It’s now the Tories turn to start racking up the excuses for yet another electoral failure in advance by harping on about the possibility of electoral fraud under the current postal voting system.

Unfortunately for the Tory’s Co-Chairman, Liam Fox, who’s been quoted by the BBC as telling party workers in Somerset that:

“It is clear Mr Blair’s reckless fiddling with the electoral system has raised widespread public concern about the integrity of Britain’s electoral system.

“The electoral practices of the 18th and early 19th Centuries, such as intimidation and fraud, risk becoming the hallmark of the 21st.”

… no one at Tory HQ has bothered to remind him that when the Electoral Commission raised concerns about postal ballots, his own party, together with both Labour and the Lib Dems, acted to block any moves to tighten the rules.

Even more embarrassingly, the only concrete investigation into alleged electoral fraud so far this campaign turns out to centre on the actions of a Tory Councillor in Bradford who is currently trying to come up with a plausible explanation as to why 13 people had applied for a postal vote from his home address and another 12 applications has been received from a derelict house which, until last year, was co-owned by the Councillor in question.

It would appear that the Tories are well qualified to talk about the electoral practices of the 18th and earlier 19th Century, not are the only UK political party to have survived from that era but they may still have some first-hand experience to go on.

After a digression or two over the last few days into other matters, its time to get back to a few more local issues - which inevitably means heading back into the weird world of Birmingham City Council Deputy Leader and Lib Dem PPC for Birmingham Yardley, John Hemming.

In my temporary absence from the fray, PoliticalHack has done a stirling job of picking up the gauntlet, finally wringing from John, after a mere seven days, that the Birmingham Lib Dems were, indeed, following the national party’s orders and handling postal vote applications on behalf of Lib Dem voters - not that John seems particularly happy to have had to admit that publicly.

The shabby opportunism of efforts by John and the Birmingham Lib Dem High Command to pin the blame on the DTI for the demise of Rover rather than on his former friends, the ‘Phoenix Four’ seems to have abated somewhat in the face of the harsh reality that even Digby Jones of the CBI, a man who should know a bit about running a business, doesn’t buy his version of events either, while Annil Chandra, the former Rover Project Manager who purports to be leading efforts to set up a worker’s cooperative at Longbridge and the only other person to repeat, publicly, John’s claim that ‘it was all the DTI’s fault’ appears to have gone very quiet indeed since being ‘outed’ as one of the Lib Dem’s candidates in Bourneville in last year’s Birmingham City Council elections.

But to further back up the truth that Rover was in serious trouble long before the government got involved, its worth reading this article from the Birmingham Evening Mail which shows that Land Rover, which is still using the Rover K series engine in its Freelander models, was stockpiling engines for several months before Rover crashed in order to tide it over until it was able to switch to a new engine from Ford - now why, John, do you suppose they were doing that if not because they were well aware that Rover was ‘living on borrowed time’ under Phoenix and, in that case, how are you going to blame the DTI for that?

In fact I’ve unconfirmed reports which suggest that SAIC has already sold off a package of 45 different rights to intellectual property which was formerly owned by Rover and sold to the Chinese around 5 months ago, long before things finally went pear-shaped, and that this rights sale was in preparation for the production of wholly Chinese-manufactured cars in the near future, based on the right sold by Rover.

More and more it looks like SAIC led Rover right up the garden path until it got what it really wanted - the ability to build its own cars for the Chinese domestic market - and then walked away without ever having any real intention of concluding a deal which would have kept production going at Longbridge.

There’s one last bit of catching up to do with John, before moving on to something fresh, and that’s in relation to postal votes.

The last couple of posts on his blog appear to show John taking a remarkably studious interest in the number, extent and, in some instances, detail of applications for postal votes in Birmingham for the upcomning election. In fact reading his comments one would be forgiven for thinking that he has been, personally reviewing applications…

…in which case I’m sure he won’t mind publicly clarifying a number of points.

1. In what capacity is he obtaining all this information about applications for postal votes in Birmingham - as a parliamentary candidate or as the Deputy Leader of Birmingham City Council.

2. If he is obtaining this information as a candidate can we be assured that any other Parliamentary candidate can obtain the same information, by the same means and on the same basis as John.

