To Archive List PageIt's business as usual for New Labour as the Iraq War fades into the background and the Government feels as fireproof as ever.
"A grubby Government, which is a stranger to the truth, short on integrity and heavy on intimidation of those who disagree with it."

January 2005 . . .

black blobLord Falconer has handed the job of president of the Family Division of the High Court to a man who used to be his boss. He has parachuted into the job, a commercial lawyer with no experience of family law.
   note: Lord Falconer got his job on the strength of being Tony Blair's former flatmate. Blair also handed the job of Lord Chancellor to his former boss, Lord Irvine, when he came to office in 1997. The tradition of 'jobs for your mates' continues.

black blobIn December 2004, seeking favourable headlines, Tony Blair promised to give home-owners extra legal protection when tackling burglars. A month later, Home Secretary Charles Clarke announced that nothing will be done and New Labour intends to remain the party of the criminal.
   note: Clarke's decision was based on a deliberate underestimate by the Crown Prosecution Service of the number of prosecutions of burgled householders. The CPS report was designed to tell the minister what he wanted to hear rather than confuse him with the truth.

black blobNew Labour's parliamentary sleaze scrutineer ruled that Prime Minister Tony Blair had done nothing wrong by trying to conceal a freebie holiday courtesy of 'tobacco baron' Alain Perrin.

black blobThe Prime Minister's office in Downing Street is trying to bury an independent survey which shows that 40% of customers at hospital Accident & Emergency departments are drunk, and this proportion rises to 70% after midnight.
   This information has been deemed 'inconvenient' to the Government's case for 24-hour opening of licensed premises. The official reason for New Labour's commitment to this concept is to avoid inconvenience to London's theatre-goers rather than a bung, in one form or another, to New Labour from the drinks industry. The Government also hopes to raise a lot of extra revenue from liquor taxes and VAT while pushing the cost of clearing up its mess onto Council Tax.
   update :Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell wants licenced premises to pay for the extra policing required by New Labour's 24-hour drinking culture, which amounts to yet another stealth tax on the customers and constitutes an open admission that her change in the law will produce a quantifiable increase in disorder.

black blobA regional committee of the Community Fund (a body set up by New Labour to distribute lottery cash) has denied a grant to the Bowland & Pennine Mountain Rescue Team because they don't serve the needs of ethnic minorities, refugees, asylum seekers, the disabled, the elderly or children.
   update :The Community Fund has also denied a grant to the Severn Area Rescue Association, which wanted to replace the elderly Land Rover used to launch its lifeboats. Apparently, SARA doesn't rescue enough members of ethnic minorities, asylum seekers or elderly people to qualify.

black blobThe National Audit Office has refused to approve the Dept. of Work & Pensions' accounts for the third year in succession. Around £3,000,000,000 was lost last year due to fraud, incompetence, blunders and the chaotic nature of the benefits system.

black blobDespite Chancellor Gordon Brown's pledge in mid-2004 to get rid of 84,150 civil servants, the Government's National Statistical Office has admitted that a further 260,000 public sector workers were recruited in the year up to autumn 2004. At least 50% of them were bureaucrats, such as 'workplace stop smoking advisors' at a salary of £32,476, rather than front-line staff.

black blob'Culture Secretary' Tessa Jowell has appointed to the Government's Alcohol Education & Research Council the chief executive of the Portman Group, a 'fig-leaf' organization which claims to promote responsible drinking but which, in fact, promotes the interests of the drinks industry and attempts to suppress contrary scientific evidence. Alcohol Concern described the appointment as like putting the Marlboro tobacco company in charge of the UK's anti-smoking campaign.

black blobThe Culture Department has come up with a Catch 22 for local councillors to prevent them from getting in the way for its plans for a 24-hour drinking culture. Only those councillors who living nearby will be able to object to a pub or club's application for an extended drinks licence. But if they do feel like objecting, they will have to declare a prejudicial interest (i.e. the matter under discussion has a direct bearing on their personal wellbeing) and leave the meeting!
   Further, the Government is trying to claim that letting local councillors consider applications from their own wards would breach the Human Rights Act when the reverse is true – the Government is breaching the councillor's Human Right to speak up as someone with relevant information concerning the matter in hand.

black blobThe Government insists that there is no money in the pot to help people who lost pensions when the company that employed them went belly-up. But there does seems to be enough to hand a significant tax relief bonus to people earning more than £100K per year.
   The Government is bringing in new rules, under which the maximum pension pot will be £215K instead of £102K and the rich will be able allowed to include stocks & shares, holiday homes in the UK and abroad, flats and houses bought for rent [like the ones the Prime Minister owns in Bristol & London], works of art, wine, etc. in a new 'flexible' pension and enjoy massive amounts of tax relief.

