Well, it’s been quite a week. The weekend will be even tougher. At least for me. I’ve got a half marathon to run. Well, stagger.
Of course, the papers are full of scandal stories, but what I find a little odd is that there’s so little question of what the meat of this story is.
Everyone agrees that Labour made a big mistake in registering donations under the name of someone who wasn’t the actual donor. That’s bad, inecusable wrong, to quote Labour Cabinet ministers. Yet what I don’t understand is apart from the foolishness in doing this, what it was all supposed to achieve? There’s a lot of burbling about a business park in Durham, but I’m willing to stake my reputation that ministers were never anywhere near that.
I’m willing to bet right now, that in the end there’ll be revealed to be no real motive. It’ll just have been a cock up in the party. That’s not to excuse it. You bring in transparency rules for a purpose, and they have to be stuck to. It’s just that it makes my frustration with this story even greater. This was something that could have been avoided. After all, Abrahams was prepared to give money to Hilary Benn under his own name when asked. So he wasn’t that desperate to hide his donations.
By the way, for those of you who remember the Sedgefield by-election, three time failed Lib Dem candidate Greg Stone crops up here, talking about Labour in the North East. He says, by way of comparing the Labour party to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party (nice one, Greg) that there is
“quite a lot of leakage between local authorities and the private sector”.
It takes a quite monumental amount of chutzpah for someone who quit as Newcastle’s Cabinet member for regeneration to join a regeneration cosultancy with contracts with Newcastle City Council to say that.
2 Comments
November 30, 2007 at 3:07 pm
He’s your best mate isn’t he?
December 15, 2007 at 2:48 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce