Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser

Labour threw open Britain's borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a "truly multicultural" country, a former Government adviser has revealed.

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a "conspiracy" within Government to impose mass immigration for "cynical" political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the "major shift" in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

"I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date."

The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

On Question Time on Thursday, Mr Straw was repeatedly quizzed about whether Labour's immigration policies had left the door open for the BNP.

In his column, Mr Neather said that as well as bringing in hundreds of thousands more migrants to plug labour market gaps, there was also a "driving political purpose" behind immigration policy.

He defended the policy, saying mass immigration has "enriched" Britain, and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.

But he acknowledged that "nervous" ministers made no mention of the policy at the time for fear of alienating Labour voters.

"Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.

"But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland."

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think tank, said: "Now at least the truth is out, and it's dynamite.

"Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock up but also a conspiracy. They were right.

"This Government has admitted three million immigrants for cynical political reasons concealed by dodgy economic camouflage."

The chairmen of the cross-party Group for Balanced Migration, MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, said: "We welcome this statement by an ex-adviser, which the whole country knows to be true.

"It is the first beam of truth that has officially been shone on the immigration issue in Britain."

A Home Office spokesman said: “Our new flexible points based system gives us greater control on those coming to work or study from outside Europe, ensuring that only those that Britain need can come. continues here

Editorial : We have always been accused of conspiracy theorisation, we on the right, undermined, under attack and under pressure and is that not the way of oppression to devalue the arguments of dissenters. Yet we know now that our extraordinary levels of immigration were for political reasons, to forever change the genetic makeup of this nation and gift to the left a sizable voting bloc. Yet we must not forget in all this the reprehensible actions of those on the purported right of mainstream political life, one thinks back to Margaret Thatcher’s, “swamping” statement made to Gordon Burns, on Granada televisions World in Action programme in 1979.

This comment of course, completely destroyed all hopes of National Front success at the ballot and helped to drive the National Front anti-immigrant vote, towards the Conservative party, thereby ensuring for the British people continued immigration, because after all, big-business likes immigration, it helps to lower wages, flood the labour market and thereby increase profit, both labour and conservative are two sides of the same wretched coin, looking to increase votes and party coffers. Yet the fictional battle of the parties is still played out and the British people still believe it to be true, the vote sways from one side to the other and nothing ever really changes, today of course rightist sentiment runs a course through British society, it is on the back of this that the British National Party have done so well, of course this means that the conservatives are likely to take office after the next election.

Already the owned press tire of the labour party, they to look to profit and if something doesn’t sell, if papers do not shift from newsstands, from corner shops, then they must move with the public mood, however, make no mistake, the press to do not and never have, looked to the best interests of the people, only to profit. It is all a game you see, all a rather well-crafted charade and the only response the people have is to avoid voting, to show their anger at contemporary politicking by disengagement. Of course such disengagement occurs on all sides of the political spectrum and it has to be said, it is the right who are more prone to vote, whilst those on the radical left are more likely be disinclined.

It is obvious to see that no one mainstream party has the interests of the general population at heart, Labours obvious policy of speeding through demographic change is on the face of it an illegal act ,although few it is that will say so, few if any taking action. Immigrant communities and indeed all minority communities are used by the left for political advantage, whilst the welfare of the majority is not even considered, perhaps it is worth concerning next time you place your cross just what the two mainstream political parties have done to your country and will continue to do given the chance, the power dear reader, rests with you.

Hillary Backers Decry Massive Obama Vote Fraud

With accusations of voter registration fraud swirling as early voting begins in many states, some Hillary Clinton supporters are saying: “I told you so.” 


Already in Iowa, the Obama campaign was breaking the rules, busing in supporters from neighboring states to vote illegally in the first contest in the primaries and physically intimidating Hillary supporters, they say. 


Obama’s surprisingly strong win in Iowa, which defied all the polls, propelled his upstart candidacy to front-runner status. But Lynette Long, a Hillary supporter from Bethesda, Md., who has a long and respected academic career, believes Obama’s victory in Iowa and in 12 other caucus states was no miracle. “It was fraud,” she told Newsmax. 