black blobThe Government has been trying to conceal a report by licensing 'guru' Andrew Cunningham (who is rumoured to be very pally with the drinks industry) saying that 65% of pubs and clubs will extend their opening hours if allowed to do so by New Labour's 24-hour drinking laws.
   The official Government word on this subject is that 1-2% of pubs and clubs will want to stay open 24 hours per day, which gives an entirely false picture of the late-night nuisance to come on Fridays, weekends and holidays.

black blobThe next general election is expected in May of 2005 but New Labour is already spending taxpayers' money on their 4-month election campaign.

black blobAfter assuring the nation 3 months ago that Britain still has complete control over its immigration policies, the Prime Minister has been forced to admit that he was lying. The then Home Secretary David Blunkett gave up the UK veto on asylum, immigration and border controls in October 2004, and Brussels now has the last word on these issues.

black blobNew Labour has been forced to admit that it has wasted over one billion pounds of taxpayers' money on refurbishing and redecorating Government offices since 1997 to provide a more luxurious working environment for ministers and civil servants. The rot started with Lord Irvine's £300 per roll wallpaper and just went on and on and on.

February 2005 . . .

black blobThe Government is abusing the Freedom of Information act with a general election looming. It is releasing anything and everything dated before May 1997 and holding back on almost everything related to the Blair Government in case it proves to be a source of embarrassment.

black blobThe Prime Minister would like everyone to believe that he'll be able to do something dramatic over reforming the benefit system before the next general election. But closer examination of the promises shows that they are mainly recycled pledges, which will take 20 years to achieve anything.

black blobThe Government has spent getting on for one billion pounds of taxpayers' cash on 'combatting truancy' but, the latest assessment shows, it has achieved precious little.

black blobThe Government is still paying Alan Milburn £130,000/year of taxpayers' money to run New Labour's election campaign; and Alastair Campbell seems to be back on the payroll. Worse, Milburn is frantically pointing a finger at the Tories and accusing them of planning to fight dirty while the Labour Party is already up to its collective greasy necks in dirty tricks including kite-flying with racialist election posters, attempts to smear former Prime Minister John Major, former Chancellor Lord Lamont and former Cabinet Secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull, and other dirty tricks with the Freedom of Information Act.
   update :Worried about the effects of a conviction for a race crime on business, the Labour Party's advertising agency has dumped the blame for the racialist election posters on the man who sent them some cobbled together designs – Alastair Campbell. And the BBC has released his obscene emails on the subject.

black blobPolitical opportunist and disgraced MP turned EU commissioner Peter Mandelson feels it's his duty to threaten the BBC with another purge like the one that followed Andrew Gilligan's exposure of Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier it the Beeb doesn't stop asking inconvenient questions about Campbell.

black blobThe Government has suppressed a report on exploitation of migrant labour in the UK, fearing adverse electoral effects. People on low wages and held in bondage, financial and/or physical, are keeping the cost of goods and services down, including products in supermarkets and labour in the NHS. The nett effect is to lower the cost of living artificially, leaving taxpayers with surplus cash, which New Labour can extract via its Stealth Taxes.

black blobThe Government has announced a new policy on the issue of asylum seekers and illegal migrants. There was no problem during the last 8 years but one has suddenly arisen (probably due to the impending general election) and your Government is going to get tough with a 5-year plan.

black blobGovernment ministers are refusing to allow their appointments diaries to be published under the Freedom of Information Act for fear of exposing embarrassing links between the Labour Party and 'special interest groups', donors to the party and generally unsavoury characters, who shouldn't be allowed within a million miles of an honest politician.

black blobA list of people invited to do's at 10 Downing Street since Tony Blair took over is now in the public domain after the Parliamentary Ombudsman obliged the Prime Minister to publish it. As expected, the list is packed with the names of people who donated cash to the Labour Party and people who donated freebie holidays to the Blairs.
   All of these people were entertained at the taxpayer's expense rather than at the expense of those who benefited directly from their generosity: the Labour Party and the Blairs. When he came to office, Tony Blair promised to be purer than pure. It looks like he got stuck at grubbier than grubby as his natural level.

black blobNew Labour's quango The Big Lottery Fund turned down a grant application from the Samaritans on the usual grounds – they don't deal with enough disabled, ethnic minority asylum seekers. But the Fund did hand out £360K (more than the Samaritans wanted) to a group which is trying to get prostitution and brothels made legal.
   update :The scouts of Alcester, Worcs., have also been turned down because they don't cater specifically for the usual categories of 'disadvantaged'.

black blobNew Labour has created in excess of 111 new quangos since 1997. The reason for the preference, over letting the civil service handle the business, is that any old Joe and party hack can be rewarded with a quango job to ensure continuing loyalty through the pursuit of self-interest.

