General Election 2010

[trophyshy 6434]

Did anyone see Clegg's speach?

 

First £10k of income @ zero tax.

 

I think he comes across as far less of a twat than either of the other two, will be interesting to see the televised debates.

[Craig 6308]

Did anyone see Clegg's speach?

 

First £10k of income @ zero tax.

 

I think he comes across as far less of a twat than either of the other two, will be interesting to see the televised debates.

 

Goes for most of the leaders the Lib Dems have had IYAM. On another note I think Vince Cable would make a considerably better Chancellor than either Darling or Osbourne. Trouble is the party associates itself with some absolute wankers - that dickhead who was nobbing the cheeky girl springs to mind...

[tinofbeans 86]

Lembit optik. Jesus wept. he bedded a weathergirl (Sian LLoyd) as well.

[trophyshy 6434]

that Sian Lloyd looks like she could suck an orange through a hosepipe tbf.

[Craig 6308]

that Sian Lloyd looks like she could suck an orange through a hosepipe tbf.

 

 

With that in mind, what the fuck could the cheeky girl do?

[Rob W 0]

she was much maligned and misunderstood

[Christmas Tree 3997]

We are definitely in a period of unappealling leaders.

 

None of them have any charisma whatsoever.

[Happy Face 29]

3 articles that make unsurprising reading when read in conjunction....

 

Adelaide is Australia's festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press, the only national newspaper, Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world's first murdochracy.

 

What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch's editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: "What'll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?"

 

While the veracity of this celebrated remark is sometimes disputed, its spirit is not. Stricken with pneumonia, the former prime minister John Howard dragged himself out of bed to pay obeisance to the man to whom he owed many empty buckets. His successor, Kevin Rudd, scurried to an obligatory audience with Murdoch in New York mere months to his election. This is standard across the planet. Before he took power, Tony Blair was flown to an island off Queensland to stand at the blue News Corp lectern and pledge Thatcherism and media de-regulation to the jowled figure nodding in the front row. The next day, the Sun lauded Blair as one who "has vision [and] speaks our language on morality and family life".

 

Whitewash

Murdoch knows that little separates the main political parties in Australia, Britain and America. He plays the man. In 1972, he backed Australia's Gough Whitlam, who revealed himself to be a radical reformer. A furious Murdoch swung his newspapers against Whitlam with stories so outrageously skewed that rebellious journalists on the Australian burned their paper in the street. That has never been repeated.

 

Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy, sport and celebrity gossip aside, are the promotion of war and jingoism, US foreign policy, Israel and a paternalism towards Aborigines, the world's most impoverished indigenous group, according to the UN. This antiquated cold warring is not entirely due to the Murdoch press, but the agenda is. When the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto was about to be overthrown by his own people, the then editor-in-chief of the Australian, Paul Kelly, led a delegation of editors of most of Australia's principal newspapers to Jakarta. With Kelly at his side, this mass murderer, whom the Australian promoted as a "moderate", accepted the tribute of each.

 

Murdoch's most unabashed, if entertaining, retainer is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian. On one his adoring trips to the US, Sheridan wrote: "The US is the greatest possible argument for media deregulation. Every morning, I flick between Fox, CNN and MSNBC as I eat my cereal . . . why did it take so long for pay TV to get to Australia?"

 

He was referring, as if instinctively, to his master's company Foxtel. As for terrorism, Sheridan blames "Pilgerist Chomskyism" for "ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama Bin Lenin, sorry Laden".

 

One of the most effective campaigns in the Australian murdochracy has been the whitewashing of a bloody colonial past, including attacks on the distinguished chronicler of the Aboriginal genocide Henry Reynolds and the former director of the National Museum of Australia Dawn Casey, for having dared to present the truth about indigenous suffering. The late Manning Clark, Australia's great maverick historian, was smeared by Murdoch's Courier-Mail as a red agent, then as a fraud, in much the style that Murdoch's Sunday Times smeared Michael Foot as a Soviet agent.

 

World domination

Something similar awaits those who question the manipulation of the remembrance of Australia's blood sacrifice for imperialism, old and new. Aimed at the young, a maudlin "new patriotism" reaches an annual climax on 25 April, the anniversary of the disaster at Gallipoli known as Anzac Day. The message is undisguised militarism promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, Prime Minister Rudd says, absurdly, that the military is Australia's highest calling.

