Four Suspended From Labour Party in U.K. Scandal

[maddezmom]

Source: NYT

Caught by concealed cameras as they offered to trade influence for cash, three former government ministers were suspended from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party, triggering a new political furor Tuesday as Britain nudges toward elections.

The Labour Party announced the suspensions late on Monday, hours after a documentary on Channel 4 television showed the former ministers, Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, talking to an undercover reporter they believed to be a representative of an American lobbying company. A Labour legislator, Margaret Moran, was also suspended, The Press Association news agency reported.

Mr. Byers, the former transport minister, told the interviewer that he was like a “cab for hire” and charged $7,500 a day for using his contacts to secure advantage for private companies.

Mr. Hoon, who was defense secretary at the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said he wanted to use his international contacts to make money. He set his prices at $4,500 a day — the same amount as Ms. Hewitt, the former health secretary.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/world/europe/24britain.html

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link to the Channel 4 program, Dispatches: Politicians for Hire
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/4od#3051050

[Ken Burch]

1. Well, Labour is probably still doomed in this election

The only good that could come of that is that it will finally break the grip of the right-wing "New Labour" cult on the party. What worked in 1997 doesn't work anymore, and if Labour is to recover, it's only going to do so by reaching out to the people it's been driving away since Tony Blair took over.

That doesn't mean doing things exactly as they were done in the Eighties(if nothing else, no Labour leadership will ever again be that clueless about media)but it does mean breaking with the obsessive anti-left mindset the party's had for fifteen years or so, and restoring internal democracy and the role of the party conference as a meaningful venue for debating and creating party policy as well.

[dipsydoodle]

2. Yes - finally break the grip

and maybe heralding the return of an albeit weakened old Labour.

[Ken Burch]

3. Not so much "Old Labour"(which was always a fairly meaningless term

including both the Eighties Left Wing types and old-time Harold Wilson-styled moderates, and was basically designed to sent the message that "anyone who questions the infallible greatness of Tony Blair is just a doddering old fart")but "Next Labour", one that could combine the media savvy of the Blairites(their one valuable contribution to the party)with a new and genuinely radical social democratic/socialist set of ideas.

[No Elephants]

4. How did a war mongering neo theo like Blair ever get to head the left anyway?

That should be a real wake up call for the DLCers here.

[Ken Burch]

10. Labour had lost three straight elections

And even though the party already had a solid lead in the polls when he sought the leadership, Blair was able to bullshit them into believing that they could ONLY win if they were led by a poor-bashing, union-hating militaristic psycho with an apocalyptic religious streak...er, I mean a "moderniser"(to use the UK spelling).


Blair was also able to take advantage of moves by the previous two Labour leaders(Neil Kinnock and John Smith)to reduce internal democracy in the party(driven by the false belief that Labour had lost because people who weren't synical elitists had too much of a say in what the party stood for), which allowed him to run the party as something like a free-market Stalinist(minus the actual executions, but still...)

The Eighties left was not without its problems...but the brutality with which they were silenced or even driven out of the party was never justifies and left Labour without any core values at all.

If that party is to avoid long-term decline and collapse, this has to change. Anti-democratic and anti-socialist "centrism" is not a sustainable political model for Labour.

[axollot]

5. I have little love for the Neo-Labour party - but The Tory days were horrid!!

I hope they do not vote them back in - the first thing they plan to take down is Auntie (aka BBC).

Sad.

Cheers
Sandy

[PassingFair]

6. That's ILLEGAL there?

It sounds like SOP for US politics.

:crazy:

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Not illegal, but the party thinks (correctly) it brings them into disrepute

It's possible that if Byers had actually done what he claimed on the tape to have already done, it would be illegal (or at least against Commons regulations), because MPs are meant to declare paid interests like that. But everyone seems to agree he was actually spinning a line to the fake PR firm to make himself look more influential than he really is, so that he could ask for more money. The 4 are still MPs (all had already said they won't stand at the next election), they are just suspended from the Labour whip - shunned, effectively. It means they can't use party researchers and resources, but since they're not standing again, that's not much of a problem to them.

[T_i_B]

7. Just so you all remember...

Geoff Hoon was UK defence secretary at the time of the Iraq war.

How the mighty have fallen.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. "Some ex-ministers, one of them Byers, ...

...Revealed themselves greedy and liars
Both Hoon and Pat Hewitt
Said pay me and blew it
But they all pale into insignificance beside the post-prime-ministerial £20 million of Tony Blair."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/03/23/jenny-diski/dispatched/