Failure to Follow-Up
Guido has been busy Christmas shopping, spending his Clegg bets winnings, which were not as much as they should be because Guido reduced his exposure as the campaign progressed, or rather as Clegg's campaign failed to progress.
Meantime in the red corner of Guido's blog comments a number of posters are complaining that Guido has failed to follow up the scandal of Cameron's Dodgy Donors. Yet more evidence that Guido is, yawn, a Tory toady.
There is a back story here. When the Abrahams scandal blew up Guido got an anonymous call from a posh voice who seemed to be intimately familiar with Tory fundraising processes. It was inconceivable, the source claimed, that if Labour were following procedures they would be unaware of Abrahams. The Tories themselves checked donations against monthly updated electoral rolls. They returned donations regularly which checks discovered failed to meet the criteria, all donations above £200 were checked, above £5,000 they were scrutinised and at £50,000 they got to know everything about them. Labour were simply not doing this checking and Guido should get on to the Electoral Commission to discover how many donations Labour returned in comparison to the Conservatives. Not enough it now seems.
The Tories are being disingenuous saying they voluntarily forfeited the £5,900 and £1,500 donations. They had no choice, the 30 day grace period to discover mistakes was up. Unless by "voluntarily" they mean "we didn't want to continue breaking the law" they only did what they had to do.
It is extra embarrassing that it is Cameron's own constituency association. Is it on a par with Peter Watt, the Labour Party's national general secretary, being party to a proxy donor scheme to cover-up the party's third biggest donor? Well, you judge for yourselves...
Meantime in the red corner of Guido's blog comments a number of posters are complaining that Guido has failed to follow up the scandal of Cameron's Dodgy Donors. Yet more evidence that Guido is, yawn, a Tory toady.
There is a back story here. When the Abrahams scandal blew up Guido got an anonymous call from a posh voice who seemed to be intimately familiar with Tory fundraising processes. It was inconceivable, the source claimed, that if Labour were following procedures they would be unaware of Abrahams. The Tories themselves checked donations against monthly updated electoral rolls. They returned donations regularly which checks discovered failed to meet the criteria, all donations above £200 were checked, above £5,000 they were scrutinised and at £50,000 they got to know everything about them. Labour were simply not doing this checking and Guido should get on to the Electoral Commission to discover how many donations Labour returned in comparison to the Conservatives. Not enough it now seems.
The Tories are being disingenuous saying they voluntarily forfeited the £5,900 and £1,500 donations. They had no choice, the 30 day grace period to discover mistakes was up. Unless by "voluntarily" they mean "we didn't want to continue breaking the law" they only did what they had to do.
It is extra embarrassing that it is Cameron's own constituency association. Is it on a par with Peter Watt, the Labour Party's national general secretary, being party to a proxy donor scheme to cover-up the party's third biggest donor? Well, you judge for yourselves...
53 comments:
Oh for fucks sake this is all so depressing.
Well whatever your backtracking excuses are, it's still abvious that you are a Tory.
Ho Ho Ho! Merry Fuckupmas!
I'd agree that it's embarrasing for the Tories, but it's nothing on the level of the Labour issue. I also think it's important to mention that all this was done and dusted 4 days before the Abrahams thing hit the press. The sending back of the money by the Tories was unacceptably late, but it wasn't a panic reaction caused by the Abrahams story. It was all done before then.
Just so the Trolls understand this post: NO, it is NOT on a par with Peter Watt...
It's a complete non-story and Labour are only digging it up now in the hope that just a little bit of the shit might actually stick. No laws were actually broken, not even the ones that Labour had invented for itself.
Labour's actions did break the law and even Brown has been forced to admit they broke the law.
Its a sign of true desparation amongst Labour activists that they had to resort to slinging mud when there was precious little mud to be found. It's a story that never deserved the oxygen of publicity here or anywhere else.
I expect that this will actually backfire on Labour because it is so obvious they were trying to dig up dirt on the Cameroons and really they have found NOTHING.
"Is it on a par with Peter Watt, the Labour Party's national general secretary, being party to a proxy donor scheme to cover-up the party's third biggest donor?"
Or is this the difference between organised crime and disorganised crime? In any event, magnitude or scale should come into this debate.
If you have a funding law that states that person donating has to be on the electoral roll then there will always be technical breaches of said law. Donations I have made to a political party have fallen foul. This occurred when unknown to me at the time my registration form got lost in the post so I was removed from the electoral register, I then made a significant donation but this was returned to me as I was not on the electoral register.
This is on a different level to deliberately conspiring to weave a path through the law!
yes, it is. and what is more it makes cameron look like a phony arse.
is is really, because theirs more to come on pretty boy cameron.
incidentally, talking about failed campaignss...i see theres hardly any mention of boris. pulling back from clegg's campaign is one thing, but i'd pull my money out of boris' camapaign.