 

Such false flags are flown for Israel, which sees a stream of Australian journalists sponsored and paid for by Zionist groups. The result is apologetic reporting of murderous actions that evokes the great appeasers such as Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, in the 1930s. The debate about state war crimes has all but bypassed Australia. That a former and current British prime minister have been summoned before the Chilcot inquiry is viewed with bemusement, as nothing like it would happen here. Yet Howard, who also invaded Iraq, claimed 30 times in one speech that he knew Saddam Hussein had a "massive programme" of weapons of mass destruction.

 

The national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has long been intimidated by the Murdoch press in the obsessive manner of the campaign waged against the BBC. Funded directly by governments, the ABC has none of the nominal independence afforded by a licence fee. Last year, HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch, was awarded a lucrative "partnership" with ABC Books.

 

In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world's media. By 2002, this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the same, and we all shall be citizens of a murdochracy.

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-...a-murdoch-media

 

October 2008....

 

David Cameron accepted free flights so he could hold talks with Rupert Murdoch on his luxury yacht off a Greek island, it was disclosed today.

 

The Independent reported that the Tory leader was flown by private jet to Santorini on August 16 where he joined the media tycoon for drinks on his 184ft (56m) yacht, Rosehearty.

 

The Gulfstream IV belongs to Matthew Freud, the public relations guru who is married to Murdoch's daughter, Elisabeth.

 

The Tories insisted Cameron had done nothing wrong and that the flights had been fully declared in the register of members' interests.

 

A spokeswoman for the Conservative leader said: "Everything in connection to August 16 has been fully and properly declared."

 

Although Cameron registered the flights last month, until now nothing had been made public about his visit to Murdoch's yacht.

 

Murdoch's News Corporation owns the Sun and the Times, as well as a large stake in Sky News, and other media businesses around the world.

 

The disclosure is likely to add fresh fuel to the controversy surrounding shadow chancellor George Osborne's visit to Oleg Deripaska, the Russian billionaire, on his yacht off Corfu.

 

Osborne has denied claims by the financier, Nat Rothschild, that he used the visit to try to solicit a £50,000 donation for Tory party funds, although he has admitted he was present when a possible donation by Deripaska was discussed.

 

In the case of Cameron, it has emerged that his wife, Samantha, and two of their children were with Freud's party on his jet when it left Farnborough for the Mediterranean.

 

The aircraft then stopped off in Istanbul to pick up the Tory leader - who was returning from a quick visit to Georgia following the Russian military incursion - before flying on to Santorini.

 

Following drinks on the Rosehearty, Cameron and his family attended a dinner party hosted by Freud on his yacht, Elisabeth F.

 

Afterwards the Camerons were flown on the Gulfstream to Dalaman in Turkey where they joined Mrs Cameron's family for a sailing holiday to mark the 60th birthday of her mother, Lady Astor.

 

Meanwhile, according to the Independent, the Rosehearty sailed on to Corfu where Murdoch held an on-board birthday party for his daughter, Elisabeth.

 

The guests were said to include Osborne, Deripaska, and Peter Mandelson, then still the EU trade commissioner.

 

Cameron's most recent entry in the register of members' interests declared: "16 August 2008, private plane from Farnborough to Istanbul for my wife and two children. Then from Istanbul to Santorini, and return to Dalaman, for myself, my wife and two children; provided by Matthew Freud, of London."

 

The Tories were dismissive of the Independent story. One source said: "This is a desperate attempt to make something out of nothing."

 

Meanwhile the Electoral Commission, which polices the party spending rules, has rejected calls for an investigation into Osborne's conduct, saying that it had seen no evidence of any offence.

 

Nevertheless the danger for the party is that the disclosures will create an impression of the party leadership as members of a gilded elite enjoying a life of luxury and privilege very different to ordinary voters.

 

It is in marked contrast to the rather more down-to-earth image Cameron sought to present when he was photographed with his wife on a beach in Cornwall during the first leg of his holiday.

 

Today's Guardian, meanwhile, reported that Lord Mandelson's contacts with Deripaska dated back earlier than has previously been acknowledged.

 

It is widely thought that it was Osborne's disclosures about Mandelson's meetings with Deripaska while they were both guests of Rothschild's that prompted the financier to go public with his own claims about the shadow chancellor.

 

EU officials had said previously that Mandelson, now the business secretary, had met the Russian "at a few social gatherings in 2006 and 2007".

