A detailed examination of expenses claims submitted by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, indicates that she submitted almost £70,000 in expenses claims for services provided by two public relations companies in the 2½ years from November 2006 to June 2009.

These claims include more £20,000 for services provided by a PR company, set-up by a former Tory spin doctor in 2004, relating to Dorries’ controversial anti-abortion campaign, which failed to secure a change in the law cutting the upper-time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

Dorries has also claimed more than £30,000 for services provided by two other ‘research’ companies with close ties to the Conservative party since becoming an MP in 2005.

Dorries’ official MPs website has also been found to have cost the taxpayer almost £9,000 since 2005 despite it not having been updated at all in the last twelve months.

Responding to reports that his company, Media Intelligence Partners, had received more than £66,000 in payments claimed against MPs expenses, ex Tory spin doctor Nick Wood told the Telegraph that MPs would typically pay for research, and then received PR advice from his company free of charge.

There should be, at least, a full investigation into the use of these companies, on expenses, by Conservative MPs.
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“Steve Hilton, though, remains the third most important man in the party behind Cameron and Osborne…Those who are close to him are phenomenally loyal, praising him as invigorating and inspirational.

“But his ideas are often so concentrated that they need to be diluted.

“For a while, Hilton argued that Cameron’s first Queen’s Speech should contain no bills, to show that the Tories did not think legislation was the answer to the country’s problems.”

I’m not making this up.

Today’s publication of the Legg report has, naturally, pushed the whole expenses issue back to the top of the news agenda.

We have, of course, had a bit of look for ourselves. And given past history you won’t be surprised that our attention naturally gravitated towards the expenses claims made by our old ‘friend’, sparring partner and Conservative MP for Mid-Narnia, Nadine Dorries…

…and, also unsurprisingly, we’ve got a few questions for Nadine for which we’d really like some answers.

Dorries’ Website/Blog

You may, for example, recall that some time ago – May 2008, in fact – we raised a few issues with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner about her personal website and blog.

At the time, the blog appeared to be funded from her parliamentary expenses and breached several of the rules governing the use of MPs websites when funded from the public purse.
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David Cameron is walking a tight rope between shedding the “nasty party” image while still holding on to the nasty bastards who only vote Tory for that reason.

So it shouldn’t be too surprising that lovely wuverly fluffy compassionate Conservative David Cameron said something so boneheaded on burglary in the wake of the jailing and subsequent release of Munir Hussein.

The moment a burglar steps over your threshold, and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside

At the time Sunny argued that he thought the law stood fine as it was but sympathised with Conservative attempts to strengthen it in favour of householders who have their house broken into. Ultimately he supported his friend’s mantra ‘If you don’t want your ass kicked then don’t break into my house.’

Luckily for Mr Hundal, his friend and all of us there is no human right which prevents your arse getting kicked if you break into someone’s house.
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What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to the idiotic #kerryout campaign?

How about this story from today’s Daily Mirror…

Tory star Adeela Shafi has £325,000 CCJ ‘debt’

A key member of David Cameron’s new generation of women MPs has had three county court judgments against her since 2007 – including one for almost £325,000.

And her husband Ijaz Shafi was declared bankrupt in 2000.

Muslim lecturer Adeela Shafi was hand-picked by Cameron to open for him at the 2008 Tory Conference.

He then endorsed her as a Parliamentary candidate and campaigned in her Bristol East constituency along with his shadow cabinet team.

CCJs of £400 and £1,048 have been settled but £324,272 is outstanding – despite her being ordered to repay it nearly three years ago in July 2007 – five months before she became a prospective Tory MP.

Hat Tip – Political Scrapbook

As Political Scrapbook correctly notes, an undischarged bankrupt cannot stand for election to Westminster, and an MP who goes bankrupt while at Westminster is out of a job, a fate that Jeffrey Archer narrowly avoided in 1974 by standing down at the October election before the shit really hit the fan.

Strangely enough, this seems to have been a minor detail that self-styled campaigner for political transparency Harry Cole/Tory Bear neglected to mention when setting up the #kerryout campaign to raise money for Shafi’s election campaign in Bristol East.

Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on young Harry.

Mistakes like this are bound to happen when you’re the unfortunate outcome of a failed cloning experiment involving Susan Boyle and Archie the Inventor, as demonstrated by his weekly appearances on ‘Guy TV News’.

FFS, Guido, can’t you do everyone a favour and put Harry in a burqa…

…every week.

UPDATE

A quick check has revealed that, to date, the #kerryout campaign has raised the princely sum of £1,681 for Shafi’s campaign.

Using the same fundraising system, Boris Johnson’s brother, Jo, has raised £11,956.

After falling flat on his face as a result of his last foray into the realm of statistics you might think that a certain Tory blogger would have learned a valuable lesson. But, no, he’s back again and making yet another raft of daft mistakes:

Burying Bad News on NHS Waiting Times

Whenever there’s a major political event, you always need to watch what government press office put out. And true to form, today the Department of Health is trying to bury bad news. At 10.06am an email dropped into my Inbox with the alluring headline

STATISTICAL PRESS NOTICE – NHS INPATIENT AND OUTPATIENT WAITING TIMES FIGURES – 31st December 2009
I nearly didn’t bother to look, but suspicion got the better of me. It turns out that patient waiting times have increased dramatically in 2009.

The number of inpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 13 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 57,600, an increase of 12,300 (27.3%) from November 2009, and a rise of 18,000 (45.3%) from December 2008.

The number of outpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 8 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 74,100, an increase of 11,700 (18.8%) from November 2009, but a rise of 26,900 (57.0%) from December 2008.

Shouldn’t the press release have been headlined…

Labour Increases NHS Waiting Times by 50%?

UPDATE: The Dept of Health has been in touch to deny this is burying bad news. They say that these figures always come out on the last Friday of the month.

Credit where its due, Iain’s already sort of acknowledged his first mistake – had he checked the DoH’s website, he might have noticed that this is nothing more than a routine statistical release that the DoH does issue at the same time every month.

As for his suggestion for an alternative headline, Iain’s got that badly wrong as well because he’s forgotten – or more likely never learned – one of the cardinal rules of statistics.

One statistic does not make a trend. continue reading… »

Let’s try a bit of word association… James Delingpole..?

I’m guessing that ‘climate change denier’ was probably the first thing that came to mind, although having read George Monbiot’s latest missive on CiF, ‘vicious douchebag’ seems rather more apt.

On Sunday, Delingpole posted this on his blog at the Telegraph:

The Warmists are looking increasingly foolish and wrong. But they aren’t going to go down without a fight. Consider, Exhibit A, this nauseating email currently being sent out to Conservative candidates. It seems that in the last week a couple of hundred Tory candidates have received variations on the theme below. Note that these emails do not come from a named organisation but from individual voters in each of the different prospective parliamentary candidates’ constituencies.

The text of the email in question, which he also posted, goes like this:

Dear Edwin Northover

I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.

I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.

Can you clarify that:

You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?

Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?

Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?

Kind Regards, *** ***”.

Not only does that look to be a perfectly polite and reasonable enquiry but it looks, to me at least, very much like the kind of  simple fill-in-the-blanks form email that’s pretty much a staple tool of internet-based campaigning.

In other words, it about as far from ’stalking’ – the term Delingpole used in the title of his post – as its possible to get. continue reading… »

The 26th British Social Attitudes Survey has just been published, and has some interesting findings.

They show strong support for liberal social values, a decline in support for redistribution and traditional left-wing economic intervention to help the worse off, and overwhelming opposition to spending cuts in health and education.

It has prompted a mixture of gloating about how Britain is shifting to the right and whining about evil librulses not “tolerating” homophobia from our friends in the conservative movement, so let’s have a look at what it really says:

On social attitudes, Britain is becoming more liberal, except for when it comes to drugs:
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contribution by Zarathustra

Nurses for Reform have been featured on Liberal Conspiracy before. They’re a campaigning group with links to the libertarian Adam Smith Institute and ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think-tanks.

Last month they met with David Cameron to discuss their ideas, which included wholesale privatisation of the NHS, the scrapping of national pay agreements for health workers and nurses being given brands like consumer products.

The idea of competing brands of nurses (None of yer manky Tesco nurses working in our hospital. We only use Sainsburys nurses) might sound daft, but this weekend Nurses For Reform crossed the line from silly to downright offensive.

Their leading spokesperspon has been strongly implying the NHS was created along Nazi principles.
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I have no idea yet whether Alan Duncan is an asset or a liability to the cause of penal reform, but he certainly appears to be an ally, and is the author of two cracking soundbites:

Ms Crook wrote: ‘Alan Duncan said that the slogan “prison works” was repulsively simplistic. Anyone in politics should work to improve society and there was no more useful target than offenders.’
[...]
Ms Crook added: ‘He said, “Lock ’em up is Key Stage 1 politics.”’ Key Stage 1 is the first part of the primary-school curriculum studied by children as young as five.