black blob1. your family better off . . .
Well, no, not after Stealth Taxes and increased National Insurance.
2. your family treated better and faster . . .
Fiddling waiting lists and keeping people waiting to go on a waiting list doesn't get patients treated any faster.
3. your child achieving more . . .
An army of kids illiterate at 11, A-levels dumbed down, truancy unaffected by the £1 billion thrown at the problem – No!
4. your community safer . . .
Violent crime and robbery both up, the police concentrating on the motorist instead of real criminals, judges not wanting to put people in gaol? No, again.
5. your country's borders protected . . .
Joke, Tony! Immigration and asylum are both out of control and you've admitted it yourself.
6. your children with the best start . . .
Even if this were not more spin, it would be a waste of time in view of No. 3 above.

black blobThe Government has 'abolished' mixed-sex wards in NHS hospitals by the same trick used to 'slash' waiting lists. Patients have to wait to go on waiting lists to produce shorter, more desirable waiting lists. Similarly, if patients are in a 'temporary' mixed-sex ward, as opposed to a permanent one, they become invisible to the Government's twisted statistics.

black blobThe Government is nodding through a bill to award the equivalent of diplomatic immunity to EU employees. This privilege will be enjoyed not only by the employees, but also by all members of their family and their 'household'.
   So in future, a Eurodogsbody's driver can't be done for illegal parking, his/her nanny can't be done for shoplifting, his/her children can go out and vandalize bits of the UK or burgle its citizens without being liable to arrest, and the Eurodogsbody himself/herself can become a major drug dealer, or even kill someone in the UK, with no fear of penalty.
   Is this the same European Economic Community that the UK signed up to back in the 1970s?

black blobAmong the mass of information requested under the Freedom of Information Act, but blocked by New Labour, is the reason why David Blunkett is allowed to stay on in his grace & favour home AT THE TAXPAYER'S EXPENSE even though he was evicted from the job of Home Secretary after gross misconduct, which included dodgy expenses claims.

black blobIt has emerged that the Government tried to sex up an interim report issued by the Iraq Survey Group in March 2004. John Scarlett, the dodgy-dossier man and current head of MI6, tried to get extra material included to 'strengthen' the document but the head of the ISG declined the sexing up opportunity.

black blobAs Home Secretary Charles Clarke's plan to put suspected terrorists under home arrest crumbles rapidly, the man himself has admitted that he would let to get more migrants and asylum seekers into the country. The people already here now know that New Labour is all talk and no delivery so Clarke is trying to stock up with new mugs to bamboozle with false promises.

black blobNew Labour's policy of early release has sent the crime rate soaring. 60% of those let out of gaol early commit at least one crime in the next two years. The reconviction rate is 80% for thieves and 75% for all male criminals.

black blobThe Government is determined to do nothing about the threat of Avian Flu, which has killed three-quarters of the humans who contracted it. The Department of Health has no stock of vaccine and it does not intend purchasing any.

black blobThe Statistics Committee has convicted New Labour of 'substantially overstating' improvements in exam results for primary school children, and doing so to present 'a misleading picture'. The improvements were largely due to teaching children how to do well in the tests rather than sharpening their skills.

black blobThe Labour Party is pestering people with unsolicited phone calls even if they have registered with the Telephone Preference Service to have such nuisance calls blocked.

black blobCooking The Books : The Chancellor has a 'golden rule' that the Government will borrow only to invest and not to fund current spending 'over the economic cycle'. And in order to appear to be sticking to the 'golden rule', the Treasury has persuaded the Office for National Statistics to reclassify billions of pounds of government spending from current expenditure to capital expenditure, which is not included in 'golden rule' calculations.
   As this fiddle factor is to be backdated over the last 5 years, the official figures for government spending during the current Parliament (and most of the previous one) will become anything politically advantageous that New Labour desires.

black blobThe Food Standards Agency, another New Labour toothless watchdog, took 10 days to pass on a warning from Premier Foods about the presence of the banned dye Sudan 1 in chilli powder in its Worcestershire Sauce. The FSA later showed no sense of urgency about updating the list of possibly contaminated food products on its website – in line with its reputation for caring more for industry than the consumer.

black blob50% of the jobs created in the UK since 1997 were in the public sector, favoured refuge of New Labour's clients. The size of the public sector workforce has increased by 14% under New Labour and 25% of the UK's employees work for the State.

black blobThe Government intends to stampede its house arrest for terrorist suspects bill through the Commons in 2 days. There will be no line by line scrutiny to ensure that the Bill makes moderate sense. The end result will be a mess full of loopholes, through which lawyers will charge at treat expense to the taxpayer. And isn't the Prime Minister married to a lawyer?

black blobThe Government is still trying desperately to cover up the fact that the Attorney General never gave the 2003 Iraq war a formal certificate of legality, as requested by the Chief of the Defence Staff. The Attorney General's 'opinion' was, in fact, cobbled together by two Blair cronies – Lord Falconer (then Home Office minister) and Baroness Morgan (the prime minister's director of political-government relations). So what the country, Parliament and everyone else has been getting since March 2003 is deliberately misleading statements from 10 Downing Street and the Attorney General.
   The nation has been treated to The Internet Dossier, which turned out be based on a 10 year old thesis about Iraq, The Campbell Dossier on Iraq's non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, which was written for Joint Intelligence Committee chief John Scarlett by the Downing Street press officer, and now The Falconer/Morgan Advice. All of which is making New Labour's customers feel like they're living in a series of novels written by Robert Ludlum.

