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INTENTIONAL OPACITY?

'In the Commons, Mr Pickles said two of the people whose names were used for donations - Ray Ruddick and Janet Kidd - were also listed as directors of Durham Green Developments, which applied to build the 540-acre business park south of Durham City, near junction 61 of the A1.

He called for a review of planning rules to ensure an applicant's "true identity" was known.

"Can you explain why government objections to the building of a business park on the established green belt of County Durham were suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn?"'

//

"What (was it) that first attracted the Labour government to the millionaire developer David Abrahams?"

Martin Horwood
Lib Dems

Perhaps it was New Labour's mastery of 'transparency'?

Hi Newsnight

Possible question tonight for any MP on your show

something perhaps along the following lines

“given that Cabinet Ministers and the PM have enormous influence, and can send our forces to war without a vote from Parliament, given that the intelligence services of all countries including our own routinely target the politicians of other countries, and look for indiscretions and mistakes with which to bring pressure to bear on them to influence their policies and decisions, do you see any merit in Cabinet ministers and the PM now submitting themselves to the same sort of routine ongoing security checks that they require of their senior civil servants and others in sensitive positions advising them?�

“Indeed why would they wish to exempt themselves from such standard and routine ongoing checks that would protect them as much as us?�

hope you might be able to ask something along these lines

best wishes
Bob Goodall
www.vetmps.org.uk

How brilliant is this: something is deemed to be seriously wrong so you device a set of rules to make sure the wrong and bad things aren’t done any more.

Then you get someone who doesn’t know (or is willing to claim he doesn’t know) a thing about the rules to run the whole thing – so when someone is caught out cheating – once again– you can just say ‘oh really sorry, we didn’t know what was going on but if we had known we would have known it was wrong but the person in charge who did know what was going on didn’t know it was wrong because he didn’t know the rules...’

How brilliant – and how untrustworthy!

All the rules in the world won’t hold back those who are willing to break the rules if they think they gain more by cheating...

Bob (#2) Excellent suggestion, but given that the Civil Service used to keep them in check, and that the trend over the past two decades has been for the parties to weaken the Civil Service in favour of the alleged glories of the de-regulated 'free-market', I fear it won't happen without a very radical change. Politicians like turkeys don't vote for Christmas. It does need to happen though, but how? At one time one might have looked to the Lords, but like the Civil Service and Armed Forces, that has been nobbled too.

Tonight's reporting of David Abraham's disguised donations to the Labour Party was excellent. However, it was illustrated with un-necessary close-up black-and-white images of Mr Abraham's facial features accompanied by music suggesting some kind of a sinister conspiracy.

For some reason your report reminded me of an anti-semitic propaganda film.

Might I suggest, to paraphrase Ali G, is it because he is Jewish?

Shame on Newsnight!

Is it just me or is there a sense that everything is a piece of knitting that is slowly unravelling? A list of horrifying possibilities is added to daily whether war, pestilence, bad behaviour of every kind, cosmic upheavals and financial chaos. The travails of a political party just add to the gaiety of the nation. Perhaps the missing ingredient is a human race that admits it's so sold on technology and shopping that it has forgotten the purpose of the technology, the shopping and of itself.
That all ignores football which appears to be seen as infinitely more important than almost anything.

Staggering isn't it - that politicians seem to be unaware of money laundering regulations. If a small business was to receive such sums of money they are required to verify in detail including passport identification the origin of such monies. Strange that the people who draft the legislation and can receive such lasrge sums of money don't seem to live by the same laws.

Good Evening,

Not Mr Paxman's best evening but then you did not have the most illuminating of guests (interview with Martin Bell was poor)nor did he get too incisive with his questions on a story that is starting to have leg and will run deeper as David Grossman suggested in his summary. However, the phone call with Mr Abrahams left two questions hanging in the air:

1. Who did supply the £5,000 to Harriet Harman if not Mr Abrahams as we must assume that none of the front donors actually contributed their own cash?;
2. What is the purpose of Mr Mendelsons letter to Mr Abraham and does this constitute an approach along the lines of previous routes for his donations and therefore right to Gordon's door?

I hope tomorrow evening takes this all a bit further.

I've just heard Mr Abrahams flush Gordon Brown's integrity down the toilet tonight.

The PM earlier today tried to distance himself from Mr Abrahams by saying he may have met him but couldn't recall any conversations with him. Meanwhile Mr Abrahams receives a letter today from Brown's chief fundraiser thanking him for his financial support over the years
and to ask for a meeting to discuss the way forward in the run up to the next election.

Why on Earth didn't Jeremy Paxman ask about Abrahams about Janet Dunn and the donation made in her name without her knowledge?

Why on Earth didn't he press Abrahams on why / who funded the Harman donation?

The phone interview with Mr Abrahams
was what Lord Copper calls 'a scoop'.
And the timing was just perfect to really upset night editors who had
put their papers to bed I'd guess!

Assuming the note he read out from Jon Mendelsohn was genuine - dates
remain fairly crucial I guess - it
does seem to turn the heat up on a
few of the politicians does it not?

According to 'The Guardian' article of August 8, 2007 announcing Jon Mendelsohn's appointment as Labour's Director General Election Resources:
"Mr Mendelsohn will report directly to cabinet minister Douglas Alexander, Labour's general election coordinator and Labour's General Secretary, Peter Watt." So did he?

Abraham's insistence that he was a supporter of Hilary Benn during the Deputy Leadership campaign also may imply that he responded to stories in the press about how Harriet had been so strapped for cash that she
had taken out a personal loan etc?

Hence perhaps the late registration of the £5,000 cheque from Ms Kidd??
Did he encourage friends to pass the hat round, after she'd won the post?

It all seems to get more confused?!
But politically more dangerous too?
I hope the investigating authorities get to the bottom of it all without keeping Newsnight viewers waiting for
more than 28 days ......

'Alexander pressed to reveal backers' by
Paul Hutcheon of 'Sunday Herald'
might also be of interest? What
bemuses outsiders is that these
politicians raise money for non
election campaigns when they are
sole-nominees ..... very strange.

Labour's leader in Scotland is
now on her third spin doctor in
so many months ... and this one
even thought the SNP were better
until he got the job with Wendy!

No sound track with online version of newsnight, so missed tonight's program. I saw him on South Africa's Sky News today - entirely unconvincing. However I miss the bojective and alternative views offered by Â鶹ԼÅÄ-2 : please fix sound on the online service!

The row over the Labor Party's illegal funding will give David Cameron a real problem. Last week at Prime Minister's Question Time, he took up much of the time going back and forth between the Northern Rock fiasco and the missing computer disc fiasco. Scandals this big are surely good for far more Brown Bashing than just one PMQT but now having to add a new topic to the agenda, however will he find a way to deliver so many barbs to one target in such a short time. Perhaps it should be lengthened to an hour...or two. :-)

Ben (#5) Surely you are not implying that Newsnight is responsible for our perceptions? It is we who make the connection, not Newsnight.

"I pulled the trigger, well I'm blessed, he's hit my bullet with his chest" P Geach (on intention 1989).

Is David Abrahams Jewish (yes, although not stated by anyone in the programme). Is David Abrahams suspected of making donations in a non-transparent way (yes, widely reported in the press). Is highlighting/questioning David Abrahams' opacity anti-Semitic or anti-underhandedness? Abrahams himself explains his actions on the grounds that he likes being an anonymous recluse. Other evidence will support or challenge that assertion in time no doubt.

If there's a chance of group exoneration through doing so, play the race card? It's unfortunate, but if the frequency of two or more classes covary in disproportionately relative to base-rates, people (and other animals too) infer that they are related. This is just how animals' neural nets work, and how statistics in science work too. There have, alas, been a large number of high profile dodgy Jewish people in the press in recent times, just as there have been a large number of black males in disorderly/criminal acts (the latter is also reflected in our Â鶹ԼÅÄ Office crime figures). Does this high joint frequency represent reality or just racism? This is an important question, as teachers have been accused of 'unwitting' and institutional racism over the very high exclusion rates of Black Caribbeans. British Jews, incidentally, comprise roughly the same proportion of the population as British Chinese, and they have, as a group, as high if not higher mean IQ than British Jews. They do not, however, appear in the news etc as often.

It's odd, but when one of the variables is socially DESIRABLE, higher than base rate frequency or salience is not attributed to racism e.g. Jews in the House of Lords, the higher than population base-rate frequency of Nobel Prize winners, or the greater athleticism of blacks etc). Maybe ethnic groups just differ in the frequency of expression of behaviours, i.e. statistically, some are at greater risk than others? (Note, SOME=NOT(ALL) and ALL=NOT(SOME)).

Food for thought?

Poor old government. I'm not so worried about the latest scandal becuase I don't think it's at all relevent to whether the government are doing a good job or not, what does worry me are:

The apauling conditions in some NHS hospitals and the increase in MRSA and CDifficile infections

The missing CD's

The rocketing price of rail travel. I paid 43 pound to travel from Colchester to London for a meeting this summer a similar journey 1 hr journey in Germany from Wuppertal to Cologne including tube would cost just 17.20 pounds. As a research student at Essex Uni now, I would have liked to have been able to go into London to conferences every now and then, but at a peak time travelcard cost of over 46 pounds next year plus conference fees of between 15-20 pounds it is just too much.

I don't want a leather armchair to travel in, I don't even care if the trains are old so long as they are CLEAN and REASONABLY safe. Nobody complained in the 1920's about sitting in third class on planks of wood, now we have to pay to sit in the uneccessary comfort of an executive bar. I'm sure what most people want is a FUNCTIONAL mode of transport that gets you from a to b with the minimum of fuss on time, clean and safe rather than pay well over the odds for creature comforts.

Ben @5,
that's poppycock, you are just cynically muddying the waters here.

The piece began with a close-up of Gordon Brown, no doubt implying sinister things about Scots' "facial features". There's an interview with one of the people whose names were used illegitimately... and his face is in close up too. Gosh. And as for the canny, duplicitious Â鶹ԼÅÄ, repeatedly using the man's name like that...

good work, Newsnight.

ON SMOKE, MIRRORS & COMPETITION

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