EDM on MPs expenses

A LibDem MP has proposed an early day motion against the idea that MPs' expenses should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. There's a letter writing campaign being initiated, but it needs to start soon!!! Really, if you're against violence, get writing now, because if this goes through I'm going to strangle some of the buggers myself!

Via Quaequam.

Catz Club

Phew! The work crisis seems to have abated (slightly) and I am heading for the alehouse in a moment, but before I go here's an interesting snippet.

Labour has agreed to pay back £15,000 it received from a children's charity after a report found that charity law had been breached.

OK, more dodgy donations to the Labour party - nothing new there. Apparently the generous party benefactor, which provides after-school care and holiday clubs for children, believed it was an administrative error, and that they should have routed the gift through their trading subsidiary. Except that's illegal too, it seems.

Still, here's the fun bit. The accounts of Catz Club were qualified last time round on the grounds that the charity might not continue to operate as a going concern. They had a £3.4m deficit on income of £850k. Yes, folks they spent two and a half million more than they received in income! The auditors said they were being kept afloat by the chairman, one A Mitchell. The 2007 accounts are overdue too, so to say that they are up the creek without a paddle is probably an understatement.

So, do you think they were after something, in return for their generous gift?

The political class and its enemies

Having recently read and enjoyed (if that's the right word) Peter Oborne's rather depressing "The Triumph of the Political Class", I've wondered, from time to time, which MPs aren't in fact fully paid-up members of the self-perpetuating oligarchy - which ones shouldn't be lined up and shot.

A few thoughts:

Conservatives

• Richard Shepherd (ignores the whip, I believe)
• David Davis perhaps? He had a real job once?
  

Labour

• Frank Field
• Kate Hoey
• Bob Marshall Andrews

Updated:

Independent

• Richard Taylor
  

And what about LibDems? I suppose it's possible that they might all be non-political-class. After all you don't become a LibDem if you've a great desire to wield power, do you?

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any others at all, so it's going to be a bit of a bloodbath. There must be some more. Any suggestions? 

Peter Oborne

I managed to read everything worth reading on my feedreader tonight, so I had a bit of a trawl through 18 Doughty Street.

I found this really good interview with Peter Oborne from a few days ago. Very interesting on the symbiosis of the political parties and the media and the corruption this engenders. 

Redeeming features

Having been offline for a day or so, I seem to have missed all the excitement, with lots of UK bloggers being threatened with writs by a large and greasy Uzbek - a man who actually seems to have no redeeming features whatsoever. I think we can take it for granted that anyone who manages to completely unite the UK blogosphere is a pretty nasty piece of work.

If anyone by any chance has missed it, the full story is here.

Tessa Jowell

Please go back to money laundering.

Quid pro quo

Via the comments at Laban's place, the returning officer for Birmingham who oversaw the election frauds there last time round, is now head of the asylum and immigration service.

This is what is called democratic accountability. 

Rampant

Guido points us to the comments of LibDem peer Lord Oakshott who has discovered that one in ten Labour peers have jobs on quangos, but only one in 25 LibDems and one in 100 Conservatives. Lord O calls it "creeping corruption".

I don't know. Perhaps he's become desensitised to sleaze by spending all that time in Westminster. From where I stand it doesn't look as if it's creeping any longer.

At the same time as this story breaks, Dizzy reports that a PR company with a Labour insider on its board has received £1.5m of public money. We might also care to remember the story about Labour supporters being put into positions of power at the University of Dundee which I blogged on yesterday, not to mention cash for peerages.

No, the word is "rampant". 

Unfortunately it's only going to get worse, as Labour insiders line their pockets as far as they can before they are removed from power. 

Craig Murray, NuLab and the University of Dundee

Craig Murray is apparently now the rector of Dundee University. Excellent. Couldn't have picked a better man. Someone who knows right from wrong and isn't afraid to say so.

His first meeting of the University Court seems to have been lots of fun. The whole thing seems to be run by NuLab cronies who are trying to run it for the benefit of Jack McConnell. Craig is, quite naturally, on the warpath. This is going to be fun.

Read the whole thing. 

Dirty dancing

There's an eye-opening post over at The Language Business. The British Council has been spending lavishly on subsidies to the Akram Khan Dance Company. Two of the directors of the British Council are, coincidentally, also directors of Akram Khan.

How convenient. 

The Golden Arrow affair

Iain Dale is all over the Golden arrow affair - he's now onto his fourth update in as many days.

I wonder why the BBC hasn't mentioned it? 

The BBC: all the news that's good for you. 

Leather (again)

This piece was originally published on my old site, shortly before I switched to Squarespace. I've reproduced it here in view of Guido's story about the Charities Commissioners looking at the status of Gordon Brown's Smith Institute. (In other words, it's a naked attempt to generate a bit of traffic).

Sometimes you have a dull moment and you just fancy reading something that you know will make you really angry. I usually find the Times "Public Sector" supplement just the job, and last week's edition was no exception.

In it we had a piece about Dame Suzi Leather, the new head of the Charities Commission and, by the by, a woman whose very name can excite paroxysms of delight in readers at Laban's place.

It's not terribly exciting - we learn that she knows nothing about charities, but has a background in regulation. She was born in Uganda and has done some paragliding. But then this appears at the bottom.

Career:
1979-84 research officer, Consumers in Europe.
1984-86 trainee probation officer
1997-2001 chair, Exeter and District NHS Trust
2000-02 deputy chair, Food Standards Agency
2002-06 chair, Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
2005-06 chair, School Food Trust

Read that again.

She went from being a research officer at an NGO, to training as a probation officer and then, after a gap of ten years was considered suitably qualified to head up an NHS trust. That's a neat trick if you can pull it off.

What on earth was she doing in that ten year gap to suddenly make her top management material? A bit of digging turns up this article which reveals that she was a "homemaker and freelance consumer consultant". So from her published CV she started in her position at the tiller of an NHS trust with no professional management experience whatsoever. This might go some way to explaining the performance of the NHS.

What possible reason can there be for this extraordinary advancement? Perhaps she is just extremely good at interviews or just plain lucky. Perhaps we'll never know.

In unrelated news the Guardian notes:

Dame Suzi, as she has been since January, [is] a committed member of the Labour party.

It's also interesting to compare the press release on her appointment to the FSA to the CV above:

[Sir John Krebs'] Deputy will be Ms Suzi Leather, who has twenty years of experience in consumer representation.

(My emphasis)

Still look on the bright side she says she's going to be robust in making charities submit their accounts on time. Perhaps she'll be dealing with the Moslem Council of Britain who have never actually submitted their accounts since their formation ten years ago.