The biggest "No shit, Sherlock" article I have ever read...

I have made almost 150 "No shit, Sherlock" awards over the past few years but this BBC report  really does take the buscuit. Apparently:

'Younger and younger children are accessing porn online, the Sun's agony aunt Deidre Sanders has told MPs.'

Younger and younger  children are accessing porn online - "No shit, Sherlock!"



 PS:
For some reason this line struck me as amusing:

'The former home secretary Jacqui Smith told the panel it was easy for children to access porn.'

Kids and husbands? 

The BBC and the Labour Party joined at the f***ing hip?

The Mail reports that:

'Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has sparked fury by bidding for a top BBC job less than three months after her political career ended in disgrace.

The plum position pays £77,000 a year for a two-and-a-half-day week and also offers generous perks.

Ms Smith is hoping to replace the current vice-chairman, Chitra Bharucha, who is stepping down at the end of October.'

That will be the ex-LABOUR minister looking to be in a position of authority at the BBC Trust, impartial?

In case you had forgotten the kind of 'people' that governed us until recently:

' Yesterday, when contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Ms Smith said: ‘How did you know that I had applied?’

Asked whether she thought her bid was likely to succeed, she said: ‘I have made an application, that’s all I know’, before adding ‘f*** off’ and terminating the conversation.'

Nice woman?


Thanks to Biased-BBC for the spot.

At least some little troughing piggies will have to wait before 'earning' the 'big bucks'

The way that so many ex-Labour ministers left government and went straight into highly paid consultancy or directorships was quite sickening; you know the people of whom I speak. So I was interested to learn that the new version of the Ministerial Code (published yesterday at David Cameron's behest) bars ex-Ministers from such roles for two years. So the likes of Jacqui Smith will be unable to cash in on her contacts and may have to instead get a normal job, if she is able to find one that is within the compass of her limited talents. It's a shame that so many Labour ex-ministers have already cashed in on their contacts but 'baby steps' are better than none.

"A serious misuse of public money"?

Watch today's Daily Politics and watch Andrew Neil firmly skewer Jacqui Smith for her government's alleged funding of extremists. It's good that there is at least one BBC interviewer willing to question a Labour (albeit ex) minister and push the point again and again.

What's next for Jacqui Smith?

The Express reports that

"HUMILIATED former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith faces being hauled before a judge as Whitehall’s whistleblower vowed to prosecute her over Commons expenses.


Home Office mole Christopher Galley will meet fraud lawyers on Tuesday to bring a private prosecution against the disgraced ex-Minister.


The meeting comes as Sunday Express research reveals Ms Smith, and her porn-watching husband Richard Timney, are in line for a "600,000 pay-off if she loses her seat at the next election.


Under House of Commons rules, not only will shamed Ms Smith qualify for pension and severance pay but so too will her husband, who has worked as her parliamentary aide for 12 years.


In a final insult to taxpayers, the payout would include an incredible "500,000 pension pot for Ms Smith and a "33,000 "golden parachute" payment.


Liberal Democrat pensions expert Lord Oakeshott said: "Ms Smith is a teacher. How would you explain this in an ethics lesson: "I"ve been caught cheating on my expense claims. If I say sorry I don"t have to repay "100,000 to the public and I can just retire with a "500,000 pension pot from the taxpayer."
"Redditch pensioners on a pittance of "92.25 a week will know exactly what to do if Ms Smith brazens it out at the ballot box at the next election.""

Thoughts anyone? In my opinion Jacqui Smith like the other Labour MPs and Ministers who have been investigated, found wanting but never had serious action taken against them, will walk away unscathed and financially rewarded.

A small victory...

The Today programme has an unusual piece on its website, apparently:

"0827
Yesterday on Today, John Humphrys interviewed Harriet Harman about MPs' expenses, and they discussed the case of the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Ms Smith has been in touch with us to complain that we had made a mistake. In the interview we stated that "the Standards Commissioner himself found that Jacqui Smith had not been entirely honest in what she told us, and she had broken the rules." Today is happy to clarify that The Commissioner did find Ms Smith had broken the rules, but he did not make any judgement about her honesty."

So she broke the rules "honestly" or the Standards Commissioner just did not "make any judgement about her honesty"? I suppose when you are in Jacqui Smith's position you have to take what small victories you can.

Compare and contrast

Two cases of women from Redditch have caught my eye and I think should be compared.

