Tag Archives: panel

Tories deny knowing MP in panel advising on grooming gangs was accused of molesting boy

Khan and can’t: Imran Ahmad Khan with Boris Johnson. The former committed a sex crime against a minor and, because the latter’s party couldn’t be bothered to record a complaint about him, he ended up on a Home Office panel advising the government on ways to stop the sexual exploitation of children. Think about that before voting Tory on May 5.

The Tories have said they did not know Imran Ahmad Khan had been accused of sexually assaulting an under-age boy – even though he had told their press office.

That’s the reason they’re using for giving him a position on a Home Office panel that advised the government about child sexual exploitation by grooming gangs, while his crime was being investigated by police.

Do you believe that?

Boris Johnson was cagey about the subject when he was challenged about it in Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday (April 27, 2022):

 

“I believe the Home Office has already made a statement about it,” he said.

Yes – as follows:

The Home Office was not aware of the allegations against him at the time and he no longer has any involvement with the department.”

This is very odd, because the MP’s victim told a court that he had made a complaint to the Conservatives’ press office days before Imran Ahmad Khan was elected as MP for Wakefield in November 2019.

The Tory Party line?

“We have found no record of this complaint.”

That could be because, as the victim stated to the court,

“I wasn’t taken very seriously.”

He said the woman he spoke to sounded “shocked” and passed him on to someone else who sounded more “stern” and asked if he had any “proof”.

“I said, ‘Yes, there’s a police report’ and she said, ‘Well …’, and that was it.

“I said, ‘I’m going to the police’, and she said, ‘Well, you do that’.”

It seems the Tories didn’t even bother making a record of the conversation and passing it on to the Whips’ office.

And it says much about the quality of Conservative MPs that Imran Ahmad Khan never bothered to mention that he was under investigation by the police and might not be an appropriate choice – or simply recused himself.

Considering the recent revelations that a Tory MP smeared Angela Rayner leading to the ‘Basic Instinct’ Mail story, that 56 MPs are accused of sexual misconduct including three Tory Cabinet ministers, and that a Tory frontbencher was caught watching pornography in the Commons chamber, we should not be surprised.

It seems the Conservative Parliamentary benches are full of sexual deviants.

And it seems they know they can get away with their perversions because nobody in their party ever takes complaints about them seriously. Am I right?

Source: Ex-Tory MP guilty of molesting boy was on panel advising on grooming gangs | Politics | The Guardian

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UN report shows irreversible damage to the planet. Why aren’t polluters being jailed?

Pollution: did your home suffer flooding last year? Here’s the reason. And I bet you haven’t done anything about it, have you?

A landmark United Nations report has demonstrated that the planet where we live – Earth – has suffered irreversible damage to its ecosystem because of pollution by big business moguls.

But it does not propose any punishments for those people that would deter them, so they will keep right on with it.

Here in the UK, a group of right-wing politicians has rebranded itself specifically to fight against efforts to clean up industry, we’re told.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that

the warming we’ve experienced to date has made changes to many of our planetary support systems that are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia.

The oceans will continue to warm and become more acidic. Mountain and polar glaciers will continue melting for decades or centuries.

It predicts a rise in sea levels that will threaten millions of people living in coastal areas with flooding by the year 2100.

But the behaviour of some UK members of Parliament shows that the people who can stop this vandalism of paradise simply don’t care.

They never wanted poor people to have fresh air and clean water anyway.

It seems the former European Research Group (ERG) of far-right Tory MPs (including Jacob Rees-Mogg, if memory serves) has undergone a metamorphosis.

After briefly becoming the Covid Recovery Group, an Orwellian perversion of the words by an organisation that wanted to do as little to fight the virus as possible, it now appears to have become the Climate Action Group – determined to prevent government from halting climate change.

As Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK states,

The plan is to argue that climate science is wrong, and we can’t afford it anyway.

Destroying the economy and national health is not enough, the aim is to trash the planet as well.

