The Tories were last night accused of a “systematic cover-up” when it emerged that someone at the House of Commons had deleted internet details about a key European ally with a far-right past. Politically embarrassing information about Michal Kaminski, a Polish politician who now leads the Tories in the European parliament, was removed from Wikipedia by someone in the Commons three days after the alliance was formed.
Chris Bryant, the government’s new minister for Europe, called on the Conservatives to “come clean” after the Observer discovered that details of Kaminski’s previous membership of the far-right National Revival of Poland party had been mysteriously removed.
The information was deleted on 25 June by someone using a computer connection directly traceable to the House of Commons. The European Conservatives and Reformists Group, which Kaminski leads and in which the Tories are founder members, was formed on 22 June.
Cuts are in the air this conference season, but none of the parties are calling for these ones. The BBC reports that British Airways is cutting 1,700 jobs and introducing a two-year pay freeze for cabin crew. Evidently asking employees to work for free, as the airline did a few months ago, didn’t do the trick.
Meanwhile, the Daily Express reports that little seems safe from the Conservatives attempts to out-cut Labour and the Lib Dems. Ministers’ pay to be cut. MPs’ jobs to go. All but the lowest paid civil servants to have their pay frozen. …
Tory conference opens, and it’s time to party like it’s 1994
A few thousand Tories are converging on Manchester today, with two issues dominating discussion: Europe and welfare cuts. Ah, and there we were thinking The Major Years were but a distant memory.
On a more positive note, the Tories will be singing today from the localism song-book, with Caroline Spelman championing the party’s conversion to local control of local services – an interesting about-turn for an MP who opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution, and believes central government should impose council tax freezes from Whitehall.
Ministerial …
As the Tories gather for their conference, it is very tempting to suspect that, despite the Cameron makeover of the party, they are still unreconstructed hateful fire-breathers underneath.
Just look at a couple straws in the wind which have re-emerged in the last few days.
It is tempting to think that the old “posh” Tories still exist. That basically the Conservative party is the party of the rich. Does the bumbling Eric Pickles flat-cap schmooze-over mean anything? No, it would seem if you look at what the Tory party regards as a “typical family”. Extrapolations on Liberal Conspiracy reveal that the …
Liberal Conspiracy has the story:
Despite the persistent criticism that it has allied itself with extremists, David Cameron’s Conservative Party now sits in the European Parliament with the European Reformists and Conservatives group (ECR), led by Poland’s Michal Kaminski – a man allegedly with a racist and homophobic past.
But so far it has gone unreported that another ally of the Conservatives in Europe has a much more serious and recent record of homophobia.
Valdemar Tomaševski, MEP from Lithuania, and member of the Tories’ Euro coalition, is on record as having branded homosexuality a “perversion”.
Not only that, I can now reveal for the
…
Do you remember Section 28, Clause 28 or even Section 2A? That awful piece of legislation introduced by the Conservatives back in 1988 prevented the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Thankfully it was repealed in Scotland on 21 June 2000 and then across the rest of the UK on 18 November 2003 – although living in Kent in 2004 was bad enough when the Conservative controlled County Council introduced their own mini-version of Section 28!
To be precise, the Act said; “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching …
From Bedfordshire on Sunday:
Snubbed tory leader Nicky Attenborough has launched a scathing attack on her party claiming Monday’s open primary to elect a mayoral candidate was ‘hijacked’…
In Mrs Attenborough’s email, copied in to Tory chief David Cameron and leaked to Bedfordshire on Sunday, she says: ‘Exactly why should anyone become a member of the Conservative Party when they can walk off the streets into any selection meeting and choose the most unsuitable candidate, if they want, without knowing anything about them, or go to a meeting with the leader without having to pay £20 for the privilege…
‘What followed was
…
So writes The Independent:
David Cameron’s charm offensive has failed to attract new members to the Tories – or keep hold of tens of thousands of people who were already in the party when he arrived.