The first case is of Jacqui Smith who has been accused of having "inappropriately used (£42,130) for the maintenance of Jacqui Smith's home". Her punishment was to have to apologise to the House of Commons.

The second case is of Tracey Onions who was found guilty of dishonestly claiming Housing Benefit of £9,520.10, Income Support of £5,942.44, and Council Tax Benefit of £2,181.67 - a total of £17,644.21. Tracey Onions was not allowed to issue an apology she was "given a two-month prison sentence, suspended for 12 months, plus a 12-month supervision order."

Compare and contrast...


Interestingly the Redditch Standard article about poor Tracey Onions concludes

"Anybody wishing to report a suspected case of benefit fraud can e-mail benefitsfraud@redditchbc.gov.uk or call the fraud hotline on 01527 534 164 at any time.

Callers are asked to provide as much information as is known for the case to be investigated as fully as possible."

Where's our £42,130 Jacqui Smith?

Jacqui Smith Request for Payback



The Sunlight Centre are not content to let Jacqui Smith get away with an aopolgy to the House of Commons, not even the taxpaying/voting public. They want the £42,130 that they consider to have been "inappropriately used for the maintenance of Jacqui Smith's home". Quite right too, keep up the pressure until this one little piggy coughs up the money that she shouldn't have claimed. Then onto the next little piggy; who should that be?


Here's Jacqui Smith's unreserved apology for the claim for films and her weasel words of apology for her housing claim...

Why the House of Commons? Surely she should apologise to the people whose money she falsely claimed.

It seems that the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has been told to apologise in the House of Commons for breaching expenses rules and that will be an end to the matter. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of what she did, and I believe that the Sunlight Centre are still pursuing that matter; should Jacqui Smith not apologise to the Country from outside of the House of Commons? After all it is our money she was incorrectly claiming.

How about setting up some stocks on Parliament Green so MPs can apologise to the public and the public can express their views via the medium of fruit and veg.

Harriet Harman sexist?

I see that Harriet Harman has done it again, she's opened her mouth and poured out a stream of rubbish. Apparently she has demanded that one of Labour’s two top posts should always be held by a woman — because "Men cannot be left to run things on their own. I think it’s a thoroughly bad thing to have a men-only leadership." It is claimed that Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, secretly tried to change Labour party rules two years ago to ensure that it could never again be led by an all-male team, but she was foiled by the party hierarchy. Harriet Harman added "I don’t agree with all-male leaderships".

Some questions for the doughty feminist? Do you believe in all female leaderships? Do you believe that women can be left to run things on their own? Is your opposition to an all male leadership anything to do with you feeling threatened by Peter Mandelson's position at the right hand of Gordon Brown? Jacqui Straw, Ruth Kelly, Margaret Beckett, Patricia Hewitt, Yvette Cooper, Patricia Hodge, Tessa Jowell? Which of those female Labour ministers do you think was held back from high office by virtue of her sex? Which of them became ministers at least partially because of their sex?

"Smith regrets lack of training "

Apparently

"Jacqui Smith feared she was not up to being home secretary and wished she had been better trained for the role, she reveals in a magazine interview.

She told Total Politics magazine she had "never run a major organisation" before accepting the job in 2007.

"I hope I did a good job but if I did it was more by luck than by any kind of development of those skills," she adds.

...

She also speaks of her first weekend as home secretary, in July 2007, when she had to respond to the abortive terror attacks in central London and Glasgow airport.

"I'm not sure I understood, I'm ashamed to say, when I first heard it, quite how serious it was.

"When somebody rings you up and they say 'a car has been found in Haymarket and it seems like it might have been set up to explode', your first reaction is 'oh, that's interesting'. You then think 'well, now I'm home secretary, so I have responsibility for that'."

"Smith regrets lack of training " - not as much as the UK population does. Now how much training as an economist did Gordon Brown have before becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer, from the look of it not much? Has David Miliband any training in diplomacy? Obviously Peter Mandelson has wide experience of the mortgage market which must help in his expanded departmental roles, although I am not sure how many other people will be able to avail themselves of the sort of deal he arranged with Geoffrey Robinson.

'Bringing Jacqui to Justice' - 'fraud by misrepresentation'

I read in The Mail this morning that:

"A Whitehall whistleblower is to launch a private prosecution against Jacqui Smith, accusing her of expenses fraud.

Miss Smith, who resigned as Home Secretary last month, racked up a £116,000 allowance on her family house in Redditch, while claiming her main residence as her sister's spare bedroom in London.