3. If he isn’t acting as a candidate in this, but obtaining this information by virtue of his position as a local Councillor and Deputy Leader of the Council, is that ethical? Is there not an inherent conflict of interest? In fact would that not be a matter for either the Electoral Commission or the Standard’s Board? I ask because because what John appears to be doing is certainly not mentioned in or covered explicitly by the Electoral Commissions revised code of practice, so I was wondering whether this was just something that candidates are allowed to do anyway, in the absence of explicit regulations, or whether it something he’s just been doing of his own bat.

4. Is he personally looking at applications and in which case; is he looking at all of them, some of them - and if so, how is he deciding which one’s merit his attention - or none of them and simply relying on reports from Birmingham’s interim Returning Officer?

5. And equally, if he getting reports from the Returning Officer, is that as a candidate or a councillor?

UPDATE

THe question above are no longer relevant in light of that information - unless John is doing something very, very stupid indeed.

Moving on to his plans for polling day itself:

6. What assurances is John prepared to give that there will not be any incidents of the kind referred to during the course of the Election Court hearing in relation to last year’s Council elections, which resulted in staff at at least one polling station lodging complaints against his polling agents in regards to their conduct, which the complainants appeared to consider intimidatory.

7. Also, with regards to his comment that the Lib Dems will have ’some patrols to follow the personators from polling station to polling station so we can collect evidence as to who is personating’ - is that, in the first instance, not the job of the Police? In fact has John even informed the Police of his plans and obtained their opinion/blessing for his plans?

8. In fact could this not be considered a rather intimidatory statement, not only to possible personators but also to legitimate voters who are intended to nothing more that exercise their lawful right ot vote but may then, as a result, find themselves being followed on leaving the polling stations by what amount to little more than a private vigilante police force under the command of a candidate?

9. Could some legitimate voters not find these statements so intimidatory that it could succeed in dissuading them from exercising their democritic right to vote altogether? And if so, would this note, itself, be in breach of election law and a criminal offence? One thing that is clear is that if these patrols do happen it won’t be on the basis that those carrying out these activities will be identifying themselves clearly as working for the Lib Dems, in which case is there not also the risk that this might lead to, or be interpreted as harrassment?

10. And again, on the subject of ‘clearance’, has John seen fit to make the Electoral Commission aware of these plans and seek guidance both on their legitimacy - or otherwise - and if they so and this is permissable, has he taken further guidance from the Electoral Commission regarding the conduct of the these patrols and what action they may, or may not, legitimately take, if any?

And now, my final question and one I can answer immediately…

Knowing full well that John visits this blog on a fairly regular basis - its I rare I mention his name without him turning up within a few hours - has he got around 24 hours to formulate a satisfactory response to these question before I start asking some questions of my own - questions I might add that will directed to WEst Midlands Police and the Electoral Commission, just to satisfy myself that everything that appears to be about to go on polling day, is actually within the rules, regualations and code of conduct?

The answer to that last question is - you betcha - after all, we wouldn’t wish to see an overzealous parliamentary candidate disqualified from the election for breaking the rules or another messy round of election courts, would we?

It’s Wednesday which Polly Toynbee’s back on another one of her ‘don’t mention the war’ rants.

This time around, in the world according to Polly, Labour voters who may still be just a tad pissed off with the whole business of sending British forces in a war on the back the most oversold document since Kenny Lay’s last Annual Report at Enron are now committing the heinous ’sin’ of not caring about ’social justice’.

It’s right about now that my blood is really coming to the boil…

I care about social justice.

I joined the Labour Party - because I care about social justice.
I campaigned against the poll tax, helped to organise an anti-poll tax union, supported poll tax defaulters as a ‘MacKenzie’s Friend’ in the local magistrates court, defaulted myself and spent the next few years dodging bailiffs and with a crap credit reference - I never did pay a single penny of that hated tax - all because I care about social justice.

I’ve worked in community development for more than ten years for the both the NHS and in the voluntary sector - because I care about social justice.

I know all about Labour’s record over the last eight years, about the time, effort and resources that have gone in the NHS, into improving education standards and providing better schools, into getting people back into work through the New Deal, into Surestart and the Children’s Fund and into urban and rural regeneration…

… and all because I work in a field which brings me into the closest possible contact with many of these things, rights at the sharp end where many of these initiative are delivered to the public.