Local Conservative parties have lost almost a quarter of their rank-and-file members since Mr Cameron took over in late 2005…
The total membership in more than 200 constituency associations – barely a third of the overall number
…
Last week the Conservatives produced a video about their history and “greatest achievements.”
Now the Liberal Democrats have rebutted their “progressive” claims with: “Don’t let the Tories airbrush history” – pointing out a few things they missed.
A Liberal Democrat MP has accused both the Tories on Bristol council and one of the city’s newspapers of misrepresenting a National Lottery grant to a gay group. The Bristol Evening Post ran a story yesterday on Educational Action Challenging Homophobia (EACH). The highly-respected group has been awarded £391,668 by the Big Lottery Fund for a project reaching out to LGBT young people.
EACH said on its website:
“Throughout the next five years this will be spent upon EACH’s ground-breaking project, REACH: supporting lesbian, gay or bisexual young people develop a sense of pride in their identity and help their peers and adults in young people’s settings challenge homophobic bullying.”
The leader of the Conservative group on Bristol City Council, Councillor Richard Eddy, told the paper the grant was “mistaken and misguided” and “an outrageous waste of money.”
Retailers who sell violent video games and 18-rated DVDs to children cannot be prosecuted because of a legal blunder 25 years ago. Dozens of prosecutions under a 1984 Act have been dropped because the government of the day failed to notify the European Commission about the law. But previous prosecutions will stand, according to the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS).
Lib Dem shadow culture, media and sport secretary Don Foster was quick to react to the news:
The Conservative’s incompetence when they were in Government has made laws designed to prevent video piracy and protect
…
The Chairman of Gosport Conservative Association is the latest to show the party’s true colours by making sexist comments in an interview for Channel 4 News.
Alan Scard is overseeing the selection of a Parliamentary candidate for Gosport, to replace Peter Viggers MP who is standing down after claiming £1645 on his expenses for a duck house.
When asked whether he would support David Cameron’s appeal for more women in Parliament, Mr Scard said,
Rather bizarrely, that looks to be the view of the Conservative Party’s Press Office. At the tail end of July, their attitude towards bloggers caught some attention following the refusal of a Conservative press officer to even email an already published letter to a Conservative blogger.
PR Week this week reports that the Conservatives have now changed tack somewhat:
The party has adapted its blogger relations policy after a staffer caused a storm in the Tory blogosphere by admitting the party’s press office does not consider blogs ‘important’…
Lib Dem Voice has covered before the growing embarrassment to the Tories of David Cameron’s decision to withdraw his party from the centre-right grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP, and to establish a new right-wing grouping with an eccentric, ragbag group of Euro MPs.
This came to a head last month, when Edward McMillan-Scott, a former leader of the Tory party in the European Parliament, was expelled for standing against a Polish MEP, Michal Kaminski, for the post of Vice-President of the European Parliament – Mr Kaminski was subsequently elected leader of the Tories’ new Euro grouping. And now Mr McMillan-Scott has gone on the record in the Yorskshire Post to reveal precisely why he decided to make a stand against the Tory party’s latest descent into Euro lunacy:
Although Kaminski was nominated by the new Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) created by David Cameron, I decided to take the issue head on, even at the discomfiture of my own party. I did this at great personal and political risk – I could have lost everything and have now lost the whip – but I did it on principle.
It was not my principle – it was a higher one. To oppose a menacing political movement at a key moment in Europe’s politics. … my Yorkshire colleague, Timothy Kirkhope – leader of the Conservative MEPs – who that day had been elected leader of the ECR, was simply replaced by Kaminski. …
It has now been disclosed, as Kaminski should have done to the Conservative Party when nominated for Vice-President, that he has had fascist links – he was a member of Poland’s notorious fascist National Revival (NOP) – and he tried, as its MP, to cover up one of the worst anti-Jewish atrocities in wartime Europe.