Christopher Galley, a former Home Office civil servant, claims however that she spent more time at the West Midlands address."

This will be worth watching.

Reshuffle rumours

I hear that Jacqui Smith is to stand down as Home Secretary at the upcoming Cabinet reshuffle. The BBC report that:

"Jacqui Smith is to stand down as home secretary in the cabinet reshuffle, sources close to her have told the BBC.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is set to shake up his cabinet after Thursday's European and English local elections.

...

It is understood Ms Smith, the first woman home secretary, intends to defend her Redditch seat at the next election.

Mr Brown confirmed to the BBC he is planning a reshuffle but refused to be drawn on individual ministers' roles."

That's a major Cabinet position freed up to shuffle Alistair Darling into, if Gordon Brown really tries to promote his old friend and colleague Ed Balls to the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Unless of course David Blunkett really is coming back after two forced resignations to takeover the Home Office; well Gordon Brown did bring back Peter Mandelson. In which case where to put Alistair Darling? Tea boy perhaps as any other cabinet position would be a demotion, unless he moves to the Foreign Office. But then what to do with David Miliband... Tricky things reshuffles, here's someone else who was worried about a reshuffle...


I wonder if Gordon Brown will keep a place in the new Cabinet for John Hutton. After all John Hutton was the Labour MP who went on record as saying that Gordon Brown would be a "f***ing disaster as Prime Minister", surely that sort of prescience deserves to be rewarded...

Sunday catchup

Too many items, too little time:

Gordon Brown's government screws up something else, this time the Queen's invitation to the 65th D-Day celebrations.

The BBC offer an apology for a Question Time panellist upsetting Muslims. Will they be offering any apologies for Tom Paulin's comments on Newsnight Review any time soon.

Hezbollah head for power in Lebanon; Israel may have a serious problem coming.

Michael Savage

"has employed top UK law firm Olswang to sue Ms Smith for libel after she put him on the Home Office’s 16 ‘least wanted’ list."

Apparently he is suing for £100,000. More good news for Gordon Brown, I wonder how the BBC will spin this story.

The rise of the UK's very own Stasi State

The news that:

"A growing army of private security guards and town hall snoopers with sweeping police-style powers is being quietly established, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Under a Home Office-run scheme, people such as park wardens, dog wardens, car park attendants and shopping centre guards receive the powers if they undergo training, and pay a small fee to their local police force.

Their powers include issuing £60 fines for truancy and dropping litter, and being able to demand a person's name and address on the street.

Under the Community Safety Accreditation Scheme, the number of civilians wearing a special badge, and a uniform approved by the local chief constable, has rocketed by almost 30 per cent in a year and there are now 1,406.

Critics claim Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is quietly seeking to create a third-tier within the 'policing family', with even less training and accountability than the controversial Police Community Support Officers. "

What is Labour's end game? A CCTV camera in every room of every house? Each citizen implanted with a GPS tracking device? Checkpoints every few hundred yard metres where citizens' ID can be checked and DNA samples taken? This Labour government really scare me, I think they are capable of almost anything as they try to keep their hands on power. The idea that a UK Government might postpone a General Election would have seemed incredible 10 years ago, now it is common currency.

MPs expenses

I have deliberately not commented on every twist and turn of the MPs expenses scandal as I don't have the time and I would have run out of bile some time ago but the news today that nine Labour Cabinet Ministers have claimed for accountancy advice on their expenses is worthy of comment. Leaving aside the specifics for the moment, it seems to me that many MPS saw their salary as "theirs" and all "expenses" as reclaimable. In the real world a person is paid a salary and has to live on that salary, spending taxed income on travelling to and from work, on housing costs, on utility bills, on food and cleaning etc. etc. etc. In the world of many MPs it seems that everything was claimable and that was just plain wrong.

On this specific case, it seems that nine Labour Ministers claimed for accountancy advice on preparing their tax returns. This really hits home when you read that as well as Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears, David Miliband, James Purnell, Douglas Alexander, Geoff Hoon and Hilary Benn and one unnamed Minister the same claim was put forward by Alistair Darling (the pretend Chancellor). When the front-man/fall-guy for Gordon Brown's economic failures is "allowed" to claim for taxation advice then you know the people using the expenses system have no shame. Gordon Brown and his minions have spent 12 years making the UK tax system more and more complicated, compliance more onerous and the penalties for making a mistake more and more serious and yet the people who enthusiastically called Gordon Brown an economic genius were able to claim as expenses for the tax advice they received.

Many MPs seem to have no shame but when you have a Cabinet that seems united only by greed and the fear of the electorate's response, what hope is there of an election to cleanse Parliament?

Boris Johnson stands up for free speech

Boris Johnson makes a stand for free speech in The Telegraph, here's an extract:

"These shock jocks were national institutions, with millions of weekly listeners. They were a new and important part of the American constitution, and that is my first objection to the utterly demented decision by Jacqui Smith's Home Office to announce that Michael Savage, America's third most popular radio show host, is banned from entering this country. It just makes us look so infantile, so pathetic.

Every day the American airwaves are churned by the paranoid rantings of Michael Savage and his kind. Has this stuff warped America, or deformed its political psyche? On the contrary, the Americans have just had the good sense to elect a supremely gifted and eloquent black man – when the prospect of a black British prime minister still seems some way off. What are we, some sort of kindergarten that needs to be protected against these dangerous American radio shows? Does Jacqui Smith think we are all dimwits, who can't tell when a man like Savage is talking rubbish? Why can America take it, and we can't?

The answer is that America still has a constitutional protection of free speech, and I have been amazed, over the last few days, to see how few people in this country are willing to stick up for that elementary principle. Across Fleet Street, swords have stuck in their scabbards, swords that normally leap to the defence of liberty.

I am not aware that a single MP has spoken on this subject, apart from David Winnick, who went on Newsnight to agree with Jacqui Smith. Harold Wilson once called Mr Winnick "the stupidest man in the House of Commons", a reputation he did nothing to shake with his performance. Mr Winnick said that Savage should be banned from this country for claiming that many children with autism were "brats". That is indeed an odious and ill-informed opinion. But surely it should be blindingly obvious even to David Winnick that it is possible to despise the things that Michael Savage says, and yet to think that it is very odd indeed to bar him from this country.

Such is the terror of being associated with Mr Savage's ugly ravings, that no one dares speak up for common sense and proportionality. To exclude someone from entering this country is a serious act of state. We have not been told how the decision was taken. We do not know which criteria were applied.

All we can say for certain is that there was no attempt to consult our elected representatives in the House of Commons, engrossed as they now are in defending their expenses, and it looks very much as though the list of banned persons was rushed out to cover up the hoo-ha over the Home Secretary's taxpayer-funded bath plug.

Michael Savage has said ignorant and unpleasant things about gay people, autism and Muslims. But it is far from clear that he would be in breach of any law, even in this country. The world is full of loudmouth media berks with views that we would all like to keep to themselves, but we can't ban them all from entering Britain.

Perhaps Jacqui Smith thinks that it "sends out a signal" about the kind of Britain we want. On the contrary, it reinforces a culture – created by this Labour Government, and its addiction to political correctness – where people are increasingly confused and panic-stricken about what they can say and what is forbidden, a culture where a police officer can seriously think he is right to arrest a protester for calling a police horse "gay". Our courts and tribunals are clogged with people claiming to have suffered insults of one kind or another, and a country once famous for free speech is now hysterically and expensively sensitive to anything that could be taken as a slight. "

For myself I find much of what Michael Savage says tasteless and exaggerated but far less offensive than that which the Undercover Mosque programme exposed, and the Imams shown live and work in the UK.

I don't think Matthew Norman is a fan of Jacqui Smith

"Jacqui Smith, like so many adored sitcom foils, is a plain and simple imbecile. She makes Baldrick look like Roy Jenkins, Doberman from Bilko's motor platoon like FDR, Phoebe from Friends like Hillary Clinton, and Dibley verger Alice Tinker like Mrs Gandhi. So let us cherish her until the summer reshuffle, and pray that she is then retained as Manuela, the Silver Stick sequestered from that mysterious officer of state and duly adorned with jester's bells, and safely housed in a heavily padded grace-and-favour apartment in Torquay."

You can read more in The Independent.

Michael Savage talks about being banned

This is the same Michael Savage who Jacqui Smith has banned from entering the UK. Does my playing his voice on this blog mean that I too may be banned from entering the UK?

If you read nothing else today...

Read David Davis in The Independent asking "How can Jacqui Smith escape responsibility for this outrage?
It's astonishing that she didn't know what was going on with Damian Green" and Tory Bear asking about the disappearing Mirror article and what's happened to Derek Draper's PC.