A lesson in fairness

IF I was a Londoner picking the city's mayor, I would rather vote for one of his pet newts than for 'Red' Ken Livingstone.

Anyone in their right might who remembers his appalling antics when he was leader of the old Greater London Council - the nuclear-free zone nonsense, his sympathy for the IRA when they were bombing London, his support for prostitutes and teenage gays and so forth - would feel the same.

But who, in a democracy, would deny this bolshie throwback to sixth-form student politics the right to put up at all?

Stand-up control freak Tony Blair.

So rigged in favour of his tame poodle, eventual winner Frank Dobson, was the complex electoral college system imposed on Labour choosing its mayoral candidate that we have a fix that stinks worse than a sewer.

What happened to the sacred one-member, one-vote that New Labour supposedly stands for?

Well, we know that principles don't stop the Prime Minister from getting his way, or his own man as candidate.

We saw him do the same trick with the selection of his now-ousted choice as the party's leader in the Welsh Assembly.

But such arrogance and contempt for democracy deserves a comeuppance. Though he would be as bad a mayor of London as he was as leader of the GLC, I hope Ken goes for broke, quits the party, splits New Labour and gives Blair a bloody nose by running in the contest as an independent.

For he would be sure to gain tens of thousands of votes of discontent over the way democracy and the electorate have been treated in the dirty and manipulative campaign to scupper him as a Labour runner.

Ken would not get my vote even if he could have it, but if he runs as a rebel, his campaign will get a pound or two from me.

It is high time that the high-handed Prime Minister and his Millbank commissars got a lesson in fairness and democracy, even if it has to be from an unreformed member of the loony Left.

Doesn't it say a lot about Mr Blair's integrity when he needs one from such an extreme quarter?

Cor, what a whopper!

IT was the Nazis' notorious propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, who once said that if you are going to tell a lie, make it a big one.

It is advice that seems to have been learned well by the modern-day storm-troopers of Greater Germany - sorry, the European Union.

For we heard last week from the scrap-the-pound campaign group, Britain in Europe (patron: Tony Blair) that a staggering eight million UK jobs would be lost if we left the EU. Well, for a start, which major political party in this country is even talking of us doing that? None, of course, but this whopper gets even better.

For the think-tank report on which this bogus, trumped-up scare - loosely translated as: 'The Euro-sceptic Tories will put you all on the dole' - was based made it clear that the cost in jobs if our EU membership was ended would be only 175,000 and only temporarily anyway.

What does this tell us of the credibility of the EU groupies in Britain in Europe?

I can do no better than the summary of the think tank's chief.

He said that either they were too thick to understand the report or were deliberately distorting it to generate scare-story headlines.

Either way, it suggests to me the Goebbels-sorts in the EU bunker are seeing the war turn against them and William Hague winning the battle to keep the pound - and are getting desperate.

They deserve the publicity

PERMISSIVE liberals are already aghast and I can picture Jack Straw going like hell at the Home Office's photo-copier to churn out copies of a new privacy Bill to protect politicians from the prying press. For the suddenly-strict Archbishop of Canterbury says politicians should have their extra-marital affairs, flings and even homosexuality exposed.

But bleat as they might that what they do in private does not make them less-able legislators, do not the voters have a right to make their judgment on this matter?

This is especially so when it comes down to the question of whether someone in public life can have an an-off switch for integrity, merrily putting on the probity in public as a politician while being sexual cheats or liars in their so-called private lives?

Oh, I know that Archbishop Carey's remarks are music to the ears of the intrusive tabloid newspapers who poke their noses into these other affairs of state to feed the prurience of snickering readers and so sell more copies.

But even if the Archbishop's views pander to such less-than-noble sentiments, in essence they uphold what decent people expect of those who would order their lives - that they are moral, upright people in all things.

Too often, we have had too many examples that lots of them are not.

And if nothing else, the standard set by the Archbishop will put on their best behaviour the bed-hoppers who would preach to the rest of us in parliament, and if not, deservedly, in the pillory for being hypocrites.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.