black blobEducation Secretary Ruth Kelly has announced that school examinations will have to be made harder, acknowledging that New Labour has been responsible for rampant result inflation to the point where just about any pupil can expect an A-grade for spelling their name correctly on an exam paper. More 'initiatives' and the waste of further millions of pounds of taxpayers' money will be involved in this further tinkering with the education system.

black blobAchieving New Labour's arbitrary NHS targets prevents hospitals from closing wards infected with the MRSA superbug. As a result of the culture of targets taking precedence over hygiene and patient safety, the MRSA death rate doubled between 1999 and 2003.

Pillar-box mouthblack blobThe prime minister's wife, a.k.a. Cherie Booth and the inspiration for the phrase 'a mouth like a pillar-box', will be going on a tour of American universities delivering lectures, probably at around $20,000 a time. She will be telling the lucky Yanks about her work as a human rights lawyer, which receives plenty of business thanks to poorly framed legislation from her husband's regime, and she will also be plugging her book. All very fine and enterprising; except that the bill for her security will be paid by the British taxpayer instead of the woman making all the money out of the tour.

black blobNew Labour chose not to let the Commons hold a proper debate during their two days on the Home Secretary's bill to abolish habeas corpus. The Bill is still undergoing rewrites and watering down as it heads for the House of Lords, and it is unlikely to be finished before it comes back to the Commons for its final rubber-stamping.

black blobThe average Council Tax rise for 2005/6, a general election year, will be 4% because the Chancellor handed out £1 billion to councils in December. No such sweetener will be available in 2006/7 if New Labour wins the election, and double-digit rises in C-Tax can be expected.

March 2005 . . .

black blobThe Government sneaked out on one of its websites a decision to prevent NHS doctors prescribing drugs which delay the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. The three drugs cost £2.50 per day to use but the National Institute for Clinical Excellence decided to ban the drugs on cost grounds rather than for sound clinical reasons.

black blobNew Labour thinks it will miss its 2006 achievement targets for primary school pupils so they have been scrapped and retrospectively labelled 'an intention' rather than 'an objective'. Much the same happened to the 2002 and 2004 targets.

black blobThe Labour Party is in trouble with the Electorial Commission for handing out £250 Child Trust Fund vouchers. The vouchers are sent out automatically but the Government is spending public money on advertising what it is doing, and that is coming perilously close to putting the vouchers into the category of a pre-election bribe.

black blob69-year-old Mrs. Margaret Dixon has had a pain relieving operation on a broken shoulder postponed 7 times. Health Secretary John Reid thinks he can neutralize any political flak with the lie that the Tories would have made sometime Labour supporter Mrs. Dixon pay for her operation. Looks like the truth and New Labour are now complete strangers.

black blob'Security before Liberty' was the policy of which tyrant:
(a) Tony Blair
(b) Adolf Hitler
(c) Both of them?
Hint: it's not just (a) or (b).

black blobNew Labour would like us to be relieved that a judge will review the Home Secretary's applications to put people under house arrest. But what if it's someone like Lord Hutton?

black blob'Real terms' spending on the NHS has risen 30% since 2000. But hospital treatments have increased by only 5%, which means the rest of the money has been wasted, as far as patients are concerned.
   update :Great Ormond Street children's hospital is closing parts of wards and some of its operating theatres, and cutting overtime pay by one-third, to tackle a £1.7 million budget deficit. The number of patients treated has shot up but the funding from New Labour hasn't – further proof that the cash going into the NHS is being wasted.

black blobNew Labour's latest big idea for the NHS is to fine hospitals the cost of the operation if they fail to carry it out within 28 days of the date given to the patient. NHS Trusts will also be fined heavily if they fail to meet the Government's arbitrary targets and generate political flak for New Labour. But the news isn't all bad because Health Sec. John Reid wants to fiddle his figures by 'contracting out' a million or so routine operations to the private sector.

black blobSince 1997, New Labour has converted one million wealth-generating manufacturing jobs into wealth-consuming public-sector jobs.

black blobAn operation in a hospital is officially 'cancelled' only if it is called off within 24 hours of the appointment given to the patient. Outside the 24-hour period, the appointment is ineligible for recording in New Labour's bogus statistics.

black blobHealth Secretary John Reid is trying to frighten voters with silly stories about how hundreds of people will die in hospitals if the Tories win the election. His only response to his own failures seems to be bluster and attacks on anyone who points them out.

