0805 Hrs GMT
London
Friday
24 September 2010
By © Muhammad Haque
Constitutional law commentary about the UK CONDEM and the implications for a democratic constitutional UK
CONTEXTUAL flashback to our commentary of 17 October 2009 with particular focus on the UK Lib Dems Party.
We are doing so in preparation of our diagnostic review of the Lib Dems' role as a part of the CONDEM Collusion in the UK CONDaved phase [there it is! Another coinage of another CON-linked word! There is no avoiding of a double meaning even here, such is the unreliability of the CONDEMNABLE entente!!]
What we are looking at is this:
Has the Clegged Collusion produced the change from sleaze-ball careerism to transparency, democracy, accountability, honesty and universality?
Has the UK Parliament become a parliament for the telling of the truth about what the people have to say about how ‘they’ are ‘ruled’, what the people want from parliamentarians, or has the Parliament reverted to the state it was in before 6 May 2010: an anti-democratic wasteful pretext for the many [of the ‘elected’] to carry on against accountability, transparency and against honesty?
"Saturday, October 17, 2009
KHOODEELAAR! Updating evidence against CRASSrail and also against the crass ignorance of 'mainstream Political parties' about London: Vince Cable [4]
2358 Hrs GMT
London
Saturday
17 October 2009
By © Muhammad Haque
A word of update on why Khoodeelaar! has been calling the Big Business London CrossRail scheme a CRASSrail scam.
This update is caused by the behaviour of the UK Lib Dems’ Party’s Vince Cable in Bethnal Green on Wednesday 15 October 2009.
And secondly by the behaviour of Boris Johnson who coincidentally on that day confirmed his own crass role in muttering in all directions as ‘justification’ of his announcement of the week of drastically raising bus fares and tube fares in London.
We [the KHOODEELAAR! Campaign against the “CRASSrail Big Business scam agenda….”] have been using the word “Crass” in the same sense as is still contained in all the major English language dictionaries in circulation and use in the world right now.
We have added our own evidential components to upgrade the definition of the word CRASS in context.
We have said for over five years now that Crossrail is crass because, amongst other things, it was crassly conceived, it is crassly peddled and it has been crassly promoted.
In different orders, we have used the same qualifiers.
We have done so as we have reported the various manifestations of crassness, illogicality, ignorance, stupidity and sheer callousness on the parts of those who have been doing the peddling and the promoting. These activities and exhibitions are to be found across the so-called divides between the three main Parties as recognised by the numbers of Mps they have in the UK House of Commons.
The Lib Dems’ Vince Cable first:
When someone from the Lib Dems Party ‘public’ meeting [Oxford House, 15 October 2009] included a slight reference to Crossrail in a question in the overly-bureaucratically treated [in the sense of=suppressed, stifled.. and so on] ‘Question time’ following Cable’s set-piece presentation lasting well under an hour, Cable was caught out on the facts.
He admitted to the ignorance that Khoodeelaar! Campaign noted.
Cable looked at the two persons sitting alongside him on the notional podium and facing the audience in the Oxford House in a side street off the Bethnal Green Road in Tower Hamlets and asked in their direction if Crossrail ran through Tower Hamlets.
Having seen their body language saying yes it did, Cable then hurled a most banal pack of rubbish in the even more banal and thoughtless direction of the captive audience.
That was rubbish because he contradicted his previous comment on CRASSrail as published MOST PROIMINEWNTLY on 21 September 2009 and said [on 15 October 2009] that he and his Party supported Crossrail.
And then he said that IF the costs were managed acceptably then they would still support it.
Gone were the flourish that had been attached to his REJECTION of CrossRail in the news that was carried during 21 September 2009. In that REJECTION, the headlines included the one published by the London EVENING STANBDARD. It said that to Vince Cable, CrossRail was NOT A PRIORITY!
KHOODEELAAR! Campaign had noted that at the time last month [September 2009] and we published the full EVENING STANDARD piece along with an image of Cable on that occasion. It is still accessible on this very blog site.
Had the audience at the Oxford House, Derbyshire Street off Bethnal Green Road London E2 on Wednesday 15 October 2009 been made up of people who had come there to actually hear an independent, original, political speech from a genuinely influential political personality in Britain today, that piece of ignorance as uttered by Cable there would have caused a swift and disapproving reaction. Derision even. But the audience was tame and timid. It was an in-house event. Although staged at the officially non-Party political Oxford House, the meeting was intended to be and went down as a ‘reassurance exercise’ for the small number of listed members of the Party in Tower Hamlets.