Long has spent several months studying the caucus and primary results. 


“After studying the procedures and results from all 14 caucus states, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories, my conclusion is that the Obama campaign willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically undermining the caucus process,” she said. 


In Hawaii, for example, the caucus organizers ran out of ballots, so Obama operatives created more from Post-its and scraps of paper and dumped them into ice cream buckets. “The caucuses ended up with more ballots than participants, a sure sign of voter fraud,” Long said. 


In Nevada, Obama supporters upturned a wheelchair-bound woman who wanted to caucus for Hillary, flushed Clinton ballots down the toilets, and told union members they could vote only if their names were on the list of Obama supporters. 


In Texas, more than 2,000 Clinton and Edwards supporters filed complaints with the state Democratic Party because of the massive fraud. The party acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s actions “amount to criminal violations” and ordered them to be reported to state and federal law enforcement, but nothing happened. 


In caucus after caucus, Obama bused in supporters from out of state, intimidated elderly voters and women, and stole election packets so Hillary supporters couldn’t vote. Thanks to these and other strong-arm tactics, Obama won victories in all but one of the caucuses, even in states such as Maine where Hillary had been leading by double digits in the polls. 


Obama’s win in the caucuses, which were smaller events than the primaries and were run by the party, not the states, gave him the margin of victory he needed to win a razor-thin majority in the delegate count going into the Democratic National Convention. 


Without these caucus wins, which Long and others claim were based on fraud, Clinton would be the Democrats’ nominee running against John McCain. 


Citing a detailed report on the voting results and delegate accounts by accountant Piniel Cronin, “there were only four pledged delegates between Hillary and Obama once you discount caucus fraud,” Long said. 


Dr. Long has compiled many of these eyewitness reports from the 14 caucus states in a 98-page, single-spaced report and in an interactive Web site: www.caucusanalysis.org. 


ACORN involvement 


The Obama campaign recently admitted that it paid an affiliate of ACORN, the controversial community organizer that Obama represented in Chicago, more than $832,00 for “voter turnout” work during the primaries. The campaign initially claimed the money had been spent on “staging, sound and light” and “advance work.” 


State and federal law enforcement in 11 states are investigating allegations of voter registration fraud against the Obama campaign. ACORN workers repeatedly registered voters in the name of “Mickey Mouse,” and registered the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys twice: once in Nevada, and again in Minnesota. 


A group that has worked with ACORN in the past registered a dead goldfish under the name “Princess Nudelman” in Illinois. When reporters informed Beth Nudelman, a Democrat, that her former pet was a registered voter, she said, “This person is a dead fish." 


ACORN was known for its “intimidation tactics,” said independent scholar Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., who has researched Obama’s long-standing ties to the group. 


Fully 30 percent of 1.3 million new voters ACORN claims to have registered this year are believed to be illegitimate. 


Long shared with Newsmax some of the emails and sworn affidavits she received from Hillary supporters who witnessed first-hand the thuggish tactics employed by Obama campaign operatives in Iowa and elsewhere. 


Jeff, a precinct captain for Clinton from Davenport, Iowa, thought his caucus was in the bag for his candidate, until just minutes before the voting actually began. 


“From 6-6:30 p.m., it appeared as I had expected. Young, old males, females, Hispanics, whites, gay and lesbian friends arriving. Very heavily for Ms. Clinton, a fair amount for Edwards and some stragglers for Obama,” he said. 


That makeup corresponded to what he had witnessed from many precinct walks he had made through local neighborhoods. 


“My mind began to feel victory for my lady,’ he said. “THEN: at 6:50 p.m., over 75 people of African-American descent came walking in, passed the tables and sat in the Obama section. I knew one of them from my canvassing. I knew another one who did not live in this precinct. And aside from four or five families that live on Hillandale Road, there are no other black people in this unusually white precinct. And one of those black couples were in my Hillary section,” he said. 


Thanks to the last-minute influx of unknown Obama supporters, Obama won twice the number of delegates from the precinct as Hillary Clinton. 