And all this is because I care about social justice.

If there’s one thing that I fucking understand its exactly what social justice is because I’m a working class kid who grew up on a council estate in Oldbury and I’ve spent my entire adult life, even through the long dark years of Tory rule under Thatcher - the don’t give a shit decade of the 1980’s - fighting for social justice because that was my one chance, the one hope that I and others like me had of making a better life for ourselves and our families.

So don’t you start fucking lecturing me on the subject of whether I care about social justice. Geddit.

I opposed the war in Iraq for a whole bunch of reasons, most of which had little or nothing to do with whether I thought our ‘imperious leader’ was telling a few porkies to get Parliament to see things his way but, as a party member, I’ll still be voting Labour on May 5th.

I’ll be voting Labour because I’ll be voting for a Labour government and not for Tony Blair, the sooner he has his retirement party and pisses off to the House of Lords the happier I and many other Labour members are going to be - Party Leaders, Prime Ministers even, come and go but the party goes on - and if, Polly, you even managed to find time to get off your arse and talk to the rank and file of the party you’ll find that down here at the grass roots we still believe in the things we’ve always believed in. And every single one of those things springs from a single, simple idea - Social Justice.

But you see the problem here, Polly, the reason why many Labour voters, Labour members even, are angry is not just about Iraq and the question of why we went to way. It runs much, much deeper than that.

Before you can have social justice, you have to have good old fashioned justice, itself - can’t have one without the other - and the current government from the ‘we’re tougher than the Tories’ stance in the Home Office to the gradual but continual erosion of our basic rights and civil liberities, has got a pretty fucking abysmal record on plain, simple Justice.

That’s why we’re angry. We’re angry because we put a Labour government in place to take care of and look after our rights, not fucking well take them away in order, most of the time, just to cover its own collective arses when it makes a cock-up of things.

Suspected terrorists should be taken before a court and tried on the evidence, not banged up in Belmarsh or put under house arrest without the right to a trial or even independent legal counsel. (Prevention of Terrorism Act)

Government’s should not be able to direct the course of judicial enquiries into governmental maladministration and negligence or pick and choose which evidence, if any, is heard in public during the course of such an inquiry. (Inquiries Act 2005)

These are simple matters of justice which go to the very heart of British democracy - and that’s why many Labour voters, myself included, are angry.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m about to vote for the Lib Dems or even (god forbid) the Tories - I’m a member of the Labour Party and I intend to stay a member and fight from within the party for what I and many others believe to be right.

So, Polly, spare me the rhetoric, the scaremongering and the thinly veiled insults. I don’t need it and I don’t need you trying to tell me whether I care about social justice or not. Angry or not, I can make up my own mind thany very much.

Just looking through the site stats which includes a list of the most recent search engine referrals with the search terms which brought people on to the blog.

Currently I’m getting a lot of hits from the Google’s Brazillian site looking for information about B16, the Pontiff formerly known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as his ‘brief’ time as a member of the Hitler Youth - Christ they must be pissed off over there that their guy didn’t get the vote.

Best search so far on this has been one for “Ratzinger Hitler Youth Underwear” (???) - now I know some folks can get a bit obsessive when it comes to memorabillia but that one’s taking it to extreme…

… unless I’m misreading the intentions of the searchee, in which case I guess we can expect to see ‘Pope In Nazi Porn Shocker” on the front if the News of the World anytime soon.

Much has already been written in rebuttal of Mark Lawson’s half-hearted side-swipe at Britain’s nascent political blogging scene which appears in Saturday’s Grauniad - you can read Chicken Yogurt’s take on Lawson’s article, which also links to several responses from other bloggers, here.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to Lawson’s comments was ‘Who is he’? - I’m, admittedly, not good with names at the best of times and it was only after bit of memory dredging that I managed to fit a face to the name.

- Ah, yes. Now I remember. The fat bloke who sits next the Germaine Greer on Newsnight Review - that’s who he is.

Others have picked up, already, on the more obvious flaws in Lawson’s argument, not least the matter of his apparently rather shallow dip into the ‘blogosphere’ - horrible geeky word - before putting fingers to keyboard. What struck me most forcefully about his comments, however, was not the obvious lack of rigour with which he had pursued his enquiries but the sense I was left with that, when it came to blogging, he really hadn’t understood the point of it at all.

