2008 October 23 - Guy Fawkes' blog

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Foreign Donors Row, Compare and Contrast

Over at the New Statesman Martin Bright lists three foreign donors who routed £50,000 each via British companies to the Tories. The Daily Mail has hit on Robin Saunders, the foxy City financier, paying for a table at a Tory fundraiser with a personal cheque for £6,600, which the Tories returned (because she is an American) and she replaced it with a company cheque. Compare the total of £156,600 given by four foreign donors via British companies to the Tories with the £4,125,000 given by Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian national, to Labour.

Mittal even managed to get Blair to do PR for his company as part of the deal…

Labour’s attack is being marshalled by a re-invigorated spin and smear operation and nobody should under-estimate the powers of the returning Dark Lord. The Tories now have a real fight on their hands, the playing fields of Eton and St Paul’s clearly have not equipped them to deal with Mandelson. This is going to be a long dirty fight.

Icelandic Terrorrists Identified

Those Icelandic fundamentalists even have their own propaganda site. Gordon saved us from the Icelandic terror threat by cutting off their funding and freezing their assets. Err, except now he intends to lend them £3 billion of British taxpayers money… doh!

Government of the Spinners, by the Spinners for the Spinners

click to enlarge

The House of Lords Communications Committee had the head of the civil service Gus O’Donnell in for a hearing yesterday (video). One of the reasons the chief mandarin gave for the doubling in “communications staff” over the last decade was that there were mounting demands on government communication officers to deal with the increase in political blogs and the growing number of journalists.

“Be very careful what these numbers mean. [There are] 3,000 journalists in the BBC alone – that’s just one institution,” said O’Donnell, “You could easily turn the statistics round and ask ‘why has it gone up so little’.” Well he could ask that, but taxpayers would ask the opposite.

Guido has in four years only twice been contacted by a government spin merchant unprompted.