly half the trustees. Many of the same people will go on to have lucrative Government posts Lord Leitch aptly named , for example gave £5000 and was appointed to produce a report on corporate governance. Good joke eh ?Labour peers are up to ten times as likely to get a dip in the treacle pot of “Public Service “ than their opposite numbers according the a recent register of House of Lords interests .Bad Joke then. Allow me to throw a few figures around



One “renowned Institution…a Charity” receives 88 % of its money from the taxpayer which it the uses much of for soft left campaigning .In his last budget Brown tied in his successor to selling £36 billion of public assets which will be leased back under PFI schemes , cheating the future to pay for his present glory The South East England Development Agency ( SEEDA) deserve special commendation. Last year the chairman James Braithwaite spent£51489 , on taxis , going to see other pointless bureaucrats . The agency spent £600,000 last year running ten overseas offices with one representative in Stuttgart paid £89,000 for either months work. One North, the agency for the North spent £965,000 on an offices in China , the USA Japan Korea and Belgium while Yorkshire forward spent £20,000 sending its staff to a film festival in Dubai . These entirely worthless talking shops have an annual budget of £2.3 billion which is an awful lot of Labour glad handing.This sort if thing never stops with , for example £11,000,000 less per constituency being received out of the national Lottery by Conservative areas a £2.2 billion differential. The closure of Hospitals in Conservative areas is well known.

Lakshi Mittal coughed up a over £4 million for Blair last year and is by far the largest donor to Labour . Mr. Mittal, claims he made the donations in support of the Labour party and not for special treatment or assistance . We do not know what he wants , we do know that Mr. Brown does and that is enough .. Neil Kinnock was awfully stuffy about cash for honours but then he was awfully stuffy about suspending the accountant who brought to light the intergalactic level of fraud in the EEC.

Where corruption starts and incompetence stop ? The point is that the one usually goes with the other in our increasingly Bureaucratised state .£55,000,000 was paid , for example , to dead people .Tony Blair trebled the cost of Downing Street to £18 million. The top twenty civil servants now have a pension pot worth £35 million. Peter Mandelson habitually orders £400 bottles of wine at the public’s expense and Ruth Turner who kept her mouth shut was rewarded with a lucrative Euro sinecure. IN such a country there are simply no footholds for making any sort of morla stand

When you step back and look at the whole picture the question of a property development oiled through is only the paper boat on the flooding river of sleaze which is formed of two Contributories . The internal corruption of the Labour Party and the general moral corruption that arrives when much of the money spent in a given day is not earnt by the spender.

Clever Mr . Croydonian recently gave me a catechism to recite

1 When I buy for me with my money I care about quality and value for money
2 When I buy for me with other peoples money I care about quality but not value for money
3 When I buy for others with other peoples, money .....


I don’t care at all