Tory crime allegations: Why stop with Shapps?

Tags

action, Action Fraud, allegation, by election, case, computer, Conservative, contempt, court, crime, criminal, David Cameron, error, expenses, fraud, George Osborne, government, Grant Shapps, How To Corp, Iain Duncan Smith, IT, legal, Metropolitan, michael dugher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortgage, paddock, Parliament, police, politics, Tories, Tory, TrafficPaymaster, Vox Political

Isn’t this fraud? The man pictured is Grant Shapps, but his name tag claims he is Michael Green – the name he used to run How To Corp before and after he became an MP. Isn’t that fraud – gaining a financial advantage by deception (in this case, the pretence that he wasn’t Grant Shapps)?

Picture David Cameron’s bemusement, as he stares around the Cabinet at its next meeting, wondering why Labour has asked him to order an investigation into criminal allegations against Grant Shapps – when George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith are in the room.

Labour’s Shadow Cabinet Office minister Michael Dugher has written to Cameron, calling for Shapps to be suspended and an investigation launched under the ministerial code of conduct after the police said one of his companies may have committed “an offence of fraud”.

The official Conservative line is that the police have closed investigations into Shapps’s How To Corp, there is no case to answer, and any further allegations should be put to the Party (as Dugher has) or the police. The source added: “To suggest there are allegations left unchallenged is actionable”, implying a threat of legal action if Labour persists.

But this is to deny the result of the police inquiry. The Metropolitan Police stated in a letter that the company’s sales of TrafficPaymaster software, that ‘spins and scrapes’ content from other websites, “may constitute an offence of fraud, among others”, but that this would not be investigated further.

Why not? A crime is a crime and the police are specifically employed to prevent it.

It seems that Tory ministers really are above the law.

Look at how the Met brushed off Vox Political‘s attempt to have George Osborne investigated for fraud, after he paid mortgage interest on a paddock with taxpayers’ money, claiming it was an allowable expense on property he needed to perform his duties as an MP – and then sold it off in a package with other land and a neighbouring farmhouse for around £1 million and pocketed the cash.

Apparently it was already under investigation, according to the policewoman who called at the end of last year. Have you heard anything about it since?

Perhaps it was one of the fraud matters that got lost by computer error.

And what about Iain Duncan Smith’s habitual offence of lying to Parliament? He has done this so many times that nobody can say it is unintentional, and he has never apologised for the factual inaccuracies. This is an offence of Contempt of Parliament and according to convention he should have been ejected from the House of Commons months ago and a by-election called for his seat.

If the Conservatives can’t keep their own house clean, why isn’t Labour demanding action on these matters?

Tory department of dirty deeds swings into pre-election action

Tags

BBC, benefit, benefits, central office, clown, Coalition, Conservative, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, disabled, DWP, Ed Miliband, Facebook, foreigner, Iain Duncan Smith, Job Centre Plus, Labour, Liam Byrne, Media, michael dugher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, nasty, Party, protest, sickness, smear, social, Stephen Timms, tom pride, Tony Blair, Tories, Tory, Twitter, UKIP, unemployment, Vox Political, welfare

The Nasty Party is at it again, spreading dire warnings about its political foes and trawling opponents’ appearances on the social media for anything it can use against them.

Labour and – especially – UKIP candidates had better watch out; these are people who will take any apparently-innocuous off-the-cuff comment and turn it into galloping racism (for example) before your eyes!

The Party of Smears kicked off in typical fashion yesterday by attacking UKIP as “a collection of clowns” in a protest party with no positive policies, that was primarily opposed to foreigners.

The comment about being a party of protest will also ring in the ears of Labour candidates, after former party leader Tony Blair warned Ed Miliband that Labour must not be seen as one.

According to the BBC, UKIP reckons it has evidence that Conservative Central Office is spreading smears about its candidates, after spending months trawling through the Twitter and Facebook accounts of anyone likely to be a candidate.

Meanwhile The Guardian has reported a warning to Labour MPs from party vice-chairman Michael Dugher, that they will all be under “intense scrutiny” from the Tories for the next 18 months to two years, with Conservatives “scouring” opposition MPs’ Twitter accounts (and, we can well expect, Facebook pages) for damaging or embarrassing material.

“The message was that while you might not be household names now, any slip can instantly make you one and do huge damage to the party. The next 18 months is crucial. And the next few weeks are crucial ahead of the June spending review,” a ‘source’ is quoted as saying.

Facebook has already been the subject of controversy over alleged links with the Conservative Party, after blogger Tom Pride said he had been told by a Job Centre Plus employee that the Department for Work and Pensions had conspired with the social media giant to create a blackout around his blog because it criticised the Coalition government.

That blackout spread to other blogs including Vox Political, in a bid to choke off critical political writing, with potential readers warned that sites “may be unsafe” in an effort to turn them away. Although initially successful, with hits on this blog suffering during the early part of last week, the attack was routed after Facebook users were told that they were being manipulated. Hopefully, visits to this site will soon be back to pre-attack levels.

UKIP has taken the Tory attacks in its stride. The relatively young party has taken on nearly 2,000 candidates to contest the local elections on Thursday and has admitted it has not had time to check all their backgrounds properly. Therefore, the party says, it is glad the Conservatives are doing this job and has begun investigating six candidates over alleged links to the British National Party and other far-right groups.

UKIP sources have also stated their certainty that, if they were to investigate Conservative candidates in a similar manner, they might find “even more examples” to use in a counter-attack, summing up the Tory tactic as “morally reprehensible and downright dirty”.

“It isn’t scrutiny; it’s smear,” said a spokesperson.

Of course, this fighting among the right-wing, minority-interest parties (and if you don’t think the Tories are a minority-interest party, you haven’t been following their policies for the last three years) should be very helpful to Labour.

UKIP’s popularity splits the right-wing vote, meaning Labour has more chance to gain a majority in marginal council wards (and, by extension, marginal Parliamentary constituencies). At least, that’s one theory.

The problem is the fact that Labour voters might decide to defect on Thursday, as well – maybe even to UKIP, despite the fact that that party’s position is further to the right than the Conservatives’.

Much of this problem, Labour believes, lies in policy – with many people unaware of what most members of the Labour front bench actually do.

And this is compounded, in my opinion, by the fact that the one policy area in which Labour’s position is known is such a cast-iron, vote-losing, disaster for the party: Welfare/Work and Pensions.

Yet a Guardian article about a possible reshuffle makes no mention of Liam Byrne and his deputy Stephen Timms whatsoever – despite the fact that their decision not to oppose a blatantly illegal stitch-up of the system by the Tory DWP secretary Iain Duncan Smith enraged Labour heartlands across the country. Indeed, a fellow blogger recently headlined an article with the profanity (which I’ll edit here) ‘Liam Byrne f*ck off’.

It is long past time that Ed Miliband told him to do so. If Labour does not abandon Byrne’s horrifying attempt to equal the Tories’ brutality towards Britain’s most vulnerable people, in favour of a new policy that attacks the causes of unemployment, sickness and disability rather than the symptoms, then Labour will lose the next general election.

And that will be an even graver disaster for us all.