Three weeks after the Tories tried to sneak out the announcement that they had formed a new right-wing European parliamentary grouping made up of some of Europe’s more, erm, eccentric and extreme characters comes news of the first Tory casualty – ConservativeHome’s Tim Montgomerie tweets:
Edward Macmillan-Scott MEP expelled from Cons Party for disobeying instructions from new EP grouping on elections for VP of Parliament
The news doesn’t come as a complete shock – on 25 June, Mr McMillan-Scott voiced “real concerns” about the Tories’ new Euro friends, commenting:
Despite what David Cameron has said there are already indications that some
…
Even to suggest today there are 2 Big Stories other than The One Big Story seems a trifle daft – the news that spread late yesterday evening of the death of Michael Jackson has dominated, and will continue to dominate, news coverage this weekend. RIP the ‘King of Pop’, of course, but spare a thought, too, for Farrah Fawcett, whose death was also announced yesterday, and has been rather overshadowed. If Michael’s death can be likened to that of Princess Diana’s in August ‘97, I guess that makes Farrah the Mother Teresa of June ’09. Anyway…
BBC …
The creation of the Conservatives’ new right-wing group in the European Parliament is welcome as a source of more media attention to the Parliament. The Group is promoting its “Prague Manifesto” as a statement of its conservative guiding principles.
The European Liberal Democrats – currently numbering, across the 27 EU states, four prime ministers, nine EU commissioners, 64 Ministers in 20 governments, 75 MEPs, and the Sec-Gen of NATO – made our own Stuttgart Declaration in 1976. The full declaration is 850 words. The main headings are:
1. The supreme task of the European Union
…
The announcement of the Tories’ formal establishment of the new anti-federalist grouping in the European Parliament – the European Conservatives and Reformists group – was (deliberately) buried by the party yesterday on a day when they realised political attention would be focused on the election to be Commons Speaker.
Ever since David Cameron’s panicked and rash promise in 2005 – at a time when his leadership bid was seriously flagging – that the Tories would desert the mainstream centre-right coalition, the European People’s Party (EPP), the Tory party has been grappling with how to achieve this without finding themselves isolated …
PR Week has a piece comparing the online strategies of the UK’s three main political parties. With a nod or two towards Obama’s use of social media, the article presents a report card on each party, compiled by their panel of experts.
Each party is examined on its approach, key players, leader and the involvement of MPs and grassroots.
The Conservatives are found to have “attracted the most plaudits so far,” while Labour’s “command and control mentality” is said to be hampering their efforts.
The verdict on the Liberal Democrats is that our “overall understanding of social media is impressive” but that …
The Independent (and most other ‘papers) have the story:
Two student Tories have been suspended from the party after making racist jokes during a meeting of the Oxford University Conservative Association .
At a drunken hustings for the next president of the association – which includes a host of Tory politicians among its alumni – student politicians were invited to outperform each other with racist jokes. A master of ceremonies told them to repeat ‘the most inappropriate joke you have ever told’.
Last Sunday Nick Gallagher, who was running for the post of Political Officer, a role that requires him to liaise with Tory central office, was also asked to name his least favourite minority.
Whuch party costs you most in Council Tax? Well, according to the coming year’s figures, it’s Tory-run councils which are levying the biggest increases: a whopping 30 of the top 40 council tax rises have been imposed by the Conservatives. And one of the highest in the country was West Oxfordshire – where none other than David Cameron is the local MP!
And on what, you may ask, are these Tory councils spending these council tax increases? Here are a few choice examples:
· Conservatives on Leicestershire County Council spent £6,000 hooking up …
As a Liberal Democrat supporter currently residing in Warsaw, Poland it is with great interest that I have read David Cameron will be in my adopted home town tomorrow to launch with Czech and Polish partners, a new right-wing group in the EU parliament. It is well documented that Cameron pledged to withdraw the Tories from the centre-right EPP grouping but as can be seen from this weekend’s Guardian this is not altogether a popular decision amongst senior Tories.
