April 2006 Archives

The media coverage of the forthcoming London Local Council elections on May 4th, seems to be dominated by free publicity for the British National Party.

The YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph claims that

It shows that seven per cent of voters are ready to back the far-Right party and that 24 per cent have considered voting BNP in the past or are thinking of doing so now.

According to the wealthy NuLabour Minister of State (Work), Department for Work and Pensions Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking claimed in the Sunday Telegraph that:

"When I knock on doors I say to people, 'are you tempted to vote BNP?' and many, many, many - eight out of 10 of the white families - say 'yes'. That's something we have never seen before, in all my years. Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not.

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust funded academic analysis "BNP: The roots of its appeal (full report)" (you may have to explicitly save the downloaded file with a .pdf extension) does not quite support such a view, but the report has been widely quoted or misquoted in the media.

Labour MP for Birkenhead Frank Field has also been exploitiing the the same fears about foreigners that the BNP misuse, in his opinion piece "Why Labour is losing the working class" in the Daily Telegraph. He is also spouting David Blunkett style authoritarian claptrap like

Linked to this should be the roll-out of ID cards so that NHS treatment was strictly linked to people's residency in this country.

On this front, the metropolitan Left will argue that such views are incompatible with human rights legislation. Again, the Government would be reconnecting with its once bedrock supporters by insisting that the collective rights should come first and that, if need be, exemptions from the human rights legislation would be insisted on.

The new look "we are not racists" NuBNP's claims to support freedom and liberty (for some people but not for everyone), are no more trustworthy than NuLabour's Orwellian newspeak about "voluntary" ID Cards in their General Election manifesto, which magically became "compulsion by stealth" once they were returned to power.

However, according to The Guardian, the BNP are putting up a mere 37 candidates in London.

Even if, by some miracle, every single one of them won a Council seat, the BNP would still not control a single London Council.

So this looks like the traditional Labour party disinformation campaign, aimed at trying to get their increasingly reluctant former supporters to give them their vote on May 4th, and not to stay away from the polls, as most of them presumably will do.

The obvious unpopularity of Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone even amongst erstwhile Labour voters in London, is coupled with the very real question of what have they ever done for us, except take us for granted ?

Ken Livingstone has no right to pretend to represent the views of Londoners abroad, especially on his pointless trip to China.

His wretched comparison of the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Poll Tax riot in Trafalgar Square as reported in The Daily Telegraph shows his sickening authoritarian communist attitude to human rights.

What did he feel about being at the site of the Tiananmen Square massacre? he was asked.

After commenting on the square's size and scale, he went on to make the comparison with Trafalgar Square.

When it was pointed out that the Metropolitan Police had not shot or killed anyone during the poll tax riot in London in March 1990, he suggested the comparison should be put into a longer context.

"If you go back to some of the early instances you will find many cases where innocent protesters were hacked to pieces with sabres - the Peterloo massacre, for example. There is no such thing as one country with a perfect record." In the Peterloo Massacre, the local militia waded into a crowd of radicals campaigning for universal suffrage on St Peter's Field, Manchester, in 1819, killing 11 and injuring 400.

On Tiananmen Square, estimates of the numbers of those killed by troops and tanks range up to 3,000, the figure given out by the Chinese Red Cross immediately afterwards.

The Observer reports that


Olympics budget 'must rise by £2bn'

Huge cash injection needed to make East London site viable after 2012, says Games supremo

Nick Mathiason
Sunday April 2, 2006
The Observer

The cost of the London Olympic Games has to rise dramatically, according to the man in charge of delivering the sporting event to the capital.

David Higgins, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), signalled that the £1bn infrastructure budget earmarked will inevitably increase.

[...]
Higgins, the former head of the regeneration agency English Partnerships, refused to put a price on how much the new infrastructure would cost. But he indicated that at least £3bn in total would be needed, taking the overall bill for the Games from £3.4bn to £5.4bn.

[...]

A new budget for the Games is being fashioned by the ODA and accountant KPMG, and is due to be finalised this summer. Any funding increase would hit budgets in transport and housing ministries. Fears will grow that the UK taxpayer, National Lottery players or even London council tax payers will foot the bill. But Higgins is adamant that the private sector will contribute to the Games.

The politicians, bureaucrats and property speculators who seem to be already milking the Olympic Games at the expense of the London taxpayer, should be facing criminal charges and fines for every penny they go over the original cost estimate.

What would be so difficult in trimming this bloated project back to what was originally presented to the ICO ?

Talk of "pribvate sector investment" is rubbish - how can they make sensible ivestment decisions when the Olympic Development Agency has hit the East End of London with planning blight and bureaucratic red tape and Ken Livingstone spends his time in futile negotiations with property developers, who he then personally insults in public ?

What confidence can anyone have that even the bare minimum of required sports stadia will be completed on time and to budget, given that it is the notorioius Tessa "9 mortgages" Jowell who is the Minsiter in charge of the Government Department responsible, the one one which brought us the disaster of the Millennium Dome in Greenwhich and which has contributed to the disaster of the Wembley Stadium ?

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