He continues:

We have due warning that the right wing are lining up to demand the right to take us to oblivion.

This one is the fight for survival, and we have to win it.

It will be a particularly hard fight, when one notes that the IPCC report does not even suggest penalties for polluters.

Given that the damage they have done is said to be irreversible – that is, there is no going back – it seems to me that those responsible should receive irreversible punishments.

I would suggest that they be removed from their jobs and banned from any executive positions in any firm globally, that their life savings should be confiscated and used to fund initiatives to de-pollute the planet, and that they should face imprisonment for varying terms, depending on the harm that has been done on their watch.

I would also suggest that their firms should be ordered to pay fines for the damage they cause – on an ongoing basis, so each year they would have to fund measures to roll back this damage, according to the amount of damage done. If the firms were to be dissolved, then all of their assets should be taken for this purpose.

Nothing like that has been suggested but it is what is needed. And it won’t happen unless you demand it.

Ah, but you’re afraid of taking part in this, aren’t you?

I only have to look at the response to This Site’s article yesterday to see the evidence of that.

I warned that people are “switching off – not just their TVs and radios, but their minds. They can’t face it. They want somebody else to come along and make it better.

“But nobody will. What these people are really doing is handing the planet over to people like Alok Sharma” who will allow the polluters to carry on polluting if they think they can make a farthing out of it.

I stated: “If you run away and hide from it because you’re afraid that bad things will happen to you in the short term, then just you remember – always – that you are making sure that bad things will happen to you in the long term.

“And that future is accelerating towards you at a terrifying pace.”

And I asked: “Are you really such a craven coward? If you do nothing, then you are contributing to it. You are supporting it. You are saying you want it.”

At the time of writing, that article has been read just 246 times. It is the least-read piece I have written this month.

And that’s because people like you simply don’t want to have to get their hands dirty, fighting to live in a clean world.

Well, as I implied yesterday: if you don’t do anything for it, you won’t get it – and that will be because you don’t want it.

If you do want to live in a clean world, you could start by writing to your MP, to Alok Sharma (as he is hosting the climate summit COP-26 in November) and possibly even to our daft prime minister Boris Johnson.

You could say that you have read the findings of the IPCC report and are horrified, that you don’t believe any businessperson will stop the pollution that is poisoning the planet – and therefore all of us – without sanctions.

And you could put forward the penalties I have proposed, above, as starting-points.

That is something you could do.

If you had any guts at all.

Source: The next fight with the right wing is for planetary survival

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‘National embarrassment issues’ as Daniel Morgan panel refuses to hand report to Priti Patel

Daniel Morgan: Priti Patel, who is in charge of the police, still wants to interfere with a report into the murder of a man who had been investigating police corruption.

What a principled, positive stand by the panel responsible for the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry.

According to The Guardian,

The independent panel investigating the Daniel Morgan scandal is refusing the home secretary’s demands to hand over its report before it can be published, as senior police sources say nothing in the case affects national security.

Patel cited the need to consider national security and human rights obligations before making the report public.

But one source with close knowledge of the five Metropolitan police inquiries into the case and the documents involved, said: “There are no national security issues involved. There are national embarrassment issues.”

The grounds on which Patel is justifying her demand to review the report are very shaky indeed:

The Home Office pointed to one part of the panel’s terms of reference which, it said, allows it to see the report before agreeing to its publication, and make changes as it sees fit.

The relevant section says: “The independent panel will present its final Report to the home secretary, who will make arrangements for its publication to parliament.”

A government source said: “Before the home secretary lays it before parliament she has to satisfy herself as to her statutory duties.

“Those relate to national security considerations and that it complies with human rights obligations such as the right to life (article 2) and the right to privacy (article 8).”

This is an attempt to shoe-horn new requirements into rules that were written six years before Patel got anywhere near the Home Office. And it shouldn’t work.

There is nothing in that section of the terms of reference that says the Home Secretary may do anything other than arrange for the report to be published.