 

However, the Guardian reveals that the two men had been seen together by a journalist at a Moscow restaurant in October 2004 after Mandelson was appointed trade commissioner but before he took up the post.

 

A Department for Business spokesman said: "Peter Mandelson's social and other contacts with Oleg Deripaska over a number of years have been well rehearsed.

 

"He does not believe anything is added by giving regular updates on dates and places where they met or in giving a retrospective running commentary of every meeting he has had with people he met during his time as EU trade commissioner.

 

"He is now focused on his role as business secretary, helping businesses small and large to cope with the current economic downturn and to position themselves to come out stronger at the other side."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oc...-rupert-murdoch

 

Start with the BBC. Murdoch, with son James, can't stand it – regarding it, a senior figure in broadcasting tells me, as "like the Ebola virus: they can't destroy it, so they try to contain it". They dress up their opposition in pseudo-intellectual free market blather, but the reality is much earthier than that: the BBC is a rival, and therefore an obstacle to their commercial ambitions. The smaller and weaker the BBC becomes, the more money News Corp can make.

 

So the Murdochs constantly demand a cut in the licence fee. Last year Cameron nodded dutifully, and called for an immediate freeze in the licence fee. That would have marked an unprecedented break in the multi-year financial settlement that is so integral to the BBC's independence – preventing it from constantly having to make nice to the politicians to keep the money coming in.

 

Second only to their loathing of the BBC is the Murdochs' hatred of Ofcom, the regulator that stands between them and monopolistic domination of the entire UK media landscape. They particularly dislike Ofcom snooping into pay-TV, an area that makes billions for Sky. How odd, then, that a matter of days after the regulator published a proposal that would have forced Sky to charge less for its sport and movie channels, Cameron, in a speech on quangos, suddenly singled out Ofcom, suggesting it would be cut "by a huge amount", possibly even replaced altogether.

 

That's the pattern in one area after another. James Murdoch laments the success of BBC radio in outstripping the commercial alternatives. Ed Vaizey, the Tories' would-be broadcasting minister, suggests selling BBC Radio 1 and letting commercial stations use the frequency.

 

Sky wants to keep exclusive access to the Ashes, rather than seeing them return, free to air, to the BBC or C4, and the Conservatives agree. Not at first, it's true: initially they quite liked the idea of "listed" sports events, of such national significance they would be available for everyone to see. But someone must have had a word with the shadow culture secretary, because the position was soon straightened out – in perfect alignment with Sky's.

 

Any doubters should play a game of spot the difference. Hold a copy of James Murdoch's 2009 MacTaggart lecture in one hand, and a clutch of Tory policy positions on the media in the other. Then see if you can tell them apart.

 

Perhaps this is merely a happy alliance of like-minded folk who share what culture secretary Ben Bradshaw calls a "free market fetishism". Maybe the Tories coolly weigh up the policy alternatives, with no thought to the endorsement Murdoch's Sun has given them and withdrawn from Labour, and just happen to reach a conclusion that matches News Corp's business interests perfectly.

 

Rather more likely is that a Conservative government would repeat one of the ugliest chapters of the Bush-Cheney era, when the White House allowed the oil and gas industry to write its energy policy. When it comes to media, the Tories are already doing that – handing the pen over to Rupert Murdoch. Don't say we weren't warned.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...ry-media-policy

[Craig 6308]

she was much maligned and misunderstood

 

 

That was Ebenzeer Goode you daft twat!

 

[Billy Castell 0]

Boss Drum!

 

Anyway, I don't really know who to vote for, as I can't remember whether I am registered in Devon, Bedford or Bridlington. If its the latter I would be tempted to vote SDP, for the retro and kitsch factor (and yes, the SDP still exist round there). Actually, I've just got to print an sign so I can vote here. I bet my constituency only has the 3 main parties and those cunts at the BNP.

[Rob W 0]

she was much maligned and misunderstood

 

 

That was Ebenzeer Goode you daft twat!

 

 

 

Nivvor!!

 

he lived upstairs......................... <_<

[Rob W 0]

Re Happy Face's story - Adelaide shows little sign of Murdoch these days - just the usual dodgy Oztralian politicians

[trophyshy 6434]

Re Happy Face's story - Adelaide shows little sign of Murdoch these days - just the usual dodgy Oztralian politicians

 

and the odd pie floater.

