Author Archives: Mark Pack

If you are childless (and haven’t borrowed someone else’s children for the day), it’s best to stay clear of Telford because as the local paper reports:

Council staff on the lookout for paedophiles have been ordered to stop and quiz any adults found walking in Telford Town Park without a child, it was revealed today.

Anyone who wants to go to the park but is not accompanied by at least one youngster will have to explain why they are there.

It’s best not to try to hand out leaflets either because also:

Telford & Wrekin Council said Rachel Whittaker and Neil Donaldson of

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Colin Ross has the story, from today’s Sunday Mirror:

According to the Sunday Mirror two Wolverhampton Conservative Councillors – Councillor Carol Bourne and Councillor David Bourne are running a brothel at their house.

I am not prude and I don’t really care what people get up to in their sex lives but I do seem to recall hearing at least of these Councillors moralising on what other people should be doing and not doing.

Below is the article, I believe both will be resigning and their will be two by-elections.

Read the rest of

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All rather bizarre (charity not noticing that it was making a political donation, Labour Party not noticing that it was taking money from a charity):

Labour was embroiled in a fresh row over donations last night after it was forced to pay back £15,000 to a children’s charity which illegally donated cash to the party.

Catz Club, which has received lottery money to run breakfast and after-school clubs across Britain, paid the money to attend Labour’s star-studded fundraising sports dinner this summer. But it was forced to ask for the money back after the Conservatives uncovered the donation and told the Charity

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Imagine you asked ten friends living in different parts of the country each to toss a coin twenty times and tell you how many times it came up tails. Perhaps it is your friend in Scotland who gets the most tails. Would you therefore conclude there was something special and different about the results of coin tosses in Scotland from the rest of the UK? Of course not; the result was just the luck of the draw and if you did it again, it may very well be another part of the country that came top with the most tails. …

Chester City Conservative Councillor Max Drury was found guilty of harrassing his former business partner, left the Conservative Party and is now also facing a council investigation:

Deputy Labour group leader Bob Rudd has made an official complaint about Cllr Max Drury to head of legal services Charles Kerry, alleging the former Tory has brought the office of councillor into disrepute.

Cllr Drury was found guilty of harassing his former business partner, James Meadows…

The court heard that on one occasion Cllr Drury, who has since resigned from the Conservative Party, turned up at the victim’s house and threatened: “My brothers from Wrexham

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The Guardian has an exclusive interview in Saturday’s magazine with the Chancellor, Alistair Darling:

Britain is facing “arguably the worst” economic downturn in 60 years which will be “more profound and long-lasting” than people had expected, Alistair Darling, the chancellor, has told the Guardian today.

In the government’s gravest assessment of the economy, which follows a warning from a Bank of England policymaker that 2 million people could be unemployed by Christmas, Darling admits he had no idea how serious the credit crunch would become.

Darling’s blunt remarks lay bare the unease in the highest ranks of the cabinet that the downturn

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Yesterday Vince Cable and the Liberal Democrats proposed a series of measures to help tackle the soaring number of repossession:

Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, said change was needed urgently to stop the “downward spiral” of Britain’s housing market.

Proposals include a mortgage rescue scheme, which would allow families struggling with repayments to sell all or part of their house to a housing association or private firm and then stay in the property as tenants.

The government should also allow councils and housing associations to borrow money to buy up land and empty new homes “to help replenish Britain’s much-depleted stock

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Earlier this week, Hicham Yezza wrote about his experiences of being arrested as a suspected terrorist, being detained for six days and then released without charge:

Once in custody, almost 48 hours passed before it was confirmed that the entire operation (involving dozens of officers, police cars, vans, and scientific support agents) was triggered by the presence on my University of Nottingham office computer of a … document called the “al-Qaida Training Manual”.

Sounds good grounds for arresting someone, until you realise where this document came from:

Rizwaan Sabir, a politics student friend of mine (who was also arrested), had downloaded the

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What does the selection of Joe Biden to be Barack Obama’s US Vice-President candidate tell us about the state of Obama’s campaign and where it is headed?

Joe Biden is a long-time white male senator in his mid-60s from the East coast with two previous Presidential bids behind him. It’s certainly not a choice based on reinforcing Obama’s message of change: white male senators are hardly a novelty in US politics, especially Presidential politics, and the selection continues the overwhelming Democrat preference for picks from the eastern third of the US. Oh, and did I mention that he’s also one of …

Yesterday’s energy policy push by Nick Clegg has received wide coverage in the media, including:

Daily Telegraph:

The thinking of Nick Clegg, the LibDem leader, is both fresh and dramatic. He envisages energy self-sufficiency in this country by the year 2050 and claims this can be achieved cleanly.

The LibDem plan is based on a combination of greater energy efficiency and a step-change in the provision of renewable energy from wind, wave, biomass and solar power.

This stands in sharp contrast with the energy policies of both Labour and the Conservatives which are

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The Independent reports:

Nick Clegg will today unveil plans to make Britain an exporter of green energy by 2050, as he called for a programme “on the scale of the Apollo moon landings” to transform Britain’s dependence on foreign oil, gas and coal supplies.

In an interview with The Independent, the Liberal Democrat leader demanded the scrapping of new nuclear and coal-fired power stations, instead proposing the establishment of a renewables delivery authority to oversee a massive expansion of wind, solar and wave energy, funded by guaranteed premium prices for green energy.

He said: “Renewable

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Earlier this week, Guido poked fun at The Guardian for publishing an opinion poll where the voting intention figures added up to 101. Of course, there isn’t really any mystery or error in all of this, because figures are nearly always rounded off to the nearest whole number when these sorts of polls are published. It’s therefore actually quite common to have polls were the rounded-off numbers add up to 101 or 99 or even sometimes 98 or 102.

So far, so silly. However, today’s Daily Mail carries a piece in their Ephraim Hardcastle column repeating the story (though without …

The disappearing flag and the unfortunate halo. The latter is presumably the result of some slightly clumsy lightening of the photo (though if it was another party’s leader in the photo, you can imagine the sort of intemperate comments that would appear from SNP supporters about how this was the lowest and most desparate acts of evils since the same party leader ate babies for breakfast yesterday). But as for the former? Very hard to see any explanation other than a mix of pettiness and silliness.

Saying that many Conservatives are viewed as “unreformed and grumpy” whilst talking about how David Cameron is a PR man probably isn’t the best of ways to go about giving an interview if you are a leading Conservative yourself, as Michael Gove has discovered today.

Ah well, makes a change from the questions over the source of donations to his local party.

Labour Deputy Leader of Barking and Dagenham Council has been cautioned by the police after reportedly telling a the mother of a rival councillor, “shut up you f***ing fat dyke” and “go back to the farmyard”. (Via Duncan Borrowman’s blog)

The police are investigating death threats from right-wing extremists made against Manchester Labour councillor John Taylor. (BBC)

Pendle councillor Nawaz Ahmed has switched to Labour. (Burnley Citizen)

Port Talbot Councillor Andrew Tutton (Neath Port Talbot Ratepayers) has called for YouTube to pre-check all clips before they go live on the YouTube site after a clip showing someone wandering drunken amongst high-speed …