Labour Sleaze : Lord Moonie's Cash for Questions Northrop Grumman Paid Peer £30,000 for 23 Questions

Not Apologising for Calling Him an Idiot - Jeremy Clarkson
Taking Ecstasy Less Dangerous than Horseriding - Reuters
Sarkozy Falls Out With Gordon - ConservativeHome
Hollobone, the Heroic MP - BBC
Baby Born in Aborton Clinic Killed - Associated Press
Complete History of the Golliwog - Indy
LabourList is Missing the Point - Sky

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2009

Labour Sleaze : Lord Moonie's Cash for Questions 
Northrop Grumman Paid Peer £30,000 for 23 Questions

The Sunday Herald has got more trouble for Lord Moonie who is already under investigation for Cash for Laws. He is paid £30,000 to act as a consultant to U.S. arms manufacturer, distasteful but legal.

The sleazy Lord has been asking Cash for Questions:

23 of the 46 written questions Moonie has had answered by the government in the Lords relate to defence work connected to Northrop Grumman Corp. These include the F35 joint strike fighter, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Airbus A400M cargo plane, the Navy's Type 45 destroyer programme, and unmanned aerial drones for spying and bombing.

Moonie also asked a question about the Sentry Awacs early-warning aircraft. In 2005 Northrop Grumman won a £665 million contract to maintain and support the Royal Air Force's Awacs fleet over 20 years.

Moonie was ennobled in 2005 but did not ask any parliamentary questions in his first three years as a peer, according to Hansard. But since mid-2008 he has asked almost 50, all on defence issues.

Angus MacNeil, the Nationalist MP for the Western Isles, said "The coincidences do not look good. I would like to think there was no motivation when Lord Moonie asked these questions, and I am sure he will be able to tell us why he didn't ask any questions before he worked for this company."

Moonie stepped down as an MP following boundary changes to make way for Gordon Brown and was enobled as a quid pro quo. Moonie also paid Gordon Brown handsomely for his old Kennington flat which he then sub-let to Alistair Darling. We are clearly not dealing with an obscure outsider here, we are dealing with corruption right at the heart of Labour's Scottish Raj. Will Gordon Brown allow a corruptian investigation into someone so intimately connected to him?

Labour Sleaze : "Second Home Secretary" is on the Take

The Mail on Sunday has caught Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, fiddling her expenses to the tune of £116,000 - bang to rights.

• She claims her "main home" is the one she stays in when in London - except it belongs to her sister.
• She claims her "second home" is the home she owns in her constituency. However her own official website says she and her family live there.
  

Her SpAd claims "It has been cleared by the Commons Fees Office." The Fees Office don't clear anything, they take an "Honourable" Member's word. The property records indicate sole-ownership of the property she claims is her "main home" is in her sister's name. If she is in fact merely lodging with her sister, who is pocketing the taxpayer's £500-a-week tax free? Can we have a Home Secretary who steals £116,000 from the taxpayers?

UPDATE : Don't forget her husband is also on the payroll (£40,000) doing "research" - when he isn't sending letters supporting her to the local paper - without mentioning who his relationship.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2009

LBC Get Wikileaked

Guido loves Wikileaks. They are like a risk management tool for bloggers. Ben Goldacre of Bad Science blog hosted an MP3 excerpt of an LBC show where a presenter, Jeni Barnett, gave an "irresponsible, ill-informed, and ignorant anti-vaccination campaigning that I have ever heard on the public airwaves." MMR jabs are a subject of intense debate in the Fawkes household. Mrs Fawkes is in the don't-care-if-it-is-irrational camp, consequently Guido is in the forced-to-cough-up-£300-for-single-shotscamp.

LBC threatened to sue Ben Goldacre for breach of copyright.* Big mistake. He took it down and in his place others put it back online. It has probably now been heard online by more people than originally heard it broadcast.Download it via Wikileaks (MP3).

Distributed defiance of lawyers is something the Dead-Tree-Press can't do.Bloggers are the free press.

*In any event Guido is under the impression that damages in copyright cases are limited to the financial loss caused by the breach of copyright, which in this case would presumably be very limited.

Johnson : We Have Only Wasted 1/4 of the Money

The Tories have announced they plan a spending cap on IT projects in view of the NHS super-computer disaster, where the budget has gone from £2 billion to £13 billion. Which is a complete joke considering that is more than Google will spend on research and development. The charge of waste must be hitting home, if this report from a co-conspirator is anything to go by:

I shared a train carriage today with Alan Johnson. He was having a loud telephone conversation overheard by the whole carriage telling everyone how worried he was the Tories would attack them over the lack of progress and tax payers money spent on the new computer system for the NHS. “We have only actually spent £3 billion, rather than the £12 billion we planned, so taxpayers are actually getting value for money....” were his very words.

On that basis the last charge of the light brigade was not a complete military failure, since some of the calvarymen survived.