I'm a bit neutral here as I hate all political parties equally but...
You argue its not comparable to Peter Watt. Surely its comparable though to Wendy Alexander who 'only' broke the law with £950. She had a patch of negative publicity here right?
But then the law's the law's the law, for Cameron and Labour and no doubt next week Dem Libs.
Have you seen this table of tax rises since 2001:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/tax_receipts/table1-2.pdf
Interesting reading. I'm awful at maths but isn't the headline stat that we all pay £130bn more tax (around £2k a year each) more tax than we did in 2001.
That's probably where all the money for Northern Rock's come from.
2 words, "lord" and "ashcroft".
the scale is large, and well organised.
tory mendacity at its finest.
Questions for Dave when he surfaces?
- when did you know about the mistakes by your Constituency Association?
- Why didn't you tell the Press straightaway about the mistakes?
- Why were you criticising the "mistakes" of others when your own CA were guilty of similar mistakes?
- What other mistakes are you aware of which are not yet in the public domain?
@lithgo
'Surely its comparable though to Wendy Alexander who 'only' broke the law with £950.'
Wasn't Wendy's real problem that she denied all knowledge of the donation until a scan of her personally signed letter to her Channel Island benefactor was posted on some tawdry website? It's always the cover-up that makes it worse.
Well I suppose theres that, yes.
Two things to be annoyed at instead of one, but the cash itself is surely reason enough to give all parties involved a thorough slapping down.
Comparable to the Wendy Alexander story? I think not. As you will see here:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/7120096.stm
This young lassie is on record as having lied about these donations. To quote the Jersey-based donor -
"I cannot understand why they continued to maintain that the donation had come through a UK company when I had a letter from Wendy Alexander thanking me personally,".
No money was returned voluntarily to the Electoral Commission.
"Two things to be annoyed at" - that's even more trivial than "breaking the rules" (i.e. LAW).
This is just a piddling bit of trivial nonsense that not even the labour press are particularly interested in, so why are you flogging it Guido?
Is it because you're still smarting after getting your arse spanked on a similiar thread, on so-called Tory sleaze, you started last week?
The only game in town is Labour sleaze and corruption. They're the ones currently being investigated by three police services not the Tories or the Libdems.
Well you've succeeded in getting all the Labour trolls excited, Guido.
Well done, fucktard.
The donor that has caused all the problems for the Tories was a Mr:
Roger Fletcher
I wonder just how many Roger Fletchers there actually ARE on the electoral roll? There are quite a few that pop up when Googling. One wonders exactly how it came to be that the Electoral Commission realised that the one that gave a donation was not one of the Roger Fletcher's that was on the electoral roll.
haha the tory cunts dont like it here when dave shits in his own nappy and then they have to eat his steaming turds.
Well guess what the country wants a blair clone as much as they want to eat tory feces. And with Dave they get both!
Anon 4:19
"This young lassie is on record as having lied about these donations. To quote the Jersey-based donor -
"I cannot understand why they continued to maintain that the donation had come through a UK company when I had a letter from Wendy Alexander thanking me personally,"."
So I'm sure Lords Laidlaw and Ashcroft never get thanked personally by CCHQ when it is their UK companies which make the donations. On the other hand perhaps CCHQ is just lying about the real donors?
Anon 4:19
"This young lassie is on record as having lied about these donations. To quote the Jersey-based donor -
"I cannot understand why they continued to maintain that the donation had come through a UK company when I had a letter from Wendy Alexander thanking me personally,"."
So I'm sure Lords Laidlaw and Ashcroft never get thanked personally by CCHQ when it is their UK companies which make the donations. On the other hand perhaps CCHQ is just lying about the real donors?
Dickhead,
No. And you kept on boring on forever claiming someone else was me. Like I would really give that much of a toss what some not very bright blue blinkered idiot anonymong thinks.
anon 4.39
I think you'll find the only senior politician who shits in a nappy is the Right Honourable Gordon Brown esquire, scotch snot-gobbling, rocking horse riding, faggot extraordinaire.
Ask Peter Mandelson if you don't believe me.
Given the complete lack of organisation of most conservative constituency associations, even Dave's- this fuck up is no suprise.
However, it is completely trivial compared with the augean stables that is New Labour financing.
guido, it was you, you dickweed. Don't deny it.
Well done 4:39 that was quite funny for a retard
jennywren 4.45....trivial compared....
I know that. You know that. It's a pity Guido doesn't know that.
Nah, would be easier to just delete you rather than waste time arguing. Like from now on.