In fact, it could be argued that the omission specifically prohibits her from trying; if she was to be allowed such leeway, it would have been written into the terms.

I reckon this will go to the High Court.

Source: Daniel Morgan murder: panel refuses to hand over report | Police | The Guardian

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This week, Corbyn, next week – Vox Political’s Mike. But will Labour admit its ‘anti-Semitism’ blunders?

 

Has the Labour Party followed its own rules for investigating the complaint against Jeremy Corbyn?

After any party member is accused, they have to be given warning of the claim against them, with questions to answer in order to give their side, and two weeks to answer them.

Then the party has to investigate the validity of the complaint – a matter that can take several months.

Then the issue goes before a panel from the National Executive Committee.

As far as we know, Jeremy Corbyn still doesn’t know the accusation against him. How could he? Keir Starmer hasn’t been able to get it right in any of the many interviews about it in the two weeks and five days since it happened.

Starmer keeps saying silly things, such as that Corbyn had said anti-Semitism had been exaggerated. He didn’t; he said the extent of A/S in the Labour Party had been exaggerated by certain people for political reasons.

Starmer’s insistence on exaggerating what Corbyn did would suggest that he is one such person. Wouldn’t it?

I’ve already touched on the next point: nowhere near enough time has passed for a proper investigation, according to Labour’s rules, to be carried out.

So it seems any discussion by any NEC members today (November 17) can only take the form of a “show trial”. If he loses his party membership as a result, the party will be accused of holding a kangaroo court.

Mention of kangaroo courts brings This Writer to my own mistreatment by Labour and the fact that my case against the party, for breaching its contract with me by failing to mount a proper investigation and by passing false information about me to the newspapers, will return to court in a week.

The hearing at 2pm on November 24 will take place by telephone – but space is being made available at Bristol Civil Justice Centre for interested members of the public to attend and hear the verdict.

This hearing may take an unexpected path as the Equality and Human Rights Commission published its own report on the way Labour has handled accusations of anti-Semitism since the trial.

I think some of that report should have been included as evidence. I am concerned that the Labour leadership postponed its publication until after the trial took place – possibly in the belief that the verdict would be announced on the same day.

It wasn’t. I hope to bring the judge’s attention to Chapter Six of the report, which gives details of serious failures of the Labour complaint investigation process, and to another part that is pertinent to my case.

I also submitted a request for information to the EHRC, about whether it considered my own case. The organisation has promised to respond before the hearing on November 24.

(This means it will have replied within two weeks of receiving the request. Contrast that with Labour’s response when I sent the party a Subject Access Request: it took the party two years and two months to deliver only a partial response.)

If the verdict goes in my favour, then doubt will be cast on the relevance of Labour’s decision today. And I expect the verdict to go in my favour.

Source: Anti-Semitism: Labour ruling body to meet over Jeremy Corbyn suspension – BBC News

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Ever wonder how the Tories keep themselves on top? Here’s how

This woman has been prime minister for nearly three years – not because she is any good at it – she isn’t – but because the people of the UK have been told, throughout that time, that there’s nobody better.

The easiest way for a political party to keep itself high in the opinion polls is to set the agenda for public debate and then tell people what to think.

The easiest way to tell people what to think is by dominating the mass media.

And the easiest way to dominate the mass media is by ensuring it is full of your cronies.

The BBC’s news team is run by Tories, as has been explained many times before – here and elsewhere.

And so are many of the private companies that make programmes for the BBC – like Mentorn, the maker of Question Time

That’s probably how this happened:

And this:

This happens week after week, and not just on QT. Not only is the panel stuffed with right-wingers – so is the audience.

Then they tell us all what to think, and dissenting voices are treated as foolish, or childish.

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Institutionally racist Conservative Party rules Boris Johnson’s anti-Muslim comments ‘respectful’ and ‘tolerant’

The Conservative Party’s code of conduct has found it was “respectful” and “tolerant” for Boris Johnson to suggest that Muslim women who wear the burqa look like “bank robbers” and “letterboxes”.