[Guest alex]

And shitloads of weed.

[trophyshy 6434]

and speed.

 

and titty bars galore.

 

 

 

godawful place.

[Guest alex]

Lovely museum, art gallery and botanic gardens though. And I'm not even taking the piss.

[Rob W 0]

there was a fabulous John Brack Exhibition on there in November

[trophyshy 6434]

Womadelaide.

 

 

tram to Glenelg, fish and chips and a coldie.

 

It is a nice spot, but a bit, erm. Odd.

Edited March 16, 2010 by trophyshy

[AgentAxeman 82]

Interesting article from the Mail (or the "right wing rag" as dubbed by some)

 

"Britain is a nation in denial and voters are just as deluded as the PM about the calamitous state the country is in

 

By Max Hastings

 

 

 

Almost all election campaigns are auctions of promises, though it suits some party leaders to try to make them beauty contests. We are seven weeks from Britain's likely polling day, but the style of the contest is plain.

 

The appalling fiscal deficit the next government will inherit prompts the three major parties to present themselves like consultants offering rival treatments to a heart patient.

 

Labour says that if he just keeps taking the pills, there's no need for scary surgery. The Tories advocated the knife, but found themselves facing a rush for the door. Now, they are peddling pills, with surgery maybe for later.

 

The LibDems say that if you mistrust medical science, they offer a great line in homeopathy.

 

Every aspect of the personalities of Brown, Cameron and Clegg has been explored. Commentators who have dissected their wives now address their mothers. If any of these turns out to possess a budgerigar, the bird should watch out. By Easter, pundits will have its tail feathers under a microscope.

 

Yet, instead of wasting ink on such guff, it seems more useful to examine the British people. What does it say about the national psyche that opinion polls suggest Labour still has a chance of forming another government?

 

Gordon Brown led this country into its worst economic predicament since World War II. We have an unprecedented scale of national debt that threatens a sterling crisis and will burden the country for years to come.

 

During 13 years of power, Labour has failed abysmally to reform public services, above all education, or to equip Britain to earn its living in the 21st century.

 

The Government's latest initiative threatens higher education, the country's only hope of creating a skilled workforce to meet the challenges of the next generation.

 

Universities are threatened with more than half a billion pounds' worth of funding cuts. The money is presumably needed to finance more NHS cosmetic surgery, asylum seekers' housing benefit or - most likely - to pay the interest charges on Gordon Brown's horrendous national borrowings.

 

Yet against this background of incompetence, fiscal recklessness and neglect of real priorities, millions of people seem willing to give Gordon Brown another chance.

 

Their motives, I suggest, say more and worse things about such voters than about the shortcomings of the Tories or LibDems.

 

They reflect the sort of thinking to be expected from an obese ten-year-old grabbing for the sweetie jar.

 

As a society, we have become so soppy and resistant to hard choices or sacrifices that many embrace whichever party threatens them with the least personal pain.

 

On Wednesday, the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, will present a Budget full of sanctimonious phrases about fiscal responsibility, measured cuts and a social balance 'to protect the most vulnerable'.

 

He will use stern words to gloss over the fact that Government spending will not be cut nearly as much as is necessary.

 

No one expects the Chancellor to seriously address the chasm in the public finances, because much of the pain would fall on Labour's huge client base of benefit claimants and state employees.

 

The party is committed to bribing its way to another election victory, whatever the cost to our financial future.

 

The frightening part of all this is not that Labour is behaving irresponsibly, but that so many voters seem happy to swallow its quack remedies. Every day we see evidence of a host of people who regard reality, or anywhere that demands a minimum of self-discipline, as places they do not want to go.

 

BA's cabin staff are preparing to strike to preserve bloated earnings and unaffordable working conditions, even when the airline is just a hop, skip and jump from bankruptcy. The public sector unions want Labour to commit itself to preserving their pension rights and early retirement age, though almost every private sector company is slashing employee entitlements.

 

A report this week shows that vast numbers of people waste GPs' time and a fortune in NHS funds by insisting on their right to personal consultations about colds (5.3 million last year), migraines (2.7. million) and headaches (1.8 million).

 

The cost of benefit payments continues to swell relentlessly. The word 'crackdown' has become the stuff of satire, when used by ministers to describe some futile attempt to cap the gusher.