'failure to follow through' perhaps
The difference between the Tories and Labour is that the Tories are more competent and less arrogant in their corruption. Lefties think they have a monopoly of virtue, which is part of why we have a Holocaust Memorial Day and not a Gulag Memorial Day. Lefties wouldn't dream of committing mass murder for the wrong reasons, as those horrid nazis did.
Anonymong @ 4:10, the difference is that Cameron's constituency association actually obeyed the rules and forfeited the money when they found the error.
THAT is what Nu-Liebour should have done over and over again when they DELIBERATELY and with foresight broke the LAW on party funding and then attempted (badly) to cover up their law breaking.
The comparison here is whiter than white Conservatives vs incompetent, law-breaking Nu-Liebour.
However, the sooner we can arrange a system that doesn't involve parties, politicians or funding the better for the country as a whole.
Until that time, go give McFuckwit his bottle and he probably needs his nappy changing too because something stinks around here and its coming from Gorgon's general direction.
Poor Guido!
Please make my day and make me a brown-nosing milk monitor.
The primary motivation for the creation of this blog was purely to make mischief at the expense of politicians and for the author's own self-gratification.
Guido campaigns against political sleaze and hypocrisy. He doesn't believe in impartiality nor pretend to it.
Commenters bear in mind this blog is private property, not a public commons, readers are guests.
Suggest you click on About... it is next to Merchandise (which you should ignore.) Tat, tat and more tat.
yours dripping with hypocritically, complacently, and effusively earnestly unctuousness.
Back to Ken Livingslime. Still smarting from the non-stop hatchet job by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard, he has lamely tried to counter the latest and most damaging accusations (Gilligan found an ex-employee who was prepared to blow the lid off Ken's dodgy mate Lee Jasper).
All Ken can manage by way of a rebuttal is an obscure reference to Jasper's godson. Presumably the other 1000+ words are correct.
http://www.london.gov.uk/mediacentre/mayor/responds/standard-20071218.jsp
A psychiatrist writes: "They are both first division wankers".
What exactly are the Tories alleged to have done wrong?
If anyone has any proof of their alleged wrongdoing then perhaps it should be reported to the Electoral Commission for investigation, or perhaps even the police.
Anyone got any evidence?
No?
Thought not.
Surely the difference is that the Electoral Commission discovered the problem with the Tory donations because the Tories made no attempt whatsoever to cover them up. Having discovered that one donation was at fault the Tories then checked and found another donation that didn't meet the rules and returned both of them to the Electoral Commission. One can only come to the conclusion that the Tory party made a mistake which they corrected as soon as they could. It wasn't even a particularly surprising miastake since the tories would have had to be particualrly careful to ensure that the Roger Fletcher they took a donation from wasn't actually one of the many Roger Fletchers that really are on the electoral roll.
In the case of Wendy Alexander, the Electoral Commission had no idea that the donations were illegal because Ms Alexander had claimed they came from a UK based company. In fact Ms Alexander knew all along that the donations did not come from a UK based company because she had already written a personal letter of thanks to the specific individual that had given the donation and sent it to his address - in Jersey.
"Despite the fact that a whole series of the allegations made by Andrew Gilligan have already been shown to be false the LDA will review any evidence from Andrew Gilligan. It will not investigate the allegations for which no evidence has been presented."
Ah so witness statements are not good enough then? You have to have hard evidence presumably "stolen" from the LDA? And then the LDA itself will investigate it?
Yesterday Ken was telling us that he and Jasper the Grasper were seeking legal advice with a view to sueing Mr Gilligan and co. That seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Kenny boy, you are guilty as charged!
Sad to find you have been bullied into posting such tosh to be 'fair' to Labour.
The reality is important. The Electoral Commission registers show an intersting tale.
Since 2001 the Tories have returned around 50 donations totaling £91,800 including voluntary forfeiture to the Commission three times including the two cases of which so much fuss has been made (because the Labour party has just caught up with the Commission’s month old press release).
In fact the third donation of the three is the most interesting as it is the biggest - but then it was not Witney so it is unimportant.
The LibDems have returned nearly 20 donations valued in total at £55,000. One of these was voluntarily forfeited to the Commission.
In the same period the Labour party has returned only one donation of £1,000 as a impermissible donation.
So in fact this current Labour attack again highlights how careless (or worse) Labour have been if they have only found one case since 2001 where the donation was impermissible while the other two parties have found and dealt with so many more.
Even the Green party found two donations and Respect one that had to be returned. The BNP found nine but the PC and SNP found none.
Or did the Labour party forget to report to the Commission? Or did they think they were exempt from the law?
Taxes said re :HM Revenue and Customs annual receipts.