He was always going to get away with it. Despite – or maybe due to – his bumbling facade, he is a popular figure among the Tory faithful and the public at large, and it would be a vicious blow to that party’s credibility if this senior member was found to be an Islamophobe.

It seems an “independent” panel has investigated comments made by the former Foreign Secretary in a column he wrote for the Daily TelegraphHe claimed the burqa was “oppressive” and it was “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes”. The investigation into whether he broke party rules was triggered automatically after the receipt of a number of complaints over the column.

The panel, chaired by Naomi Ellenbogen QC, found that while his use of language in the column could be considered “provocative”, it would be “unwise to censor excessively the language of party representatives or the use of satire to emphasise a viewpoint, particularly a viewpoint that is not subject to criticism”.

“Not subject to criticism”?

The Muslim Council of Britain holds a sharply alternative view. It said the Conservatives had “given a licence to bigotry” – and the evidence suggests the claim is correct. The watchdog organisation Tell Mama, which records hate crimes, said there was a “direct link” between the comments and an increase in incidents targeting women who wear the burqa.

In a statement, the MCB said: “Mr Johnson is not a satirist – he is a member of parliament, and as such has a responsibility to set the tone for the rest of the UK to follow. In this case, it is far-right Islamophobes who have been empowered to follow his rhetoric.

“The MCB further fails to see how Mr Johnson’s remarks were ‘respectful’ and ‘tolerant’ as the panel has concluded.

“In a year where over half of all Home Office recorded hate crimes targeted Muslims, over a hundred women who choose to wear the niqab or burqa wrote to the Conservative party chair to express the daily threat they face as a result of the prejudice whipped up by Mr Johnson.”

The whitewash hasn’t rubbed off on the social media commentators either:

https://twitter.com/SidUnite/status/1076020013667180544

Some drew a comparison with the claim that Jeremy Corbyn had called Tory leader (and current prime minister) Theresa May a “stupid woman”:

In fact there is a very strong difference between the Tories and the Labour Party with regard to prejudice on religious grounds.

Consider the case of Chris Williamson, who was reviled by politicians and political commentators from all sides after he tweeted support for a known anti-Semite.

Mr Williamson was not aware of jazz musician Gilad Atzmon’s anti-Semitic views; he had been told that Islington Council had banned him from performing in a gig, due to “pro-Palestinian views”.

Having discovered his mistake, Mr Williamson tweeted:

You see, when Labour politicians found to have supported unacceptable views, they apologise. Tories who promote such views are told they are “respectful” and “tolerant”.

That is why the Conservative Party is institutionally racist.

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Labour’s kangaroo court issues details of its finding against me – and they don’t even match the charge

Facepalm: Jeremy Corbyn probably thought he could trust senior members of the Labour Party to handle disciplinary procedures impartially. If so, he was mistaken. Now look at the mess they’ve caused.

What a farce!

Today I received a letter from the secretary of Labour’s National Constitutional Committee, giving its reasons for saying the charges of anti-Semitism against me were proved.

Of course, they are meaningless.

The letter states:

“Upon the balance of probabilities the charge was proved for reasons including:

  • It was not disputed that you were responsible for the posting the content that the NEC claimed breached Labour Party rules;
  • A reasonable person would find the posted content, that is the basis of the NEC’s charge, to have the propensity to cause offence, be regarded as abusive and make some feel discriminated against;
  • In posting the content you breached the Labour Party’s Antisemitism and other forms of racism code of conduct, Social Media Policy and Member’s Pledge in appendix 9 of the Rule Book.”

Unfortunately none of the above proves the particulars of the charge against me. In fact, all it proves is that whoever complained to the Labour Party about me in the first place – back in May 2017 – had said they were offended by it, that they felt it was abusive, and that they felt I had discriminated against them.