After it was over, “a very large bus was seen in the parking lot afterwards carrying these folks back” to Illinois, Jeff said. 


Obama’s flagrant busing of out-of-state caucus participants from Illinois was so obvious that even Joe Biden — today his running mate, then his rival — pointed it out at the time. 


At a campaign stop before the Jan. 3 caucus at the JJ Diner in Des Moines, Biden “said what we were all thinking when he got on stage and said, ‘Hello Iowa!’ and then turned to Barack’s crowd and shouted, ‘and Hello Chicago!’” another precinct captain for Hillary told Long. 


Thanks to Illinois campaign workers bused across the border into Iowa, all the precincts in eastern Iowa went for Obama, guaranteeing his win in the caucuses, Long said. 


Obama supporters were also bused into northeast Iowa from Omaha, Nebraska, where Obama campaign workers were seen handing out “i-pods and free stuff: T-shirts, clothes, shoes, and free meals” to students and people in homeless shelters,” according to eyewitness reports Long collected. 


In Iowa City, red and white chartered buses with Illinois license plates arrived from Illinois packed with boisterous African-American high school students, who came to caucus for Obama in Iowa after being recruited by Obama campaign workers. 


2,000 complaints in Texas 


In a change in the Democratic National Committee rules for this year’s election season, four states had caucuses and primaries: Washington, Nebraska, Idaho, and Texas. “But Texas is the only one that counted both the caucus result and the primary result,” Long told Newsmax. “The others didn’t count the primary at all, calling it a ‘beauty contest.’” 


Because caucuses are more informal, and can last hours, they tend to favor candidates with a strong ground operation or whose supporters use strong-arm tactics to intimidate their rivals. 


“There is inherent voter disenfranchisement in the caucuses,” Long said. “Women are less likely to go to caucuses than men, because they don’t like the public nature of the caucus. The elderly are less likely to go to a caucus. People who work shifts can’t go if they work the night shift. And parents with young children can’t go out for four hours on a week night. All these people are traditionally Clinton supporters,” she said. 


But Obama’s victories in the caucuses weren’t the result of better organization, Long insists. “It was fraud.” 


In state after state, Hillary was leading Obama in the polls right up until the last minute, when Obama won a landslide victory in the caucuses. 


The discrepancies between the polls and the caucus results were stunning, Long told Newsmax. The most flagrant example was Minnesota. A Minnesota Public Radio/Humphrey Institute poll just one week before the Feb. 5 caucus gave Hillary a 7-point lead over Obama, 40-33. 


But when the Minnesota caucus results were counted, Obama won by a landslide, with 66.39 percent to just 32.23 percent for Hillary, giving him 48 delegates, compared with 24 for Clinton. 


“No poll is that far off,” Long told Newsmax. 


Similar disparities occurred in 13 of 14 caucus states. 


In Colorado and Idaho, Obama had a 2-point edge over Hillary Clinton in the polls, but won by more than 2-1 in the caucuses, sweeping most delegates. 


In Kansas, Hillary had a slight edge over Obama in the polls, but Obama won 74 percent of the votes in the caucus and most of the delegates. In nearly every state, he bested the pre-caucus polls by anywhere from 12 percent to more than 30 percent. 


This year’s primary rules for the Democrats favored the caucus states over the primary states. 


“Caucus states made up only 1.1 million (3 percent) of all Democratic votes, but selected 626 (15 percent) of the delegates,” says Gigi Gaston, a filmmaker who has made a documentary on the caucus fraud. 


In Texas alone, she says, there were more than 2,000 complaints from Hillary Clinton and John Edwards supporters of Obama’s strong-arm tactics. 


One Hillary supporter, who appears in Gaston’s new film, “We Will Not Be Silenced,” says she received death threats from Obama supporters after they saw her address in an online video she made to document fraud during the Texas caucus. “People called me a whore and a skank,” she said. 


John Siegel, El Paso Area Captain for Hillary, said, “Some people saw outright cheating. Other people just saw strong-arm tactics. I saw fraud.” 