Assuming population 2001.2 = 59.114 m
Assuming population 2007.8 60.8m
therefore
2001.2 £5443 taxes per person
2007.8 £7407.89 taxes per person
36.0% increase
RPI Nov 2001--- 173.6
RPI Nov 2007---209.7
Inflation 20.79%
anonymous said:
"tory mendacity at its finest."
Fuck off on several levels. Fuck off because you are a cunt. Secondly, fuck off for being a NuLab troll, thirdly, fuck off for using the word 'mendacity' which I am totally sick of reading from NuLab ignorati. Finally, fuck off for showing dog-like obedience to the theiving twisters that 'govern' us. You are thick as a plank and don't you forget it.
no case to answer said...
"What exactly are the Tories alleged to have done wrong?
If anyone has any proof of their alleged wrongdoing then perhaps it should be reported to the Electoral Commission for investigation, or perhaps even the police.
Anyone got any evidence?
No?
Thought not."
The evidence is all there.
Flashman's constituency party accepted 2 illegal donations.
They did not carry out the proper checks.
The Electoral Commission did carry out checks and discovered that the first donor was ineligible.
The party did not voluntarily forfeit the money. They were obliged to do so by the Commission.
OK Guido, so Cameron's crew screwed up on the home turf. Nothing much that can't be put right, with a change in personnel, that can mind the leader's back.
Pensioner Phain has STILL to declare his undeclared dosh... and HIS SILENCE is increasingly damning.
anon 7.05
So are the electoral commission alleging fraud or corruption?
No.
Are the police investigating?
No.
Are the police investigating Labour?
Yes Yes and Yes
The sleaze is all labour's,
It's nice to have friends in high places.
It is extra embarrassing that it is Cameron's own constituency association. Is it on a par with Peter Watt, the Labour Party's national general secretary, being party to a proxy donor scheme to cover-up the party's third biggest donor?
No, but it is certainly on a par with Wendy Alexander's donation.
..the tories would have had to be particualrly careful to ensure that the Roger Fletcher they took a donation from wasn't actually one of the many Roger Fletchers that really are on the electoral roll.
In my experience, substantial donations always have an associated address so that they can be acknowledged. Therefore, checking against the electoral roll is no problem. If there is no address then the donation is suspicious.
well done Guido! - The Peeple's Party trolls are out so you must hitting a nerve! How? Simply by exposing WITHOUT FEAR these Nulab wankers as the hypocrital, corrupt, shameless, theiving, self-interested arseholes they really are. I'm no Tory but that aint the point. These Nulab crooks are the ones in POWER who are shafting us no. Keep up the good work.!
Don't care. Really don't. Labour have destroyed civil liberties, outlawed free speech, stolen everyone's pension, and mislead the House to take us into a war from which we have received no material benefit, only hundreds of thousands dead. Thanks to ASBOs and ridiculous "hate crime" legislation, you can now be imprisoned for 'offending' the sensitivities of anyone who cares to go running to the nearest policeman, who won;t be a policeman anyway but a half-trained teenage PCSO.
And now the economy look set to go plunging down the cresta run.
I couldn't give a tinker's cuss who funds either party. I don't care if the Tories are funded by Martin Boorman himself, as long as they kick Labour out before the whole ship goes down.
never used to vote tory, will be henceforth..
As your spiritual adviser, it is my unpleasant duty to advise you that voting tory makes the old bell end turn green, shrivel & drop off...
That's why I've never gone in for that sort of practice
True.
Hang on a sec. We are talking about 5 grand that was returned when the review process showed it to be an illegal donation. Compare for pushing a million given for highly suspicious reasons associated with planning permissions under conditions that flagrantly broke nuLabs own laws, with the clear knowledge of most of the cabinet. Bit of a difference
Let's face it Labour are 15% behind in the polls and so far we haven't had a stock market crash, a house price crash, a run on the pound or dramatically rising levels of unemployment. These are all scheduled to start next year. And when they do what will Labours' poll rating be then I wonder? Labour are utterly finished in this country for all time. They know that they should kick out Gordon but nobody wants to be in the driving seat when the real shit hits the fan. The Labour party is walking like a zombie towards total meltdown.
Who gives a flying fuck what any of them or any of their mindless apparatchiks think about anything?
This has been a useful discussion, and better to have had -- out in the open like this -- rather than not to have had, so well done to Guido for having the courage to start it off.
The conclusions we can reach are that (a) probably no political party is perfect in this arena; (b) the Conservatives did make a genuine effort to correct the error once they discovered it; and (c) the Labour trolls rather predictably tried to concentrate on this speck in the Conservatives' collective eye as a diversion from bothering to deal with the plank in their own party's eye.
This last shows the Labour trolls to be entirely dishonest, and lends further credence to the continually-unfolding revelation that to be Labour means to be trash. No-one honest and with any integrity would be thus -- end of argument!
Post a Comment