To which the Mail has helpfully editorialised:

Suggesting that an old-style tough Tory approach to crime is worthy of a five-year-old will infuriate the party’s grassroots activists.

Well, if they’re going to act like five-year-olds…
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It’ll be interesting to see what Mike Smithson makes of this story over at Political Betting…

CADBURY workers fearing for their jobs have been branded “whingers” by a Midland MP…

Mr Wiggin – whose Leominster constituency in Herefordshire includes Cadbury’s Marlbrook plant – said:

“Who wants to hire a whingeing workforce when you can have a positive upbeat one?”

Wiggin, who’s currently sitting on a hefty majority of 13,167 over the second-placed Lib Dems, from the last general election, would ordinarily be considered to be a safe as houses but he does seem to have a knack of opening his mouth and putting his foot right in it, as the Telegraph noted during its coverage of the MPs expenses scandal:

Mr Wiggin, the MP for Leominster in Herefordshire, has been contacted by John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, over his claims for £13,000 in council tax and household bills between 2004 and 2006.

Mr Lyon is acting on a complaint from one of Mr Wiggin’s constituents who believes that the MP – a contemporary of David Cameron at Eton – may have claimed thousands of pounds too much.

The MP has accused the constituent, Jim Miller, a self-employed writer, of being a “trouble-maker”. He asked whether Mr Miller was “on benefits” and said: “His time would be better spent finding a job than pursuing a vendetta.”

Could Wiggin now be a more attractive target for the Lib Dems than his majority at the last election suggests, especially as his CV prior to entering parliament includes stints as a Forex trader with UBS, an associate directorship with Kleinwort Benson and a management position in the Forex department of Commerzbank?

After all, he seems to be a right merchant banker from where I’m sitting?

If you thought the Tories’ ‘broken society’ meme was bit dystopic, this will really have you reaching for the bottle. According to Zac Goldsmith, Conservative candidate for Richmond Park and everyone’s favourite uber-green non-dom, we are no longer living in a civilised country. Can’t wait to see that on his election posters.

In a post which implicitly supports euthanasia, Goldsmith contrasts the seemingly lenient sentence given to a convicted paedophile with a seemingly harsh sentence for a woman who ended the life of her beloved but brain damaged son.

The problem, you see, is those pesky “sanctimonious liberal commentators” who “will argue that the mark of a civilised society is its willingness to apply justice in the face of public opinion. For them, this mother is a law-breaker, just like Sweeney, and she should be punished as such”.

Now, if I was going to write about how two court cases reveal what an uncivilised country we are, I’d probably think twice before accusing anyone else of sanctimony.
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The Press Association today reports:

Tory leader David Cameron will warn that Britain is in a “social recession” even deeper than its economic one as he steps up pre-election campaigning. And the Tory leader will point to the torture of two young boys as an extreme symptom of what he dubs Labour’s “moral failure” as he launches a raft of social policies.

“When parents are rewarded for splitting up, when professionals are told that it’s better to follow rules than do what they think is best, when single parents find they take home less for working more, when young people learn that it pays not to get a job, when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community, is it any wonder our society is broken? We can’t go on like this.”

Mr Cameron will point to the brutal attack on the nine and 11-year-old boys in Edlington, South Yorkshire, by brothers aged 10 and 11 to reinforce his case.

It’s beggars belief that Cameron thinks it is right for a party leader to shamelessly exploit such a brutal crime so he can simply take cheap political swipes. Does he plan to strengthen legislation and provision for domestic violence? Nope, nothing about that in here.

Perhaps he is advocating that every single family in the country is placed under supervision so nothing like this could ever happen? It’s a possibility but the details of any policies are still vague.

Oh wait, the murder of Jamie Bulger took place under a Conservative government. Perhaps that was the start of this “social recession”? I suppose under a Tory government there will no violent crime ever. Right?

contribution by Vinay Nair

At this Saturday’s Fabian Society annual conference, Vinay Nair made a presentation to the assembled audience arguing that both Labour and the Libdems should be aiming more directly at George Osborne, and asking whether the electorate were happy with him as Chancellor.

Vinay narrowly lost out to being voted the best policy idea to defeat the right. He used a presentation to make his point and we publish them below the fold. continue reading… »

For an Old Etonian to promise a ‘brazenly elitist’ approach to state education – as Tory leader David Cameron has done this week – is nothing if not brazenly cheeky.