Lawson’s overall perception of bloggers seem predicated on the assumption that we’re all, somehow, a bunch of ‘wannabe’ political journos and media commentators and in deriding bloggers for everything from their choice of online psudeonym though the absence of editorial oversight to the tendency of some to ‘free associate’ while composing their latest missive his ‘message’ - if indeed there is one - seems to resolve itself down to little more than an exercise in professional vanity.

- Take it from me. I’m a pro and you just don’t have what it takes…

Now I’m no spring chicken when it comes to the realms of online discourse. I may be a relatively late entrant in to the world of personal blogging but in terms of haunting the ’spittle flecked hellholes’ of online debate I’ve been around in a variety of guises for quite a while, initially on Usenet and in more recent times on a range of independent and sometimes-not-so-independent web-based discussion forums - long enough to have accumulated one or two nom-de-plumes I have no intention of owning up to by reason of of their reputation for possessing an overly robust debating style.

And what I can say, with a considerable degree of certainty, is that since putting a bit of time and effort into blogging, my ‘media habits’ have changed considerably from what they once were.

I am a self-confessed news junkie, a sometimes debilitating condition for which a stint at the Priory is, unfortunately, not a viable recovery option. There, I’ve said it. I’m an addict.

I’ve been mainlining news for years. It all started innocently with John Craven’s Newsround and the ‘Red Top’ tabloids but it wasn’t long before I started to get in the ‘hard stuff’. First it was the broadsheets, then Radio 4 until, finally, I discovered the news junkie’s nirvana, Television. The instant fix. The media equivialent of crack cocaine.

I’ve got it bad. Some people pay through the nose for a top of the line cable TV package so they can get the full range of movie channels. Or sports channels. Or even just so then can get to see the latest episode of ER a few days earlier than their colleagues at work. Not me.

You want to sell me on digital TV then just give me news - and lots of it - 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

I’ve got them all, News 24, Sky News, the ITV news channel, CNN - if it’s late and there’s nothing else on I’ll even watch the bloody Parliament channel, especially if there’s a decent select committee in session.

Over the last few years, however, my addiction has become much less fulfilling than it used to be. I think it started back when Diana had her car crash.

The whole thing started well enough. Diana dies in car crash - now that is news. But after the first couple of hours, once the detail of the story was out, well then things just started to go off the boil. The news programmes went on… and on… and on… all fucking day, in fact. But after a while it became apparent that the media had used up all the actual news and all I was getting was a constant stream of the same faces saying the same things over and over again. then there must have been a shift changes and we started getting different faces… still saying the same things that the first bunch of faces had been saying earlier.

The news just wasn’t as satisfying as it used to be and no amount of channel hopping was going to bring back the buzz I usd to get from a good, really fresh, new story.

Politics got to be even worse. So bad that I eventually found myself looking forward to seeing Portillo on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ and then only because his political career had, by that point, gone into such a terminal decline that he no longer gave a shit about the official line from Tory Central Office and started, instead, to develop a few opinions of his own.

Question Time, on of my main weekly fixes, got to be exactly the same - an endless procession of mass produced minor politicos who’s sole objective was to stay firmly ‘on message’ - however anodyne and uninteresting that message turned out to be - hey look at me Tony, I’m one of the good guys, one of your loyal troops… now about that promotion during the next reshuffle…

I even started to get selective about if and when I’d tune in. I’d check the TV listings to see was going to be on the programme as a panelist - Oh fuck, its some identikit junior minister this week. Fuck it, I think I’ll give it a miss.

It was then that it hit me and I began to understand the problem I was having. Way back when I started getting into news in a big way the kind of people you saw in the news had ‘opinions’.

That was it! That was where it all went wrong. Whatever happened to all the people who had fucking opinions..?

And that - for me - is the whole point of blogging.

Since starting to write my own blog I’ve cut back, massively, on the time I spend as a consumer of prepackaged, low-carbohydrate, mass produced news. I catch, maybe one main bulletin a day, tune in to Question Time if it looks like there’s someone on who might have something to say that’s worth listening to and occasionally, just occasionally, treat myself to a bit of Panorama.