 

The twin monsters of health & safety and a lawyer-led blame culture have created a society in which it is deemed possible to protect us from all perils and to exact cash compensation for all misfortunes.

 

A mania for precaution, wildly disproportionate to the scale of risk, imposes horrific costs on the public purse.

 

British soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan seem likely to be obliged to fight their battles under the protection - though in reality, of course, the grotesque handicap - of human rights legislation.

 

Since state schools cannot educate our children (40 per cent are incapable of proper reading and arithmetic at 11, according to the latest figures), the prescribed remedy is to create exams that semi-literates can be judged to have passed.

 

At every turn, people clamour for a right to a soft option; to receive rewards unrelated to their efforts or performance; to be preserved from any consequence of failure.

 

It invites derision to suggest that it is good for us as human beings to struggle a bit, to compete, to suffer some hardship, especially in youth, to be denied instant access to whatever takes our fancy.

 

The pursuit of self-interest, heedless of the consequences to others, is enshrined as if it was a basic human right.

 

Those at the bottom of the social pile can scarcely be condemned for their own greed and selfishness when they see the repellent example set from the top.

 

The herd of snorting, grunting porkers who make up Britain's insanely over-rewarded financial community have done frightful damage to ideals of fairness and social justice.

 

You will remember the favourite old schoolroom history story, of the Elizabethan soldier Sir Philip Sidney, mortally wounded on the battlefield of Zutphen.

 

Declining an offer of water, he urged it on another man, saying: 'Your need is great than mine.'

 

In similar circumstances in modern Britain, your average town hall bureaucrat, Goldman Sachs partner or shop steward would grab the water for themselves, saying: 'Sorry, mate. My need is greater than yours.'

 

This is the spirit of the British times. And it represents a huge obstacle that the Tories must overcome, to win the election on anything resembling a truthful prospectus.

 

In recent months, David Cameron has been attacked for alleged wobbling, wetness and 'wishy-washy policies'.

 

Yet what has prompted his behaviour? The answer, surely, is the way millions of voters have responded to being told the nasty facts of life.

 

Last winter, Cameron and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne talked bluntly about the horrors of the fiscal deficit and put it to the country that the overblown state must shrink; they promised sweat, toil and tears. The consequence was that polls showed voters fleeing in their droves. The big Tory lead of late 2009 shrank almost overnight.

 

I do not for a moment believe that Labour's fortunes have recovered because the public warmed to Sarah Brown or decided that her husband is not really the bumbling zombie he appears.

 

What changed was that people weighed the impact of slashed public spending, reduced hand-outs and austerity budgets on their own lives and recoiled from the party that threatened such things.

 

They lurched towards the cosier, absurdly fanciful, future promised by Labour.

 

My trade, the media, devotes acres of print and countless hours of broadcast time to discussing what is wrong with our politicians.

 

Certainly there is plenty to criticise, exemplified by the parliamentary expenses scandal. But it seems right also to consider what is wrong with us, the voters, the people whom the wretched politicians are trying to govern.

 

Instead of speculating interminably about where the Tory leadership is going wrong, we might usefully take a look in the mirror.

 

We often accuse ministers of lying and, indeed, they do.

 

Gordon Brown's performance before the Iraq Inquiry was a disgrace for a national leader.

 

But we also feed the culture of deceit, by our lack of appetite for realities. It is a chronic problem for democracies, especially for that of Britain, that so many people put their hands over their eyes when they are confronted by tough problems.

 

Consider a few facts of life in our own country. Britain can no longer afford the level of personal entitlements we have allowed ourselves for the past decade or two, chiefly through the benefits system.

 

The nation is threatened with relentless relative decline, unless we can start to educate our children to the same standard as the young workforces of Asia. This demands a return to selective streaming.

 

We need a huge investment in our crumbling national infrastructure, which can be funded only by higher taxation.

 

We cannot afford indefinitely to provide unlimited free health treatments for every citizen, because medical capabilities and their costs are soaring relentlessly.

 

Unless we build a lot of nuclear power stations fast, our lights will start going out in the middle of the next decade.

 

GM crops are probably indispensable to the future of our agriculture. We have almost no prospect of bringing the Afghan war to a successful conclusion, but we must persevere until the Americans decide to go home, lest we inflict disastrous injury on the Atlantic alliance. All these are realities familiar to most thinking people.

