What has Denis Macshane done, or rather what has he been accused of doing?

The BBC are reporting that:

'A complaint about former Labour minister Denis MacShane has been referred to the police.

An standards inquiry has been suspended "until the question of possible criminal proceedings has been resolved".

The Labour Party has confirmed Mr MacShane has been suspended from the parliamentary party in the meantime.

It is understood the complaint relates to expenses. Mr MacShane said he would "co-operate fully" with the police.'

Couldn't happen to a nastier piece of work.. Actually that's not true, he was merely an irritant compared with many others in that last Labour government.


Here's Denis as I choose to remember him, casting unpleasant and untrue accusations 'loonies and weirdos' - odd to see Gordon Brown answer such a question.


And here's something I found on Denis 'third class degree' MacShane on Wikipiedia 'After the 2005 general election, he was dropped from the government. MacShane's failure to remain in government is believed by some to have been his falling between the two stools of being neither overtly a Blairite nor a Brownite, and thus, in his own words, having "no hand to push [him] up the greasy pole". However, his position was considered to be untenable after comments he made to a meeting of Durham Labour Students [6] in which he described Gordon Brown's five economic tests as, "a bit of a giant red herring." When contacted by The Scotsman newspaper about whether or not he made the comments he responded: "Jesus Christ, no. I mean, ‘red herring’ is not one of my favourite metaphors. If you think any Labour MP saying the Prime Minister’s most important policy is a red herring, then they would not survive long in the job." However, he had been recorded on a dictaphone, with the tape played on both the Today Programme and BBC News 24. MacShane himself wrote in Tribune "I have no idea why I was removed as a minister and it does not worry me in the slightest." [7]'

Do read my previous postings about Denis MacShane, this is one that I particularly remember, here's an extract:

'From around 07:00 Denis McShane tries to claim that the NO vote was about anything but the Treaty, presumably so that later it can be ignored, he even uses the word "lies". Even Simon Mayo sounds a touch incredulous that the EU and Gordon Brown are going to press ahead. Neil O'Brien dares to ask Denis McShane some difficult questions and Denis McShane takes umbrage and gets in some nasty little attacks. Apparently Denis McShane cannot believe that anyone would dare to disagree with his line and his beloved EU.

Denis McShane is a detestable EU propagandist and he should just shut the fuck up and accept that the only three countries who held a referendum have said NO, that's NO.

As the French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at a meeting of senior MEPs, (reported in EUobserver, 14 November 2007) "France was just ahead of all the other countries in voting No. It would happen in all Member States if they have a referendum. There is a cleavage between people and governments … There will be no Treaty if we had a referendum in France, which would again be followed by a referendum in the UK." '

And this is from a March 2008 posting that I had forgotten about:

'My recent piece about possible government plans "that "Men using brothels and massage parlours should be made to give DNA samples in an effort to reduce the number of prostitute murders, an MP has said." That MP was ex-Labour minister Denis MacShane." The argument being "because almost all the horrible murders of prostituted women are by men who have frequented them beforehand.”

Ministry of Truth has a marvelously accurate piece on this subject, take a read, including:

"Tell you what Denis, while we’re at it why not suggest that the police should take DNA samples from everyone who’s got a bank account because almost all bank robbers are people who frequented banks beforehand?

Or how about taking samples from everyone visiting a Jobcentre because almost all people who fiddle the dole have visited them beforehand?

Or better still, how about taking DNA samples from MPs as they pop into the office to put their expenses claims because we can be fucking well certain they’ve all visited there beforehand?" '

But it was over the EU Treaty that I first commented about Denis MacShane:

'Dennis MacShane has written an article for The Guardian's Comment is Free section. He writes that the "European scrutiny committee of the commons on the new reform treaty is a serious document. It does not call for a referendum. It makes clear that thanks to the negotiations over the new treaty Britain will have a new relationship with Europe. It does not enter into the percentage game."
All that is true, but you can read my article of the Committee's report here for a rather fuller analysis.

Of course Denis MacShane has to then make an absurd claim, "The new treaty is 44,000 words long. The dead constitution was 157,000 words long. Unless there is a new EU mathematic directive abolishing the laws of percentages 44,000 cannot be 90, or 95 or even 50% of 157,000."
I am not sure if Denis McShane is a liar, a fool or just a politician.
I explained back in early August here, "The core of the text has 145 pages, accompanied by 132 pages of protocols and declarations. There are a total of 12 protocols and 51 declarations.

The rejected Constitution had 475 pages of text, but this document was intended to replace all EU Treaties from the past. The newly-proposed Reform Treaty merely amends the existing Maastricht and Rome Treaties, which will legally continue to exist under different names.

Think of the Constitution and Treaty as equations, don't worry this will make sense. Let us assume that the old treaties are T1, T2, T3, T4 etc. and the Constitution is C, if the new treaty is Tz and the minor differences are D. We can see that:

T1..x+Tz=C-D

According to various European bigwigs T1..x+Tz=C-D=C*0.90 or T1..x+Tz=C-D=C*0.95 or even T1..x+Tz=C-D=C*0.99"

If you are not mathematically inclined or have been taught Maths since the end of O'Levels, then think of it this way, the constitution did indeed abolish all the old treaties but it then re-enacted them with amendments and new "innovations" to make up 157,000 words. The new treaty simply amends the existing treaties and adds new components so that the end result, as a consolidated treaty, is only 157,000 words.


Denis MacShane doesn't refer to the part of the report that says "we do not consider that references to abandoning a 'constitutional concept' or 'constitutional characteristics' are helpful and consider that they are even likely to be misleading in so far as they might suggest the Reform Treaty is of lesser significance than the Constitutional Treaty. We believe that the Government must offer evidence if it is to assert that the processes are significantly different."

I presume that he also did not read this part either "Taken as a whole, the Reform Treaty produces a general framework which is substantially equivalent to the Constitutional Treaty."


Now that I have drawn Denis MacShane's attention to these two parts of the report that he must have missed, do you think he will change his mind? '