Quick note to the Conmtroller of BBC 1. If you can put Doctor Who back on in its proper place on Saturday evenings then you can fucking well move Panorama back to its proper slot after the main news on Monday nights - oh, and while I’m on, you can tell those bastards at ITV to bring back World in Action as well…

The reason I’ve got my own blog and am writing this now is simply because I have opinions and figure that somewhere out there someone might just find those opinions interesting enough to spend a few precious minutes of their time on reading them.

These days, I get most of my daily news/politics fix online.

I go to the Beeb to keep up with what’s happening in the world, I visit a number of mainstream sources including the Guardian, Times and Independent - to name but three - for a mix of news and professional commentary, and I get my opinion and debate from hitting the blogs - in fact I probably spend more of the online time I have where I’m not writing, visiting a wide range of blogs and taking in a multitude of different views and opinions from across the whole political spectrum - real views and real opinions which come directly from real people…

… and if some of those people are more - or less - articulate or informed or knowledgeable than others then so fucking what, its their opinion and they’re entitled not only to voice it but to let others in on it as well, if they’re interested.

It’s their choice.

Blogging has given me a much better balanced and satisfying news diet than I’ve been getting from the mainstream media alone and I feel all the better for it, thank you very much Mark.

Now do you understand?

The beeb are report a major success for the FBI in cracking down on organised crime in Chicago, although the two ‘gentlemen’ pictured below, Joey “the Clown” Lombardo and Frank “the German” Schweihs are reported to be still ‘on the run.

What really interests me about this story, though, is the question of exactly when Jerry Lewis started running a crime syndicate?

Its seems that the super soaraway Murdoch scandal rag from Wapping believes itself to have discovered blogging… the only problem being that its yet to work out quite what blogging is.

Memo to Rebekah Wade…

Stick to the tits and soundbites routine on page three - that at least you seem to understand.

Better still, have this one as a freebie on me.

Bimbo, 19, says shes really concerned about dirty hospitals and the MRSA superbug.

“I’m due to go for breast enlargement in a few weeks ‘cos my agent finks it’ll be really good for my career as a page free stunna but wot wiv all this superbug nonsense I ain’t so sure anymore. Just the fawt of them nasty superbug fingys nibblin on my new tits ’til they fall off gives me the creeps.”

WARNING - This is a very long article and not for the politically fainthearted.

It’s taken a couple of weeks but now Iraq is back on the agenda - as much, it seems, of out desperation as anything else. Still, it was bound to happen. There was no possibility of this election campaign reaching its conclusion without the question of Iraq and what that might say about the personal integrity of Tony Blair arising. Only the timing is a surprise – I expected it much sooner and certainly long before the opposition’s inability to make even a modest dent in Labour’s prospects of third term reduced it to being little more than a final throw of the dice and a blatant appeal for a protest vote - which looks increasingly like the opposition’s only prospect of making gains on May 5th.

Knowing it was bound to come, I did a fair bit of reading around the subject, trying to sift rhetoric from reality. Taking Britain into war, whatever anyone else might choose to believe, is not a decision that Blair and others in government will have taken lightly. They had their reasons and considered those reasons good enough to take us into a war that a sizeable section of the British public opposed outright and that put us at odds with our most important European allies; France and Germany. Granted those reasons may not be quite the same reasons they gave to Parliament or to the British public but then this was a matter of foreign policy, of pursuing the national interest, and on that basis not so unusual a state of affairs as many seem to believe.

In this I have, self admittedly, an agenda. I come not to bury Blair nor to praise him. I do, however, want to try to explain, as best I can, why he took the decision to follow the US into the Iraq war and, more importantly, why, in his position, both Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy would have done the same and why their respective parties, had they been in government at the time, would have done more or less exactly what Labour did in order to win the vote necessary to take Britain to war. I also hope to show why the stance of each of the opposition parties, at the time, was not only entirely predictable but was based not on questions of morality and ethics but on simple political expediency. The one thing I’m not about to do, however, is try to reach a judgement on the actions of Blair and the Labour government in the matter of Iraq – I have my owns views, certainly, but my purpose here is not to try to convince you that Blair was either right or wrong in his decision. Rather I hope to give you a bit more information – free from political rhetoric – from which you can make up you own mind has to the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war.