Most of those present and apparently listening to him did not even notice that Vince Cable had made such a major error.
Not one member of the audience stood up or raised their hand to quiz Cable on his crass question about when CrossRail went through the borough that he was allegedly there to offer his expertise about.
Tower Hamlets, for those who are not in the UK, is also the ‘main’ area associated with the East End of London. And Bethnal Green, where Vince Cable was sitting when he exhibited his ignorance and nervousness, is in Tower Hamlets.
And Crossrail has been THE most cited word in relation to a campaign that has been going on in Tower Hamlets for the past now almost six years.
All of these are facts beyond dispute.
How?
Some of the Lib Dems party’s undeniable ‘leaders’ in Tower Hamlets who were present in that same audience, had themselves been present and speaking at demonstrations held by Khoodeelaar! AGAIUNST the fundamental impact that Crossrail would have on TOWER HAMNLETS.
More than one of those sat at the very back in the audience.
One was Janet Ludlow.
Sitting next to her was Stephanie Eaton.
Janet Ludlow actually spoke at two Khoodeelaar! Demonstrations, in February 2006 and March 2006. Both held outside the main entrance to the Mulberry Place town hall, the official address of Tower Hamlets Borough Council.
Stephanie Eaton, the 'leader' of the 4-member group of Lib Dems councillors in Tower Hamlets Council, has not spoken at a demonstration but has attended campaign events that we organised. Especially in Bethnal Green South, an area she was not familiar with until we offered her the objective and non-party-political introduction to it in the context of our campaign against the Crossrail hole agenda attacks.
And sitting somewhere in the middle of the audience at the Oxford House was Louise Alexander.
Although Ms Alexander is currently not a Lib Dems Party [or any sort of] councillor in Tower Hamlets Borough Council, she actually was the councillor who put her name to a motion tabled for debate at the Tower Hamlets Council ‘full council’ meeting held on Wednesday 1 March 2006.
That motion came closest, for a motion as put forward by any councillor in their name, to the contents of the Khoodeelaar! Campaign demands on Crossrail.
And having been a member of the so-called all-party MPs’ committee on CRASSrail dating back at least 18 months before the then UK Transport minister Alistair Darling [now in post as Gordon Brown’s successor as UK Finance minister] formally tabled the “CrossRail Bill” in the UK House of Commons [the lower camber in the two-chamber Parliament] in February 2005, Vince Cable would have been expected to know what the scam was about.
And the basic facts that he would have been reasonably expected to know about the Crossrail scam would include the one about the parts of London that the scam would affect directly and go through directly as a proposed ‘London ‘rail line’.
Yet Cable staggered non-party observers present as he paused in the middle of his ‘answer’ and asked: does Crossrail go through Tower Hamlets?
The Lib Dems’ Party’s own published records show that Cable has been involved in what the Party has advertised as the highest level ‘activities’ in the name of their Party about Crossrail.
Those activities go back to 2003 when the then MP for the same party for the Richmond area in south west London, Jenny Tonge, took part in a Lib Dems Party promotional exchange staged within the official boundaries and limits of the House of Commons.
[To be continued]
Posted by AADHIKARonline London UK at 4:58 PM
“In the end, the only solution for Labour may be to take its leader Ed Miliband resolutely at his word and rebuild the local party from the ground up, broadening its base and listening to all those it wants to serve more carefully than ever before. That's an easy thing for a hack in Hackney to write and a much, much harder thing for a politician in Tower Hamlets to do. But it sounds rather like democracy.”
Unquoting Dave Hill [with emphases added by the commenter below].
We are commenting here to correct some of the misleading contents and insinuations.
We shall come back to deal with any other that we find appropriate in due course.
We here concentrate on Dave Hill’s “discussion” on the spelling of particular last name and we examine some other aspects of the Dave Hill’s London Blog in perpetuating the discriminatory myths about “local expertise’ by a “colleague” of Dave Hill’s.
We start by examine Mr Hill’s statement: “the only solution for Labour may be to take its leader Ed Miliband resolutely at his word and rebuild the local party from the ground up”.
