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
The Treasury's record on transport over the years is unbelievably bad.
The disastrous PPP was cooked up in the Treasury. But their greatest transport crime was the crazy industry structure forced on the railway industry at privatisation, completely against the advice of all the experts who knew anything about railways. This almost lead to the complete collapse of the network in 2000, and has resulted in a tripling in the subsidy without anything like a tripling in the quality. Our railway is now very expensive by European standards, but nothing like European quality. Have we ever has an apology from Sir Steve Robson, former deputy permanent secretary to the Treasury, who Christian Wolmar says "pushed through the structure of rail privatisation...that is at root of so many of the railway’s problems"?
There are many other examples.
More generally, the Treasury (and the ex-treasury hacks who dominate the upper reaches of the DfT) has an obsession with competition, which just doesn't work with public transport. See for example the book by Paul Mees.
London desperately devolved control over tax and spending. We need to wrest control of the purse strings from the dead hand of the Treasury, and allocate the money according to local priorities, and not according to Treasury prejudices and dubious cost/benefit models.
- Kev, Bromley, 29/07/2010 14:41
Report abuse