So, Charles Clarke has decided to
go on the offensive. Anyone surprised?
Unity:
So the fact that the party treasurer was kept in the dark about a series of secret loans from millionaire business that, according to one of the lender, Dr Chai Patel, were specifically solicited as loans and not donations in order to avoid having to declare them to the Electoral Commission is a sign that Dromey may not be up to his job, not that the party leadership have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar?
Honestly? I think it may be both.
VampWillow:
You are the Finance Director of the organisation and last year you spent �18 million on a very public project, only �3.5 million of which you actually know where it came from.
A friend of your boss 'acquired' the other �14.5 million and you have no idea where it came from or under what terms and this didn't cause you any worries, even though everyone in the world knew the money had been spent.
Can we get
Tired Tony and his cronies
out of office please?
5 comments:
It may be a difficult concept for you to grasp, but there have been three opportunities for the electorate to decide on Blair's future. It is called, winning an election as opposed to hiding behind the bike shed and pulling faces.
Thanks to First Past the Post and the current electoral boundries the chances of anyone that wasn't Labour getting into Number 10 was approximately 0.
Going from the simple number of votes cast Labour lost England last time. Most of the electorate in England want Labour even less than they want the Conservatives.
The majority of opinion across Engalnd and Britian as a whole was for the 'none of the above' option of abstention. To say that Labour has a clear mandate is laughable.
Chris, did someone suggest anyone had a 'clear mandate'? I couldn't find any reference to it apart from you. How come the chances of anyone else getting in was 0 when the Tories won elections throughout the eighties and most of the nineties? How come the electoral system counts against the lib dems? I think there is an equally good argument that they would lose votes under PR. At the moment Tory and Labour voters can safely vote lib dem in most constituencies as a protest vote, safe in the knowledge that they don't have a prayer. There is not a first-past-the-post in opinion polls, and yet the lib dems don't do any better there. Looking at the shambolic way the two yellow/blue tories run Birmingham, I suspect there's not much to hold your breath for if they were elected. Anyway, all I was saying to MatGb was that if the nation wanted rid of Blair that much, they've had chances to do so. If you say they've abstained, they wouldn't appear to be THAT bothered.
Bob, as a general rule, I personally try to distance local politics from national politics; local incompetence is an embarrasment (I live in Torbay under a total shambles of a LibDem council), and, well, one of my top all time British political speeches remains Kinnock on Militant (now there was a Labour leader I respected).
Regarding the "three opportunities"? First one, we weren't judging his govt, we were getting Major out, and get him out we did. Second one, I voted Labour (Ben Bradshaw as it happens). Third one? I was hoping for a reduced majority and a much higher LibDem showing, got the former, but CK messed up the latter.
But last May was before we found out all the dodgy loan deals. Last May was before they tried to ban "glorification".
Besides, as Chris says, I'd hardly call the lowest recorded turnout and the lowest percentage share for a returned Govt an endorsement.
This time last year, I didn't want rid of Blair; I wanted to make sure Howard's lot didn't win.
A year is a long time in politics. Blair needs to go; not just because he's crap and lost it, but because he's irrevocably damaging the Labour party, and really hurting your chance, for example, of being reelected; you're associated with him. With dodgy loan deals, with finances arranged behind the back of the NEC. With Jowell, with Clarke.
For your sake, get him out of #10. Soon.
I say 0 because of the biases that First Past the Post adds into the election, biases that are currently worth over one hundred seats to Labour. Even if they had had someone good as leader they where not going to win since there was no chance of overcoming the biases of FFTP which are currently against them. Unlike during the 80's and 90's when FFTP was biased in their favour to the tune of 80 seats.
As for a proportional system loosing the Lib Dems seats, also not possible. Under a proportional system the Lib Dems should have got 142 seats in 2005, compared to the 62 they got. Maybe their vote would be a bit less because of people that want to simply lodge a protest abstaining, but more likely their proportion of the vote would go up as they became seen as a viable alternative government. Where seats dished out in proportion to votes they would have held the balance of power since 1974.
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