What is Ed Miliband? Is he a magician or is a super human? He is neither. As for “rebuilding” of the former Labour Party, Miliband is even less. He has neither the knowledge nor the interest nor the commitment to rebuild democratic accountability anywhere. He is a machine leader of a machine bureaucracy that is banking for his ‘aim to reach the shore of power’ on the bankruptcy of the British political vessel as it is evident via the democracy-denying, democrat deficit Houses of Parliament Whatever Ed Miliband may have puffed on, he is no different on the evidence so far from any of his predecessors in that post when it comes to the fundamental purpose of the Party bureaucracy. When that purpose is ‘relaunched’ in areas like Tower Hamlets during routine ‘periods of elections’, it is as dull, dishonest and unjust and undemocratic as it ever has been. So what secret are you alluding to when you invest all; your rhetorical hopes on Ed Miliband doing the undoable? Do tell. As for us ordinary folk in Tower Hamlets, we see no evidence now and we have found none in their records of the past half century, of the former Labour Party being anything other than a machine vehicle for time-servers, petty careerists and several brazen liars. The same conclusion applies to what is now the “Tower Hamlets Lib Dems”. The several ‘names’ that you have now ‘introduced’ and or promoted about the former Labour Party in Tower Hamlets are as contaminated on their records as could be found in any of the past five decades. Our Movement has drawn attention to those during the past fifty years and demanded action against the crooked behaviour of so many time-serving place men and women in the former Labour Party that the list of the perpetrators and the allegations against them alone would take up more space than is available on your blog comment slot. The former Labour Party has persisted in failing to take action. Why? Because the entire bureaucracy has been itself corrupt. Let any of that bureaucracy's key decision-making obstructors come out and declare themselves and we shall read them the details of their perpetration with ample updater diagnostics.
The only thing that is ‘new’ about your promotion of those is your name and your blog, Dave! You are now doing what decades of “Fleet Street” media has done for the corrupotocrcay that is the former Labour Party.
About the rest of your concluding Comment, you have not qualified the phrase “a politician in Tower Hamlets”. Without qualification, that phrase is full of misleading and vacuous potential. For the sake of democratic accountability, we shall attempt a working qualification as always in context here. Perhaps by a politician in Tower Hamlets you are referring to those who seek or occupy “elected” posts. Examples include local Tower Hamlets Borough council posts or the London Assembly post/s or the posts of MPs for any of the two Parliamentary constituencies. Secondly you must be meaning the post or position seekers and the postholders in the former Labour Party that is still floated in Tower Hamlets as a bureaucratic version of its former form at the present time. Finally you must be meaning the couriers of the various sub-candidates and sub-post-seekers that make up the number that also serves as ‘the organisation’ of the former Labour Party. On the facts of the contens of your blog, you could not be meaning people in the ordinary population in Tower Hamlets. Had you meant any of us, you would have said something about the Movement that has actually been working to defend the key universal values from which the time-serving opportunists you DO recognise have benefited [personally and in terms of their own careerists factions] without a shadow of a doubt.
[continued]
You also refer to the Conservative Councillors’ group ‘leader’ Peter Golds who has been doing business fort his cause by parading as a ‘Tower Hamlets politician’ although he has yet to come on the record ANYWHERE as representing the concerns and the demands of the ordinary democratically conscious people in Tower Hamlets. We have pointed this out before about Peter Golds and we do so again here, in context. We also point out that you have not expressly examined poverty of any description in your blog. Indeed, you have not even mentioned the word poverty once. In our knowledge of the ordinary lives of the overwhelming majority of ordinary people in Tower Hamlets, there are three types of poverty currently affecting the quality of life for ordinary people in Tower Hamlets. Poverty as experienced and felt and as measurable by income, earnings or none. Secondly poverty as evident in the absence of accountably, transparently democratic representation at any of the local state levels as linked to ‘electoral’ processes. The third type of poverty is in the absence of delivery of the promised or the purported standard of democracy in accordance with ordinary expectations as defined by ethics, morality or due process in most of the state and local agencies and institutions as operating in Tower Hamlets.