As mentioned early, I’ve done a fair bit of reading around this subject, enough I feel to enable me to offer an informed explanation of events but not enough to claim that that explanation is necessarily definitive in terms of accuracy and detail – a better and more scholarly historian or political scientist will no doubt take on and complete that task in due course. I will, however, point readers to three key sources which are crucial to the thesis I am about to put forward:

The Hutton Inquiry and what it revealed about the conduct and actions of the government in the run in to the Iraq war is, naturally, one these sources and, at the time of writing, the full hearing transcripts and final report are still available from http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk.

However, I recognised that, at best, Hutton is heavy going and not likely to be to everyone’s taste, which brings me to my second key source, Tim Slessor’s first rate account of the Hutton Inquiry and what it reveals about the inner workings of Whitehall, contained in his excellent book ‘Lying In State’. You’ll need to be sure to pick up the second edition, which was revised and updated in 2004 to include a chapter on Hutton – the book was first published in hardback as ‘Ministries of Deception’ – and please read the whole book. There is simply no better or more accessible exposition of how, and why, we are lied to by the state, irrespective of which party or government is in power, on a frighteningly routine and regular basis.

The most important of all my sources, however, relates not to the inner workings of the British government but to events ‘over the pond’. Ron Suskind’s ‘The Price of Loyalty’, an account of Paul O’Neill’s experiences as Treasury Secretary – and, therefore a member of the National Security Council - in the Bush Administration and which was written with the full support and cooperation of O’Neill himself, is crucial to understanding how and why we came to go to war in Iraq – indeed I would go so far as to say that if you haven’t read this book then you simply cannot understand how the Iraq war came about and cannot claim to possess anything like a fully informed opinion on the subject.

…for the next day or two, its only because I’m working on a couple of major, and pretty lengthy, pieces for the blog, which I hoping to release in the next few days

I don’t want to say too much at the moment as I’m delving into a field of political analysis and understanding that I’ve not touched for a long time, not since university in fact, and I want to be sure that each piece is properly researched and is exactly as I want it to be before going ‘live’ with them.

However, as this is, I suppose, a bit of trailer as much as anything else and the intention is to get people to come back and read the finished pieces, what I can reveal is that some of things I’ll be looking at include:

- Why the US really invaded Iraq - yes, there is a definitive answer, one which is actually so simple that its been overlooked by almost everyone.

- How and why Britain really got involved in the Iraq war and why Blair can genuinely say that he did the right thing for Britain and be telling the truth - even if it isn’t for the reason he’s telling the British people.

- Why George W Bush is the perfect US President and why that’s even scarier than it sounds.

If any of that’s piqued your interest at all then check back in a day or two and things will start to emerge.

Pity the Tory’s Shadow Immigration Minister, Humfrey Malins, whose own party has managed to put him in rather a bind.

On the one hand, as the shadow junior minister responsible for immigration policy he’s duty bound to push the party line on immigrations - it’s a bad, bad thing and needs to be rigidly controlled. On the other hand he finds himself fighting a constituency - Woking) in which he has the views of Muslim voters to consider, voters from whom the Tories hard-line approach to immigration is going to go down like a lead ballon.

What’s a boy to do when faced with such a dilemma?

Easy. Use two different sets of leaflets, one in English for his white voters, extolling the virtues of being tough on immigration and tough on the causes of immigration and the other, in Urdu and delivered only to Asian households, informing them just how helpful he’s been in trying to ’smooth the way for them to bring their loved ones to the UK’.

At the last general election, Malins took the seat with a 15% or so lead over his nearest challengers, the Lib Dems. Interestingly, however, the Labour vote last time round was 20% of the local electorate, not enough to come through from third to win the seat this time but certainly big enough to make ‘decapitation’ a possibility, especially as its likely to be safe to assume that the majority of Muslims votes, last time around went to Labour.

Look, I don’t think I need to spell it out, here, but if you’re a Labour voter in Woking and you read this then it may be worth thinking long and hard about whether your best interests lie in being absolutely loyal to the party or in loaning the Lib Dems your vote and shafting a Tory hypocrite - whatever you decide, I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.