And there can be a huge difference between saying a thing and actually meaning it – especially considering the fact that the accusation was deliberately timed to interfere with my campaign for election onto Powys County Council.

Also, I wonder what the many tens of thousands of reasonable Vox Political readers – who have read the material in question and don’t consider it to be offensive, abusive or discriminatory – think of what the NCC panel has implied about them. Are you one such reader? How do you feel about the NCC claiming you’re not reasonable?

Let us remind ourselves of the particulars of the charge against me:

“Mr Sivier has repeatedly posted content propogating the conspiracy that secretive networks of Jews control and have undue influence over government and other societal institutions. He uses language that is dismissive of antisemitism and that denies Jews the right to self-identify as they wish. This falls fairly and squarely within the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which the Labour Party has adopted.”

During the hearing, I proved conclusively that I had not supported any nonsense about a “global Jewish conspiracy”, nor had I used language that is dismissive of anti-Semitism or that denied Jews the right to self-identify. And none of the words forming the basis of the NEC’s complaint fitted even tangentially within the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.

The NCC couldn’t suggest otherwise, so instead it seems the panel came up with the tripe in the letter.

The difference between what’s said in the letter and in the charge is the same as the difference between claiming something and proving it.

I should be grateful. The letter proves two things:

I am not an anti-Semite (the letter makes no suggestion of any hatred towards Jews, simply because they are Jewish) – and Labour’s National Constitutional Committee is a laughing-stock.

Still, there is a serious side to this.

We are currently in the middle of a crisis, engineered by the Conservative government, around Brexit – and Labour is hoping to recruit more members into the Party, possibly to help fight a snap general election.

Here’s an advert from Twitter:

But why would anybody want to join an organisation whose internal procedures are prejudiced against rank-and-file members such as myself?

And why would they want to support a party into government that cannot even root out corruption in its own internal procedures?

It seems clear that Labour has a serious credibility problem, as long as it allows its disciplinary procedures to be run in the corrupt and prejudicial manner demonstrated by my own case.

Worse still, as there is no right of appeal, it seems there is no way the party can cancel its false finding against me.

Still, the difference between the charge and the rationale for the verdict puts Labour in a highly actionable position, so perhaps we will be able to sort out this mess in court.

The timing is unfortunate, as the party undoubtedly wants to gain ground with the electorate at a time of chaos within the ranks of the Conservatives, but I can’t help that.

Remember Blackstone’s ratio? “The law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”? I am innocent of the charges against me, but allow me to assure you that although I may present a composed exterior, it is extremely distressing to face accusations of anti-Semitism – especially for the more-than-18-months this has been going on.

If Labour really wanted to gain credibility now, the party’s leaders should have thought very carefully before inflicting this particular injustice on this particular man.

They’d better do something about it quickly – don’t you agree?

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International watchdog says we all have 12 years to tackle climate change

Every little helps: But don’t be fooled – these personal measures to cut your carbon footprint are tiny compared to what governments can do. Will they do anything, though?

We’ve all heard a lot of debate about whether climate change is real and whether it poses a significant threat.

Here’s the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) spelling it all out for us:

We (meaning national governments across the world) need to act without delay to prevent the destruction of coral reefs and stop sea levels rising by as much as ten centimetres. If that happened large parts of the world could become uninhabitable.

Within 12 years.

Are we all clear on this now?

The Tories are already saying the UK has the best record of any G20 country in attacking the causes of climate change.

Do you believe that?

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Gwynne seeks to ‘lower expectations’ for Labour in local elections – because of Wadsworth expulsion?

Damage control: Andrew Gwynne.

Shadow Communities Secretary Andrew Gwynne has tried to reduce expectations of a Labour landslide at the local elections on Thursday, in the wake of a decision to expel a prominent black anti-racist campaign – for racism.