It’s a nice catchphrase of course, chiming as it does with the popular perception that something is wrong with the system, and that sex-crazed pothead Sirs and Misses of the type parodied in that Channel 4 comedy-drama a few years back bear most of the blame.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong in principle with offering more money to attract people to a sector where vacancies are hard to fill. That, the economics textbooks tell us, is how labour markets are supposed to work.

But let us not even pretend that any government is going to provide state school teachers with the kind of starting salaries that Oxbridge graduates can pull down in the City or at a City-oriented law firm.

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At the weekend Peter Oborne treated us to a treatise on how the Conservatives have put together the most radical program for government since Oliver Cromwell, or words similar to that effect.

But in reality, as yesterday’s launch of the party’s education policies showed, somehow managing to be even worse than Labour at reforming our benighted education system.

After all, it really ought to be an open goal. Even after almost 13 years under New Labour, still barely 50% manage to get 5 “good GCSEs”, a record so appalling that it can’t be stressed often enough.

There have been improvements made, although considering the amount of money pumped in it would be incredible if there hadn’t been, and diplomas as introduced by Ed Balls, is one of the few reforms which has been a step in the right direction.

So when Cameron then immediately decides that the most important thing which will decide whether or not a child succeeds is not their background, the curricula, the type of school or the amount of funding it receives but the person who teaches them, he’s on the verge of talking nonsense on stilts.
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It’s always a sure sign that the Tory faithful are happy when Tory bloggers start posting long extracts from one of Cameron’s policy speeches.

We’re going to begin at source – at recruitment – and make sure we get the best people into the profession. At the moment, not enough of our brightest people consider going into teaching, especially those in the subjects we need – like maths, and in the schools that would benefit most from their knowledge – tough inner-city ones…

We can get round this problem – we just need to learn from abroad. Finland, Singapore and South Korea have the most highly qualified teachers, and also some of the best education systems in the world, because they have deliberately made teaching a high prestige profession.

They are brazenly elitist – making sure only the top graduates can apply. They have turned it into the career path if you’ve got a good degree…

So we will end the current system where people with third class degrees can get taxpayers’ money to enter postgraduate teacher training. With our plans, if you want to become a teacher – and get funding for it – you need a 2:2 or higher.

But can you be sure that any of these high-flying graduates you want to attract can actually teach?

It’s also interesting to see Dave picking on Finland as one of the three countries cited as having an excellent education system.
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A few months ago I was hanging out at the back of a fringe event at the Tory conference, bored and exhausted and frankly wondering whether I could justify going home, when Mike Penning said something that suddenly made me start listening.

Penning, a shadow health minister, casually mentioned that a Tory government would take from the poor and give to the rich.

He didn’t put it in those terms, of course. But that, nonetheless, was the implication. The government, he said, had done all sorts of iffy things to the formula that distributes money around the NHS. They’d over-emphasised poverty. They’d under-emphasised age.

They’d done this for political reasons, to redirect cash to their own voters, and as a result a lot of sweet old ladies in nice, Tory constituencies were snuffing it with distressing speed.

The Tories would correct all that. They’d “de-politicise” that formula. No longer would those old ladies have to die.

So I looked into this. Yes, a press officer told me, this was actual policy.
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Facing the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free news website, as yet there wasn’t a set-out policy on how the BBC could be emasculated by the Tories.

Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn’t so much as mention Murdoch.

Not that Policy Exchange itself is completely free from Murdoch devotees or those who call him their boss. The trustees of the think-tank include Camilla Cavendish and Alice Thomson, both Times hacks, while Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and who refused to pay the licence fee until Jonathan Ross left the corporation is the chairman of the board.

Also a trustee is Rachel Whetstone, whose partner is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s director of strategy. Whetstone was also a godparent to the late Ivan Cameron. The report itself is by Mark Oliver, who was director of strategy at the Beeb between 1989 and 1995, during John Birt’s much-loved tenure as director-general.
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Edward McMillan-Scott MEP may take legal action against the Conservative Party after an internal appeal panel upheld his expulsion from the party.

He says his treatment went beyond that of any Conservative MP involved in the Westminster expenses scandal, and that the five year ban contrasts with the two year expulsion of Den Dover, the former Tory MEP who was expelled for two years in 2008 when he refused to pay back “unduly” claimed expenses payments worth over £538,000.

This is not about me: it is about the values of the next British government … In the context of the Westminster expenses scandal, for which no Conservative was expelled, this will be seen by many as a serious case of double standards. The party seeks to prevent my candidacy in the next European election merely for taking a stand on matters of personal conscience. This raises very serious ethical, legal and political issues. [Telegraph]

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