black blobThe management of the Whitby Community Hospital in North Yorkshire tried to conceal cuts in a range of services and a general downgrade of the hospital until after the next general election. The hospital is in the Parliamentary constituency Scarborough & Whitby, which is held by Labour with a majority 3,585. The sitting MP claimed expenses for 2003/4 of £133,922 compared to an average figure of £118,000.

black blobDeputy PM John Prescott has issued travellers with a licence to ignore planning laws and create a mess wherever they choose. Worse, the licence is retrospective to encompass existing messes. A day later, Housing Minister Yvette Cooper lied to the nation by saying there will be no special treatment of travellers. It's what George Orwell called DoubleThink – the ability to hold two contradictory concepts in the mind simultaneously.
   And while it is encouraging travellers to set up illegal camps, the Government is also handing them hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money to buy legal advice. But it denies similar legal aid to householders who take legal action against blight on their doorstep. Travellers get special treatment because they are a minority but when was the law changed to deprive the majority of their rights, Mr. Blair?

black blobPrime Minister Blair falsely claimed that MI5 had advised against a 'sunset clause' while trying to ram his botched anti-terrorist bill through Parliament. (But even his cronies in the Lords wouldn't swallow that.)

black blobNew Labour has been including 143,000 dinner ladies, school psychologists and town hall staff in its numbers for teachers working in the public sector. Once the boguses have been removed, the real number of front-line education staff comes down to 1.3 million – the same as under the Tories. So if New Labour claims to have thrown lots of taxpayers' cash at education, the facts show that they missed the target.

black blobThe Government is not bothering to deny that it would like to put 40% capital gains tax on house sales to raise £10.5 billion to chuck into the Big Black Hole created by Chancellor (for the moment) Gordon Brown.

black blobThe Prime Minister who assured us in 2003 that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction ready for use against British interests in 4-5 minutes would now like us to believe that he knows all about 200 Al Qaida terrorists, who are in England plotting bombings.

black blobIn the last 2 years, the staff of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister have driven the equivalent of 250 times around the world in hire cars – that's 6.5 million miles! So if you ever wondered where your tax-pounds are going . . .

black blobThere are more bureaucrats at the Department of Food, the Environment & Rural Affairs than the number of dairy farmers left in England.

black blobMore cronyism at Downing Street as Paul Boateng, MP for Brent South, exchanges his parliamentary seat for the job of High Commissioner to South Africa. The job should go to a senior diplomat but Tony Blair drew up a special shortlist of one. He is believed to have done a Mandelson on Boateng to ensure that the former minister doesn't get up to mischief while rattling around on the back benches of the Commons.

black blobDowning Street has responded to the Nottinghamshire Chief Constable's complaint that the Home Office's obsession with meaningless targets stops his officers fighting crime. The official response was a barrage of massaged statistics and the usual personal attack instead of anything constructive.

black blobA team of detectives, which is successfully tackling the gangs that organize the theft of luxury vehicles in the Greater Manchester area, is being disbanded. This category of crime, even though it is booming, has a very low priority in the Home Office's system of arbitrary targets. So the police officers are being deployed elsewhere.

black blobThe government's city academies are at the bottom of the list for overspending and failing to improve standards. But Prime Minister Blair is still dead set on wasting £5 billion of taxpayers' money (a price 250% over the original budget) on building 200 of them by 2010.

black blobThe Ministry of Defence has written off the £250 million pounds which it wasted on buying Chinook helicopters, but not the bits that make them fly, from the Yanks.

black blobThe Government has caved in to the unions over increasing the retirement age for council workers in April to avoid a big row before the general election. Prime MInister Tony Blair is also planning to abolish cost competition on wages for private contractors which supply services to the public sector. The object of the exercise is to protect inefficient public sector workforces and maintain the membership (and income) of the public sector trade unions.

black blobOne-third of all NHS hospital trusts are in deficit to the total tune of £350,000,000. The cause of the problem is over-expansion to meet the Government's arbitrary targets.

black blobNew Labour's promise to improve junk-food school dinners doesn't actually extend to offering any more money in addition to the current 37p per meal. So if schools want to do anything constructive, they'll have to divert cash from luxuries such as books, chalk, computers, building maintenance, staff, etc.

black blobThe UK will soon be contributing more than Germany to the EU's coffers, making it the top of the list for contributions and the bottom of the list for EU grants. And the Government still hasn't got across the message that the UK's rebate is not negotiable until the system is changed to give the UK a fair deal.

black blobThe Government Actuary's Department has calculated that the population will rise by 6.1 million by 2030 and that 5.2 million of the new citizens will be immigrants and their children. So Immigration Minister Des Browne rushed onto the wireless to say these official government projections are rubbish. Which means that either he's lying or the Government is wasting taxpayers' money on people who are creating bogus forward-planning data.

black blobAfter doing his best to encourage single parents for the last 8 years, the Prime Minister is now blaming them for being at the back of all the crime and anti-social behaviour in the country. Could there be an election in the offing?