This Site reported that black and ethnic minority representatives had responded with outrage after Labour’s National Constitutional Committee expelled Marc Wadsworth – apparently on the flimsier-than-tissue-paper basis that anti-Semitic intent could be inferred if someone hearing what he said at the launch of the Chakrabarti Report in June 2016 felt that it was.

The Guardian reported:

“Gwynne also sought to lower expectations ahead of the local elections on Thursday. He said: ‘We’re predicting that because these were high watermark years when these seats were last fought in 2014, that it’s probably going to be difficult to get anything like that.

“’We’ve never ever held the City of Westminster, we last held Wandsworth in 1978. If we took those it would be a spectacular night.

“’I am confident that we will have a good night – I don’t think it will be anything like some of the opinion polls would suggest because we are already defending about 80% of the seats in some of those metropolitan boroughs and London boroughs – we’re already at a high watermark.’”

It seems clear that he is trying to manage expectations downward – and This Writer would suggest this is a rather desperate attempt to mitigate the effect of the NCC’s disastrous decision to turn BAME voters against the party.

His words also suggest – as I speculated in my previous article – that there is no mechanism available to the Labour leadership to reverse the NCC’s perverse and unjust decision before Thursday, thereby restoring confidence that the Labour Party still supports fairness and justice.

It won’t be enough. I wonder what the official Labour line will be tomorrow – and why aren’t right-whingers like Ruth Smeeth who prompted this disaster speaking up about what they’ve done? They seemed proud enough on Friday.


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Wadsworth expulsion: Did Labour just throw away its chance to take London?

Jeremy Corbyn: Can he talk his way out of this tight corner?

Labour made a huge mistake on Friday.

After 40 white people escorted another white person to the hearing in what looked like a lynch mob, a panel composed entirely of white people found an innocent anti-racism campaigner – who happened to be black – guilty of a form of racism.

Just on the face of it, that makes Labour look like the racist party.

We are told the verdict on the allegations of anti-Semitism facing Marc Wadsworth went against the evidence.

According to Grassroots Black Left, “The panel … ruled the case against Wadsworth could be proven based on solely on the perception by some people that what he said at the launch of the Charkrabarti report on June 30, 2016 was anti-semitism.”

That would certainly run against the meaning of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism to which Labour has subscribed. That document states that anti-Semitism “may be expressed as hatred towards Jews”; it is not behaviour that may be inferred as offensive by Jews.

In other words, according to the definition which Labour supports, a person’s behaviour should not be deemed anti-Semitic because someone else took offence at it; it would have to be informed by, and motivated by, hatred towards Jews.

And criticism of an individual Jewish person, or a group of them, should not raise accusations of anti-Semitism unless it is informed by hatred towards all Jews. Such criticism may be entirely reasonable, depending on the evidence supporting it.

So the decision against Marc Wadsworth is doubly wrong. And it could jeopardise Labour’s ambitions in the local elections taking place on May 3.

Black and minority ethnic people are infuriated, and you can see why.

As one commenter to This Site put it: “To see Marc Wadsworth shouted down for daring to express an opinion, “How dare you, how absolutely dare you,” like [a] servant being berated by the white mistress of the house, makes me shudder. Do they ever think how much courage it takes for a black person to stand up and speak honestly in a room full of powerful white people?”

And then the Labour Party expects black people to come out and vote it into power in councils across London.

It has been suggested that New Labour expected black and minority ethnic people to vote for the party because they had nowhere else to go. That assumption was wrong; they just stopped voting.

The arrival of Jeremy Corbyn gave them a reason to start voting again – and for Labour.

But the Wadsworth decision suggests that Labour will not support the BAME community; that Labour does not support justice.

In that case, why should the BAME community support Labour?

The party has painted itself into a corner in an attempt to appease liars.

I do not know if there is a mechanism in place that can reverse the damage before Thursday.

If not, I hesitate to speculate on how much harm the NCC panel, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting and the posse of MPs and Lords who supported her at the hearing have done to the people of the United Kingdom.


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