Another woman, who was not identified in the film, described the sign-in process. “You’re supposed to sign your names on these sheets. The sheets are supposed to be controlled, and passed out — this is kind of how you maintain order. None of that was done. The sheets were just flying all over the place. You could put in your own names. You could add your own sheets or anything. It was just filled with fraud.” 


Other witnesses described how Obama supporters went through the crowds at the caucus telling Hillary supporters they could go home because their votes had been counted, when in fact no vote count had yet taken place. 


“I couldn’t believe this was happening,” one woman said in the film. “I thought this only happened in Third World countries.” 


On election day in Texas, Clinton campaign lawyer Lyn Utrecht issued a news release that the national media widely ignored. 


“The campaign legal hot line has been flooded with calls containing specific accusations of irregularities and voter intimidation against the Obama campaign,” she wrote. “This activity is undemocratic, probably illegal, and reflects a wanton disregard for the caucus process.” 


She identified 18 separate precincts where Obama operatives had removed voting packets before the Clinton voters could arrive, despite a written warning from the state party not to remove them. 


The hot line also received numerous calls during the day that “the Obama campaign has taken over caucus sites and locked the doors, excluding Clinton campaign supporters from participating in the caucus,” she wrote. 


“There are numerous instances of Obama supporters filing out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them as completed vote totals at caucus. This is expressly against the rules,” she added. continues here

The sleeping giant is awake to back Barack Obama with a Latino beat

There was only one building attracting much activity this week in Truth or Consequences, Sierra County. 

Few tourists lingered at the Exotic Cactus Ranch, and the remaining stores had all but given up looking for business in what must be the only town named after a 1950s game show. 

The office of the county clerk, however, thrummed with early voters. Pollsters like to call this “sleeping giant” country. Like other southwestern states in play in this election, New Mexico has suffered from an historically low turnout of Hispanic voters that has so far failed to reflect the raw demographic power of the fastest-growing minority in the US. 

This time there were signs that 2008 would be the year with the biggest Latino turnout. Since George W. Bush came to office Hispanics have accounted for half of the country’s entire population growth. About ten million are expected to vote this year, compared with 7.5 million in 2004. For the first time Hispanic voters will play a prominent and possibly decisive role in the election.  

“Before, people would tell me, ‘La vota no cuenta’ — the vote doesn’t count — but now they’re seeing it differently,” Bobby Rodríguez said as he delivered absentee voting forms. “This time it counts.” 

A month ago New Mexico was considered a toss-up. But massive voter-registration drives and a grassroots “Sí, se puede” campaign have tilted the race towards Barack Obama. 

Mr Rodríguez, 69, a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), has been on the road every day since the primaries, canvassing. 

“This election is different. Those who left the party feeling disillusioned and disenfranchised are coming back.” Only last week, he added, they handed out 150 forms on the Thursday. “They were filled out by Friday”. 

He drove past pecan orchards and cotton fields to the home of María Chacón, a 39-year-old mother of six, in Mesquite. She said that she, her husband and her mother registered to vote for the first time despite having lived there for more than 30 years. They will be voting Democrat. 

Why now? “I have a 21-year-old daughter in the military, about to return to Iraq. I want her out,” she said. “That’s what made me change.” 

The next stop was a farm belonging to Ben Bolanos, on the edge of the Chihuahua desert. “I’m ready”, said the former rodeo rider who fought in Vietnam with his three brothers. As an Hispanic veteran he represents one of John McCain’s target groups. 

He said: “McCain, I respect the man very much. He was the same place I was, but somehow the Bush Administration just got hold of him. I know who I want, and that’s Obama.” 

President Bush carried New Mexico by 6,000 votes in 2004. However, latest polls show that Mr Obama leads his Republican rival by 51 per cent to 44 per cent in New Mexico. The margin widens among Hispanics, suggesting that Mr Obama is winning over supporters of Hillary Clinton. 

Pablo Martinez, the state director of LULAC, said that many Hispanic voters felt betrayed by Mr McCain, a former champion of immigration reform, after conservatives derailed the comprehensive immigration Bill he put before Congress in 2006. “It will be a long time before Hispanics can trust Republicans again,” he said. 

