No Hain, no gain
So, Peter Hain has resigned his post, or posts (how can one man be in charge of work, pensions and Wales?), over the undeclared donations made when he went for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party in September 2006. He seems to have spent almost 200,000 quid on this campaign, failing to declare 103,000 of it. The joke of which is, he was eliminated in the second round, coming fifth. What a waste of money. It just shows you can't spend your way out of unpopularity. Hain has hung on to his job, or jobs, for about three weeks since the story broke, saying he'd been too "busy" to remember to declare the money. I don't care why he didn't declare it, or that he's one of those Blairite sellouts who once demonstrated against Apartheid and was a member of the Anti-Nazi League but now seems content to wag his tail and do what he's told and in fact is such a wet Blairite he was able to become a Brownite without anyone noticing, I just want to know: what on earth did he spend all that money on? It's not as if he was a presidential candidate crossing 50 states to drum up support - it was an election within the party. A few phonecalls, surely? If I was a member of the think-tank that exists only in name, the Progressive Policies Forum, who donated much of the money, I'd certainly want to see some invoices, even if I didn't exist.(By the way, does anybody know how to type a pound sign and for it not to come out all weird like this - £ - when the blog is published?)
posted by Andrew Collins @ 3:18 PM
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He spent it on bunting.
The pound signs look ok to me ... £££
It's a valid point though - what did he actually spend the money on? What is it about the job that makes it worth so much time and money to get it, unless it opens up the opportunity for some fairly hefty kickbacks of one sort or another. The whole thing stinks.
You may have to use the HTML code for a pound sign which is "£" (everything within the double quotes).
Did you see Alex James on Question TIme last night? A lady in the audience asked how anyone could spend so much money on self promotion, and that there should be a cap on such spending. Alex James replied 'That's not much. For a marketing campaign, that's nothting...'. I don't think he endeared himself to the audience...
For pound signs, this symbol usually works for me: GBP ;-)
"£", eh? Thanks for the tip.
You're right, Jason H, Alex did himself no favours on Question Time. He seemed hugely uncomfortable from his first answer onwards, fiddling with his chin and his fringe. His louche style didn't quite work in those surroundings, did it?
I was interested to see how he would function in that environment, and sadly he didn't come across well at all. His taxing drugs quip went down terribly, and it was painful to watch him squirming when it was his turn coming up to give an answer. I'm really surprised that he agreed to do it. Some of the left field guests they have on their acquit themselves well (unlike quite a few of the politicians!), but it was a bit car crash telly when it came to his turn. Shame really as I like him, though of late it seems you can't avoid him in some papers or Sunday supplements. Or on TV programmes. Or radio shows...
There, not their, dammit!
Yes, overexposed would cover it. I understand he now makes cheese.
*tries in vain to find any magazine or newspaper in which Alex is not talking about making cheese*
I loathe the way people like Alex James are asked to participate in political shows in order to make them more populist. I really have no interest in the opinions of a nitwit popinjay who spent the best part of the Nineties off his tits, and now has a pretend job as a farmer/cheesemaker/journalist.
£100 grand? Even with my poor memory, I think I'd remember that. Once politics become visibly less corrupt, people might start to get interested again, Alex James or no Alex James. And as for Ken Livingston's 'medicinal' 10am whiskies, don't get me started...
I too wish Ken had just admitted he needed a nip to keep him going, rather than using the "medicinal purposes" defence.
Actually, I will be watching Alex on cocaine on Monday. (On the subject of cocaine, on Panorama.)
Agree on the Alex James front.
It's odd (but excellent) how Damon has emerged as the most respected and admired of the lot, when towards their commercial decline he was the most publically mocked.
Star-shaped is a great rockumentary, while I think of it.
It has some strange habits, this blog software, when it comes to rendering characters. Though the apostophe problem is caused by using typing into Word first to use the spell checker. I think it uses quite raw HTML so you have to use HTML special character syntax. The trouble with explaining how to do a pound sign is that it comes out as a pound sign and you can't see the codes. In words you type ampersand hash 163 semi colon:
£
Have the patience? Go for Jons GBP solution; much easier!
I read Alex James's autobiography, and he comes across just terribly. Incredibly smug. He seems to think his Groucho club antics in the company of Hirst and Allen were amusing rather than appalling. And as for how he treated women ...
John
I must admit, John, I actually admired Alex for his honesty of how appallingly he treated the women. It would have been far easier to gloss over it or tidy up the truth. Also, did you not think: this man can actually write, which is far from a given in showbiz autobiographies.