Although you appear reserved about Peter Golds, you perform a telling act of excusing him. You let Mr Golds off the hook by deciding to not scrutinise him on the allegations that he had INSINUATED. You say (“) Golds’ letter claimed that the Brick Lane restauranteur Shiraj Haque had, "stated to a number of local politicians that he funded the legal action" and that, "This is a reportable donation that has not been reported [to the Electoral Commission] within the [legal] time limit." (”). Who are the “number of local politicians”? We ask because we know [as defined above again] for a fact that there is no such thing as “local politicians” without links, strings and careerist negotiations and or deals. So whatever “local politicians” is supposed to refer to in relation to Peter Golds’ own promotion of his “party'-linked business would be someone [or more than one] who would be found to be already compromised by some other relevant factors vitiating any attempt to bring about an ethical and a democratically accountable atmosphere in Tower Hamlets. That would mean that you should have demonstrably queried Peter Golds’ assertion. Had you done that, you would have found ON THE EVIDENCE that a true investigative examination of his c,aims would have to reveal that Peter Golds was basing HIS bit of the allegations as much on partisan and untenably non-democratic ground as any of his implied Party political opponents would be doing given the same observed and non-democratic and or antidemocratic objective. Your reference to “the Brick Lane restauranteur Shiraj Haque” is also inaccurate and in context significantly misleading. The person you name as “Shiraj Haque” is in fact known in the community simply as Shiraj. This is true of today as it has been since the end of the 1970s when he was first listed in the public domain as an active member of the community in Tower Hamlets. One of the original validators for Shiraj getting INTO the public domain as an active member of the local community in the late 1970s was the campaign that our Movement was conducting at that time in defence of the community following the racist murder of Altab Ali on Thursday 4 May 1978. So the question that arises now , 32 years on, is this: who has been responsible for moderating or altering or amending the community-based persona of Shiraj? Has there been a legal reason why the spelling of his stated last name was or has been changed? If so, what was that legal reason? If none then why haven’t you or to be more practical your ‘local expert’ [‘colleague’] [promoted by you in the past few months as ‘the’ de facto ‘expert’ on “Tower Hamlets”] explained that change in the spelling of the stated last name cited about Shiraj? This is also important in view of the many references to Abbas Uddin “Helal” as made by you and by at least three others in or about “Fleet Street”. One of those, David Cohen, the self-described ‘rescuer of the dispossessed of London’ as promoted via the London EVENING STANDARD, invaded a democratic accountability forum that had been organised by the Spitalfields Small Business Association [SSBA] on 18 October 2010. The SSBA’s Director Kay Jordan, who sat on a chair next to where David Cohen had been sitting before he stood up to launch his invasion, wondered to our campaign within minutes of David Cohen’s invasion, what would have been the best way of stopping Cohen from violating that meeting. And what was his violating act?
Why a personal insinuation against Lutfur Rahman and as retailed on behalf of the interests that were promoting Abbas Uddin “Helal” as their chosen courier of the Blaired party band. David Cohen abused the entire local, SSBA-organised meeting, by standing up and demanding to know from Lutfur Rahman why Lutfur Rahman’s alleged supporters had been spreading an allegation about Abbas Uddin “Helal” abusing or beating his [“Abbas Uddin “Helal”:] wife. Abbas Uddin “Helal” himself was absent from the event. And there was no legal, constitutional law, ethical or democratic or electoral reason why Lutfur Rahman had to even comment on that utterance by the invader David Cohen. But Lutfur Rahman did. And ion making a comment “denying” Cohen’s invasive utterance, Lutfur Rahman confounded the Cohen-contrived confusion even further! He proceeded to deny having abused HIS wife! And a suitably timed supportive sounding woman stood up in a row behind where David Cohen was sitting [and or standing, depending on what moment of his invasion he was engaged in] in the audience and stated words to the effect that she supported her husband Lutfur Rahman totally! In his ‘response’ on the same occasion, Lutfur Rahman also said that he would sue anyone who said what Cohen was saying! This part was in fact triggered by the Lib Dems’ John Griffiths whose own utterance [to Lutfur Rahman’s mind and to observers present] represented a repetition in effect of what Cohen had done earlier in the invasive disruption of the proceedings of the SSBA-organised meeting that had been intended to offer local people a say on what the local Tower Hamlets Council should be doing to support the local small businesses and similar initiatives. Considering the fact that David Cohen VIA the London EVENING STANDARD played a promotional part in propping up the campaign propaganda and image for the Lib Dems and the Conservatives in the run up to the 06 May 2010 elections on the alleged basis that Cohen had been “helping” the “DISPOSSESSED” in London [ played as a “counter” to the then Gordon Brown-fronted regime that was, so the “DISPOSSESSED” theme suggested, causing the DISPOSSESSION to areas typified by the East End Borough of Tower Hamlets], his violation of the people who were attending the SSBA-organised meeting on 18 October 2010 showed just how irrational Cohen was, how contemptuous he was of the rights of the people in the East End and how indifferent he was to what we had to say on that day about our “local Council Cohen on that occasion dispossessed us from our democratic say! Our campaign intervened at the right time to ensure that Cohen was not able to carry with him any pretext that he could later retail for the delectation of the likes of Peter Golds in another exaggerated, untrue and untruthful attack on the invented image of our community portraying it as not only being intolerant to “journalists” but also to “free speech”! Cohen abused the kindness and generosity of the meeting and in his abuse he denied that meeting the freedom to exchange views and information about matters to do with the local Council’s financial and democratic conduct. It is clear that in your “accessible” and “sympathetic” “style”, you too are engaged in doing the same.