 

But any political party leader who explicitly asserted any of them would face crucifixion by the commentators and probably thereafter in the opinion polls.

 

We would be told: he has made a gaffe. He has told it like it is. He has probably lost himself the election. He was silly enough to tell the truth.

 

This week, I met an U.S. political scientist who has just written a book about why and when politicians lie.

 

One of his conclusions is that national leaders seldom don Pinocchio noses in international negotiations, because they know they can't get away with doing so.

 

The main victims of politicians' untruths are their own people.

 

I suggest that this is in considerable measure our own fault. Too many of us seek remedies for disagreeable problems by burying our heads under the bedclothes.

 

David Cameron faces a major dilemma in deciding how frankly, how harshly, to address the British people between now and polling day.

 

If I was in his shoes, I would take the risk of telling much more of the truth than he has done so far.

 

Some time, the electorate will have to grow up, recognise that we do not need a prime minister who is Mr Nice Guy, but rather one who knows how to be Mr Cruel To Be Kind.

 

There is no easy or pain-free path out of our ghastly economic predicament. Any politician who pretends otherwise is a shyster unfit to govern.

 

Gordon Brown has parted company so decisively that he will never rejoin planet Earth.

 

He wants to be in office, but not in power. He craves the title of prime minister, but rejects any vestige of personal responsibility for the nation's fate in war or peace. He has become a psychological mess of frightening proportions.

 

This presents the Tories with a chance to display courage, honesty and leadership, which are all desperately needed.

 

David Cameron must offer people hope for the future, a promise of sunlit uplands.

 

A decade of prudent and forceful government can restore this country to prosperity and set a course for the sort of future our children need and deserve.

 

But no responsible politician should flinch from acknowledging just how painful the journey will be to reach this destination.

 

It is time for those who aspire to govern us to dismiss the lies surrounding Britain's sickness and to confront the hard truths about the only credible remedies for them."

[Christmas Tree 3997]

Surely Labour now have the crown as the party of Sleaze

 

 

Three ex-Cabinet ministers involved in the "cash-for-lobby" row have been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

 

It came hours after Labour's chief whip Nick Brown promised MPs he would question Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon about their roles in the affair.

 

The trio are alleged to have tried to sway policy decisions by lobbying the government in return for cash.

 

The claims were made in Channel 4's Dispatches programme about a "sting" operation in which a number of MPs, including Mr Byers, Ms Hewitt and Mr Hoon, were secretly filmed in discussion with an undercover reporter posing as the representative of a fictitious US lobbying firm.

 

Ahead of the programme, at a meeting of the PLP, a number of MPs called for the former ministers to be thrown out of the party.

 

PLP chairman Tony Lloyd told MPs: "Nobody should have any doubt about the anger felt across the PLP tonight."

Sky News' chief political correspondent Jon Craig said: "The Prime Minister has been actively involved.

"The Labour Party will not confirm who said what to whom, but one Labour source said to me, 'You can assume the Prime Minister is not amused'."

 

Mr Byers, who described himself as a "cab for hire", requested £5,000 a day and boasted he had previously secured secret deals with ministers over a rail franchise contract and food labelling on behalf of private companies. He later claimed he had "exaggerated" his influence.

 

Ms Hewitt and Mr Hoon were filmed suggesting they would charge £3,000 a day for their services.

 

Sky News' political correspondent Joey Jones said: "For all of those individuals, I think, reality is going to slap them in the face this morning.

"For all that goes on in the House of Commons, some people were using it as a vehicle for making money."

[Craig 6308]

Fucking Tories have no room to speak after the 'Cash for Questions' debarcle that was the final nail in John Major's coffin.

[Guest alex]

Both as bad as each other. We need a proper alternative.

[NJS 3986]

I still think people want to be positive about politics but I think they're in for a shock during the upcoming campaign - I think a lot of people have lost any remaining reverence and respect for politicians which will mean some harsh doorstep chats.

[Christmas Tree 3997]

I still think people want to be positive about politics but I think they're in for a shock during the upcoming campaign - I think a lot of people have lost any remaining reverence and respect for politicians which will mean some harsh doorstep chats.

 

 

I think this is going to turn into a real dirt fest

Edited March 23, 2010 by Christmas Tree

[Christmas Tree 3997]

The budget

 

watching and thinking, is this the right time to gamble the recovery by changing government.

 

Darling might be drab but seems authoritive, especially compared to osbourne.