The Tory party has long made itself irrelevant on European issues – but what bothers me so much is that the …
Iain Dale has the story of Ralph Buckle, the chair of University of York Conservatives until he called for people to vote UKIP. He’s now an ex-chair and ex-member.
From the Sunday Mirror:
A Tory activist has been expelled from the party for posting a picture of himself with a Hitler moustache on Facebook … And beside it, in the “My Favourite Quotes” section, he allegedly made racist and sexist comments, including one saying: “I don’t hate everyone, I just hate women …
A spokesman said: “These comments are disgusting. He has no place in the party. He is being expelled immediately.”
Daniel O’Docherty had been chair of the Birmingham University Conservatives until a few weeks ago.
Damian McBride’s indefensibly puerile emails seeking to smear senior Tories (and Nadine Dorries) have left David Cameron understandably livid:
David Cameron is demanding a personal apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown over e-mails sent by an adviser discussing smearing the Tories. The Tory leader is “absolutely furious” and is calling on Mr Brown to give a guarantee that such messages will not be sent again, a spokeswoman said.
Many will argue – no matter which party they support – that this is the very least Mr Brown should do. It does not matter that he is not personally …
The Electoral Commission is investigating tens of thousands of pounds the Conservative Party has received from the Said family, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Wafic Said was a key figure in the highly controversial Al-Yamamah arms deal between Saudi Arabia and the UK. Allegations of corruption surrounding the deal were being investigated by staff at Britain’s Serious Fraud Office – until they were ordered to drop the investigation because it was supposedly against the national interest. Tough on crime? Only when it suits.
Although the Liberal Democrats – and Norman Lamb in particular – have been vocal in their criticisms of …
There may be one or two of you who haven’t yet seen the toe-curling embarrassment that was last week’s attempt by Tory party chairman Eric Pickles to defend MPs’ second homes on BBC1’s Question Time. Well, if you’re one of those those two people, then sit back and enjoy because it’s now been uploaded to YouTube for our viewing pleasure:
Fresh on the heels of the news that Conservative MEP Caroline Jackson is thinking of quitting the Conservative Party comes this news via The News of the World:
The Tories’ top donor today told the News of the World how he has defected to the eurosceptic UK Independence Party.
Spread-betting millionaire Stuart Wheeler has written a cheque for £100,000 to UKIP and said he will be voting for them in the June Euro elections …
In 2000, Mr Wheeler gave the Tories £5m – their biggest single donation.
He has continued to back them since, but has become increasingly angry at leader
…
I leave the country for just three days, and come back to find that, in my absence, the Tories have fallen to bits over tax. I must try this going away lark again, some time. (What do you mean, post hoc ergo propter hoc?)
Of course, it’s possible to claim it’s all a storm in a teacup: that (i) George Osborne’s announcement that the Tories will go into the next election promising to raise the top rate of tax, and (ii) Ken Clarke’s declaration that their inheritance tax cut for the rich was an “aspiration”, are merely a …
Lib Dem equalities spokesperson Lynne Featherstone has written to the Tories shadow foreign affairs spokesman William Hague asking him to clarify if his party intends to join forces with a Polish party in the European parliament known for its homophobic remarks. Politics.co.uk reports:
The party in question is called the Polish Law and Justice party. The Tories are being pulled towards them after leaving their grouping in the European parliament – the centre-right European People’s party. It was the culmination of a promise David Cameron made while running to be party leader, but he must now form a grouping with at least six other parties to earn EU recognition and funding.
But Liberal Democrats and Labour warned the party could easily be thrown into the arms of non-mainstream parties, putting them on “the lunatic fringe” of European politics. Senior politicians from the Law and Justice party have made homophobic statements, as well as describing Barack Obama’s election in the US as marking “the end of white man’s civilisation”, the Liberal Democrats said.
The full text of Lynne’s letter to Mr Hague is below:
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