black blobThe Office of National Statistics has suddenly realized that it has been making a bog of the accounts for the Highways Agency for the last 7 years (a time period corresponding to 'the current economic cycle'). The nett effect has been to make £3 billion of the Chancellor's Black Hole go away (at least until after the election). So the electorate is advised to stand by for the Treasury leaning on a few more of the government's accountants to make the rest of the Black Hole go away (at least until after the election).

black blobIt has emerged that Tony Blair makes most of his decisions, including dragging his country into a war in Iraq on the basis of a tissue of lies, during an undocumented chats with his Downing Street press officer and his 'chief of staff'. Which raises the interesting question of why the nation is paying vast salaries (and expenses) to cabinet ministers who are sitting around doing nothing. And the same applies to the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, a man who can be relied on to come up with the right answer (from the Government's point of view) if his arm is twisted hard enough.

black blobTony Blair helped the French and the Germans to prevent the EU from opening up the labour market to 'professionals' from lower-waged countries. And all he got for his help was a threat to grab the UK's rebate from Jacques Chirac, a man who would be in gaol for corruption if he were not president of France.

black blobPatients in the area around the University Hospital of North Durham (NHS) are being diverted 20 miles to the facilities of Alliance Medical (private sector) for MRI scans. The NHS scanner at the university hospital is 'considerably underemployed' but New Labour signed a deal for scans with AM while Alan Milburn, Tony Blair's Minister For Getting Labour Re-elected At The Taxpayer's Expense, was working as a consultant for the company that owns AM.
   update :Kevan Jones, the Labour MP for North Durham, has been ordered by his party to stop raising this issue as New Labour's re-election committee has ruled it an inconvenient truth.

black blobThe number of applications for a postal vote is up 300% in some areas as the general election approaches. Labour areas such as Birmingham, Merseyside and Manchester all show very high levels of demand and the rise is an astonishing 1,200% in Southampton. New Labour changed the rules to allow postal votes on demand in 2000, removing the need to have a valid excuse like being on holiday at the time of the election.
   Complaints of election fraud have rocketed since the rule change, the police don't seem to be bothered about it and anyone who has their vote stolen via a bogus postal application just has to lump it as there is no complaints mechanism.
   Despite a shower of complaints at the last round of local elections, and the police finding Labour spivs in possession of hundreds of postal ballots, nothing much has been done to tackle the issue of electoral fraud. Which raises the suspicion that the council elections were viewed as dry runs for the general election, and the lack of official action will be taken as a licence to commit fraud on an epic scale in May.

black blobNew Labour's policy of being soft on illegal gypsy camps is costing councils around the country at least £11 million for legal costs. They are having to take the cash from budgets for libraries, playgrounds and other community services and they are now starting to demand more money from central government. Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, is seen as the main cause of the problem and he is the main target for protests.

black blobLatest Labour Lies: Labour party chairman Ian McCartney claimed that the Tories will abolish the minimum wage while Trade Secretary Praticia Hewitt accused them of backing out of a maternity pay pledge after confusing it with a separate policy on childcare tax credits.

black blobThe Government is to blow £500,000 of taxpayers' cash on promoting the EU constitution in the run-up to the general election.

black blobEducation Sec. Ruth Kelly announced £280 million of 'new money' for school dinners over the next 3 years. But £60 million of it is going to a new quango rather than school dinners, and only £15 million is coming from Government funds. The rest, £45 million, has to come from the Big Lottery Fund but there is no guarantee the Fund will stump up the full amount. The remaining £220 million has to come out of an existing emergency fund in the education budget at a rate of £73 million per year for the next 3 years – and there's only £30 million in the budget for next year. Someone's sums don't add up.

black blobThe Institute For Fiscal Studies has used Government figures to calculate that, as a result of the 2002 budget, average household take-home income fell (a small amount) between 2002/3 and 2003/4. The Treasury responded by saying that the self-employed have been doing very badly under New Labour and if they had been excuded from the calculation, then the average take-home income would have shown a rise in 2003/4.

black blobNew Labour has thrown £4.5 million at a computer teaching system aimed at teaching Latin in state schools where there are no specialist teachers. But the system is 3 years overdue and its software doesn't work on a lot of the computers used in schools. So that's it for Latin. If left to New Labour, it will become extinct in state schools in the next 5-10 years.

black blobMargaret Hodge, Minister for Covering Up Child Abuse, has blown £1 million on Family Resources, a pilot scheme which was supposed to offer mediation to separated couples in dispute over their children. The scheme had a participation target of 3,500 couples. Just 6 couples used it in its first 6 months and the scheme is now dead in the water.

black blobChancellor (pro tem) G. Brown is being shifty about National Insurance. So it will be going up again if Labour is re-elected.

black blobThe deputy chief constable of South Yorkshire has announced that his force is too busy chasing New Labour's arbitrary targets to bother with chasing burglars. But at least the South Yorkshire bobbies aren't too busy to chase murderers like the Nottingham police.
   Things will only get worser, Mr. Blair?