Why else is it that you promote Peter Golds and then fail to show why his alleged allegation to the Metropolitan Police did not go anywhere? Why is it that you refer to everything else about the various allegations about corruption over the Blaired Party's bureaucracy and its handling or mishandling of the selection etc, but fail to even recognise that there has been a fully active campaign against the very constitutional change to Tower Hamlets being lumbered with a post called executive mayor that is the persistent topic of your particular blog posts. Given that two fifths of the stated votes cast in the alleged referendum were in favour of the NO option, how can you treat 40,000 voters as if they did not record their rejection of the bid to change the Council’s particular structure? Given also the fact that Abbas Uddin “Helal” was himself a “campaigner against an elected mayor system” for MONTHS, how is it that you leave that fact out as if it was not the central feature of the evidence of active contempt for ethics and honesty that the Bliared party bureaucracy has been exhibiting at every level over the matter? You state that you had spoken to Joshua Peck but then you do not include any substance. Why mention him then? If you had asked us, we could tell you that the same Joshua Peck had appeared along with our Campaign organiser on at least four platforms at “public” meetings held across Tower Hamlets between 06 February 2010 and 06 May 2010 “speaking and uttering arguments against” a directly elected executive mayor.
We could add that without making any noticeable let alone substantiated apology to the Tower Hamlets community and the public the aforesaid Joshua Peck then began to make appearances on the Bliared Party promotional events in the Borough SUPPORTING an elected executive mayor system! He has remained silent on the fact that Bliared party candidates for Council ward votes on 06 May 2010 received far more votes than the NO question got. The significance of this is in the fact that JOSHUA PECK and other such Bliared Party candidates had been claiming that they were “campaigning against an elected mayor system” and that they were claiming that they had been ALSO asking their canvassed voters to vote NO in the allotted box on the referendum/ballot paper [held on the same day, 06 May 2010] as the general election and the London local council elections. All the evidence that we have obtained of the voters behaviour on that day in the in the run up to polling [and referendum on the mayor] day has shown that those who were actually genuinely approached about the serious flaws and the pitfalls of installing a directly elected executive mayor in fact voted NO. That raises the almost certain possibility that those, like Joshua Peck who were claiming to be campaigning for s NO vote on the referendum were doing less to secure a NO outcome than they were doing to get their personal election as councillor guaranteed. This discrepancy was deliberately created as admitted to our campaign organiser by one of Joshua Peck’s co-candidates in February-April 2010. According that candidate for a Council ward in Mile End, their priority was to get elected as councillors! Yet that ‘NO’ campaign ‘speaker at platforms’ kept on making appearances, even though she knew perfectly well that she was not campaigning for NO outcome as much as she was claiming to be when on the platform. Given the fact that that ‘No’ campaign ‘speaker’ was soon doing the “YES FOR candidate X as mayor” routine in Tower Hamlets during July-October 2010, the claims that anything any of them said at any time was based on ethics, principle or honesty is very difficult to accept. This is the real problem in the former Labour Party.
As it is with the PRESENT Tower Hamlets Council, with or without a directly elected executive mayor installed.
Contrary to the prejudiced references you make to Tower Hamlets as a whole, the behaviour of the ‘elected councillors’ and their likes is the real problem as against a truly really actually actively democracy-delivering Council. For the reasons we have shown in this detailed factually revealing comment,. the same finding applies to Lutfur Rahman as it does to his alleged detractors.
0750 Hrs
Saturday
12 February 2011
BHANGEELAAR! The Campaign against an elected executive mayor in Tower Hamlets