Re the £ sign, you probably just need to go into Blogger, then go to Settings... Formatting and change the encoding drop down to "Universal (Unicode UTF-8)".
The technical reason for this is that the text appears to be published in the UTF-8 character set (which sometimes used more than one byte per character, hence the extraneous symbol) whereas the "meta data" your blog is published in is incorrectly telling browsers that it is ASCII encoded.
I wouldn't normally bore people with such technical details, it's just, well, I don't get to talk to people about character encodings very often, so I take every chance I get.
Interestingly, Chris, it is actually set to that particular code. I just looked.
I think the problem is more to do with the character encoding that the browser thinks is being used. The content is in Unicode (UTF-8) but the browser thinks it is ASCII. If you change the encoding of your browser (in Firefox it's View->Character Encoding->Unicode) then the pound sign will appear correctly formatted. You might have to ask your webmaster to ensure that the page is being served as Unicode.
Or something like that, it's just a hobby.
Andrew, you may want to try using '£' to get a pound symbol. Just in case what I've just typed gets converted to a pound symbol (and I look a complete twit!) it reads ampersand followed by the word pound and finished off with a semi-colon.
By the way - podcast with your good self and Mr Herring - yes, yes, yes! I miss your radio show on 6music, not to mention the likes of Mr Jupitus and Mr Coe.
Try "£"
Blimey, (Another) Chris, I think you've cracked it! You're a genius.
I have mixed feelings about Hain because I think he came forward in the first place and volunteered the information that he'd cocked up the declaration of the donations. That he doesn't see it's an obscene amount of money is hardly to his credit but then I don't know how much the other campaign's cost (hopefully it was a lot less, in which case: good). The mixed feelings really come in because he only had to resign after our whiter-than-white and fully accountable police have reluctantly and without any glee had to launch a very public full-scale investigation into the matter (not that their actions would be politically motivated in any way).
I'm glad you've spoken out about Hain - somehow he seems to have been beyond criticism for recent activity because of his fantastic crusading in the 1970s.
But he quit the Liberals as soon as he saw his opportunity, and could in power have used his gravitas and experience to get a worldwide consensus together, designed to get shut of Mugabe. But he didn't. Greasy pole, nose in trough etc etc.
Why are the police involved? Surely it's an internal Labour party matter? He broke their rules, but as far as I can tell he hasn't broken any laws of the land.
John
It's always been "cash for questions".
People don't just give money to political parties for nothing. In Scotland, the current scandal is over a major donor to the Lib Dems who later gets a controversial new motorway diverted away from his estate by the Lib Dem transport minister (yes, we had Lib Dems in some sort of power in Scotland). Every donation needs to be investigated, I say. See what they gave and what they got out of it. I bet not a lot of it makes pretty reading.
Get lost, Hainy.
PS Alex James was a terrible guest for QT.
Alex James seemed uncomfortable and out of place on Question Time, but I'm inclined to think that, all things being equal, that is to his credit. He wasn't on the Salisbury audience wavelength, despite, apparently, going to school round there. I find the whole Question Time setup a bit smug.
I assume he was on it in the first place in connection with his Panorama programme on Monday, where he will take his knowledge of cheese production to the Colombians.
Oh and as for Hain, regardless of his politics, he should have resigned straight away. It was inevitable that he would have to go after such a cock-up, which is at the very least what it is, but he's managed to make himself and his party look (even more) shifty and desperate.
Yes, but £100,000. That's One Hundred Arsing Thousand Pounds! What the hell did he spend it on? Did The Labour Party hold a dodgy phone in poll charging £1.50 a minute. Press 1 for Hain, Press 2 for Hilary Benn etc.
I can't help thinking I could've mounted a more successful campaign to become Deputy Leader of The Labour Party. And for a damn sight less money too. Sod it, I'm going for the Leadership itself. It's what Labour really need, a dour,grumpy overweight Scotsman in charge.
I was eligible to vote in the deputy leadership election, and didn't get a single communication from any candidate. I did however get a leaflet from my trade union, which gave details of all the candidates, but which "suggested" that I vote for their "preferred" candidate.
I don't mean to be cynical, but I suggest that most donations probably went on wining and dining the executive committees of such organisations...
Sorry about my unhelpful "use the HTML code" comment - turns out the code I typed got converted into the pound symbol so that you couldn't see the code. I quite deserve the reply.
Anyway, for future reference, you can find all the codes you need here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/sgml/entities.html (hope this shows up correctly)
They're in section 24.2.1.
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