black blobLabour has secretly changed the rules on National Insurance contributions. The money used to be ring-fenced to finance 'social benefits'. Now, it goes straight to the Treasury, like any other tax, and it can be blown on anything at all.
   So if Labour wins the election and G. Brown announces that he's increasing National Insurance, the money won't go to the NHS – no matter what lies he tells – it will just slither into the Chancellor's Black Hole.

black blobLabour created 560 public sector jobs per day in office in a crude attempt to buy votes.

black blob8% of schools have no cooking facilities but Labour failed to include the cost of providing kitchens in its dash to get aboard the school meals bandwagon.

black blobHospital Accident and Emergency Departments have to treat patients within 4 hours or lose funding for failing to meet a New Labour target. So what many hospitals are doing is to move the patient out of A&E as the time limit approaches. The practice is not in the patient's medical interests but the hospital does it to avoid having its funding cut by New Labour's micro-meddlers.

black blobNew Labour's official policy on illegal immigrants is to give them 48 hours to vanish after they've been caught. Immigration officers tell suspected illegals that they can enter the UK if they promise to report for questioning or deportation within 48 hours. Most are never seen again and thus do not make an embarrassing contribution to government statistics.

black blobNew Labour has been forced to apologize for the murder of DC Stephen Oake in Manchester in 2003. He was killed by an alleged Al Qaida agent whom David Blunkett, when Home Secretary, failed to deport when his bogus asylum claims failed.

black blobThe Blair Broadcasting Corporation has also apologized for neglecting to mention in 'news' broadcasts that Kamel Bourgass was a bogus asylum seeker. To do so was forbidden under the BBC's PC censorship rules.

black blobNew Labour is keeping the Rover car company afloat until after the election. This is seen as pay-back for Rover's prosperous bosses not announcing their company's insolvency until after Parliament had been wound up for the election campaigns. As a result of this cosy arrangement, Trade Secretary Praticia Hewitt was spared embarrassment and the dodgy doings of the Department of Trade & Industry in relation to Rover were not exposed.

black blobT. Blair wants Four More Years. G. Brown is reported to be chewing his carpet in fury when not required to pretend for the meeja to be the prime minister's pal.

black blobNew Labour has arranged for the Ministry of Defence to make a bog of registering service personnel to vote. As a result of the chicanery, tens of thousands of service personnel, including those sent to fight an illegal war in Iraq, will be denied the opportunity to vote against New Labour in the up-coming general election. Tony Blair has given a personal pledge to do something about the problem, knowing full well that there is nothing that can be done this side of the election.

black blobG. Brown returned to the old New Labour trick of re-announcing a previous spending commitment in the package of aid being thrown at the collapsed Rover car company. Meanwhile the Phoenix Consortium, into whose arms New Labour thrust Rover, has still not accounted for the £427 million black hole in the company's accounts.

black blobIan Blair, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and full of the New Labour spirit of his namesake Tony, plans to waste £1 million of his budget on reprinting forms to include a different general description for ethnic minorities.

black blobThe Nottinghamshire police are doing their best for New Labour by cheating to meet their targets. Gun crimes are not recorded to keep the figures down. Robbery is described as something else, e.g. theft instead of robbery with violence. And as for burglary, all attempted burglaries go on the books as cases of criminal damage. So it's no wonder that Chief Constable Steve Green can brag that he's reducing robbery and burglary and produce bogus statistics to 'prove' it.

black blobNew Labour used taxpayers' money to pay Professor John Salt to find ways of counting illegal immigrants. Prof. Salt estimated that at least 500,000 people are in the UK without proper permission. So the Home Office excluded his figures from a report on illegal migrants published last year. The Blair regime continues to deny the existence of any official estimates of the numbers of illegals but it is unable to explain how a figure reached using taxpayers' money can be considered unofficial.

black blobIan Blair is doing his bit for namesake Tony by turning the Metropolitan Police into a branch of the Labour Party. Blair 2 is openly backing Labour policies in the run-up to the election and T. Blair and his bodyguards are swanning around the country in two Metropolitan Police Range Rovers bearing 'Vote Labour' stickers.

black blobTony Blair has promised that people with bowel, breast** and cervical cancer will see a specialist within 2 weeks of being referred by a GP by 2008. But there is no new money on offer to make it happen. So people with other types of cancer will just have to wait longer for treatment. And only someone like Tony Blair could see that as fair.
** p.s. The pledge on breast cancer is recycled from 1999, and if New Labour hasn't made it happen by 2005, there is precious little chance of anything happening by 2008.

black blobTony Blair has admitted, while being grilled by Paxman, that he did order Iraq weapons expert Dr. David Kelly to be thrown to the wolves during New Labour's row with the BBC over sexing up Iraq dossiers. Mr. Blair has been lying about his involvement in this sordid betrayal since July 2003.

black blobNew Labour says crime is falling when official Home Office figures show that violent crime is on the increase. This miracle is achieved by selectively quoting results from a "statistically insignificant" survey, fiddling the figures and encouraging police forces to do the same to meet meaningless targets.

black blobTony Blair is so worried about his laxity over illegal immigration that he's annexing the Conservative Party's policies rather than coming up with any policies of his own. How curious that these policies were dismissed as 'nastiness' when Blair was feeling cocky but they have become 'all about fairness' when he's desperate.

black blobAs a result of fiscal drag – Chancellor Gordon Brown's failure to raise tax thresholds – 500,000 people will become liable to pay income tax in 2005/6. They used to be too poor to pay tax but Brown's Stealth Taxes have repaired that situation.

black blobMet Commissioner Ian Blair plans to waste another million pounds on 24 'diversity advisors' to appease racialist, ethnic minority and homosexual interests in London.

black blobThe Government has doubled spending on the NHS in the last 7 years but most of the extra cash has just vanished without benefit to patients. NHS hospital and primary care trusts now have a combined debt of £1 billion and they are having to close wards, cancel operations, get rid of front-line staff, not pay suppliers and tell people to tear surplus documents into small pieces because they can't afford to buy equipment such as shredders.
   The Government recruited 20,000 new nurses to the NHS in 2004 but 35,000 nurses opted out of the NHS because they found the pay and conditions unsatisfactory, so the nursing corps suffered a net loss of 15,000 people. One thing the NHS does have lots more of is managers and administrators and quangos, so it's no wonder that the cash fails to trickle through their highly absorbent ranks to the 'front line' staff, such as nurses.

black blobThe inevitable leak has proved that the original advice from Attorney General Lord Goldsmith to Tony Blair was than an attack on Iraq had no legal justification. And that Goldsmith changed his mind after he was 'leaned on' by the Prime Minister's minions.

black blobThe Treasury, run by that self-proclaimed economic genius Gordon Brown, is hanging on to £9 million of tax relief on telephone cash pledges to the South East Asia tsunami relief organizations.

black blobNew Labour's pledge to get junk food off school menus has crashed and burned. So many schools have long-term contracts with junk-food suppliers (up to 25 years!) that the Government has no hope of actually doing anything much to provide better nutrition in schools. Another empty promise, Mr. Blair.

black blobNew Labour promised in 2002 to cut truancy by one-third. That target was reduced to 10% in 2004. The official Department of Education & Skills figures for truancy in 2003/4 show an increase of 10% over 2002/3.

black blobPublication of the Attorney General's full legal opinion on invading Iraq has shown that Lord Goldsmith put the Labour Party's demands ahead of the interests of the country and that Tony Blair stripped out the caveats, as he did in dodgy dossiers based on the sweepings from the floors of MI6 offices. To be blunt about it – the leak shows that Blair lied and Goldsmith went along with the lies.

black blobReality bit Tony Blair on TV when he said he had no idea that NHS GPs won't give patients an appointment more than 2 days ahead because their pay is cut if they fail to meet the government target of seeing patients within 48 hours. He also had no idea that patients are told to ring another day if the next 48 hours are fully booked.
   Medical staff at the sharp end have been complaining about the situation for the last 2 years and Health Department staff have told them regularly that the Prime Minister was 'interested' in the problem. So either Blair wasn't interested enough to do anything or the spokespersons were lying about telling him about the problem.

black blobTony Blair is reforming the House of Lords again by packing it with has-been cronies. The object is to build a majority there, so that the revising chamber is effectively neutralized, and also to free up some Commons seats for younger cronies.

black blobTony Blair committed Britain to 'regime change' in Iraq at a top-secret meeting on July 23rd 2002, according to the latest leak. After that, he was just looking for a pretext to sell an invasion to the country; genuine or manufactured, either would do nicely. So when he said he was looking for a peaceful resolution to the Iraq problem via the UN, he was lying.

black blobNew Labour claims that less than 4% of NHS patients are unable to book an appointment with their GP more than 48 hours ahead. The real figure is over 80%. Just a routine example of New Labour lying with figures plucked out of thin air.

black blobAccount Closed
Just to show that it's Business As Usual after the 2005 general election, Tony Blair handed out sweeties to a shower of cronies and unsavoury characters. His newly appointed junior ministers include:

  • Lord Drayson, the Labour Party donor who copped for a £32 million contract to buy smallpox vaccine which the civil service could have acquired, and also a peerage for himself;
  • Turncoat ex-Tory MP Shaun Woodward, who was parachuted into a safe Labour seat against the local party's wishes;
  • Bev Hughes, who was sacked from the Home Office for lying about a visa scam; and
  • The delightfully named Andrew Adonis, a Downing Street aide who was handed a peerage to boost the ranks of Labour cronies in the Lords.

Note: This report was compiled according to official New Labour standards of accuracy and verification.

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