Mr Martinez put the blame for Mr McCain’s failure to connect with this huge, disparate group, which includes Puerto Ricans and Cuban-Americans, on the ugly undertone of “otherness” in the speeches of his running-mate. 

“McCain has also been a friend of Latinos but as soon as Sarah Palin started saying, ‘He’s not one of us’, it brought back a lot of memories . . . If she feels this way about an African-American, is she going to say the same about us too?” he asked. 

Mr Obama’s lead in New Mexico, where 42 per cent of the population is Hispanic, is being credited to a brilliant grassroots campaign. Four years ago John Kerry opened six field offices in the state. Mr Obama has 39. 

At the local Democratic Party headquarters in Las Cruces, impossibly cheerful college students man the telephones, tallying up the numbers of “houses knocked on” and “calls made”. Voter registration has been a priority, with the party claiming to have surpassed its target of registering more than 30,000 new voters during a 30-day push. “We’re hoping that is what is going to win it for us,” one volunteer beams. continues here

Foreign owners channel cash to Tories through their British companies

With George Osborne vehemently denying that he asked a Russian oligarch for £50,000, just how home-grown is the money flowing into the Conservative Party? 

The Times has discovered a series of donations to the Tories of exactly £50,000 or £100,000 paid legally by UK companies where overseas businessmen appear to be in control. Some of the gifts came from businesses that seem to have been extraordinarily generous. One wrote a cheque for a large proportion of its profits, one was making regular losses and one seemed to be doing hardly anything at all. 

Overseas businessmen can contribute quite legitimately to British politics under the current law if their UK-registered companies make donations. 

This is not just an issue for the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats faced embarrassment after accepting millions of pounds from the Scotsman Michael Brown, living in Majorca, through his London company. 

Indeed, had a contribution been accepted by the Conservatives from Oleg Deripaska’s Leyland Daf, it might well have been within the law, provided that there was no attempt to conceal the source. 

The Times has discovered that £100,000 was given by CVS Management, the management consultancy that is a subsidiary of a British Virgin Islands-registered, Swiss-based investment company. 

The guiding hand of its parent Corvus Capital is the highly colourful Andrew Regan, a financier who was cleared of stealing £2.4 million from a food company where he was chief executive. Today Mr Regan lives in Switzerland. He is invisible on the published British electoral roll. His office confirmed that he travelled from Geneva to attend one Conservative event. He has been invited to other get-togethers but declined. 

Mr Regan, 42, who tried to buy the Coop, is just one of the big beasts overseas whose companies appear to be bankrolling David Cameron’s bid to capture Downing Street. 

Markland Holdings (UK) is part of an organisation owned by two Irish property tycoons, Sean Mulyan and Paddy Kelly. But the business is based in Dublin and has no London office. It gave £100,000 to the Conservatives. 

Venson Automotive Solutions, which gave £50,000, is a British business owned by Dermot Desmond, the billionaire Irish owner of Celtic FC. Then there is the donation from Star Reefers UK, the British wing of a family shipping business whose parent company is chaired by the Swiss-based Norwegian, Kristian Siem. Companies House records show Star Reefers UK lost £394,000 last year. Yet in February this year it gave £50,000 to the Tories. 

Another donation of £50,000 was given in June this year by Sleepwell Hotels UK, which is owned by a trust in the Isle of Man. The latest filed accounts at Companies House for 2006 show that this entity did no trading. The law states that a company must be “carrying on business” for a donation to be eligible. 

Denholm Eke, one of the Manx directors, said the corporate donor was part of a business running hotels in Blackpool and the Isle of Man. A restructuring meant that Sleepwell Hotels UK was now clearly trading and this would be reflected in future accounts. He stressed that nobody had been to any Leader’s Group events. 

Mr Eke, managing director of the trust, said the gift had been a corporate, rather than an individual, donation. “It’s because we are very interested in Blackpool,” he said. “The Conservative Party would provide the most obvious political impetus for a Blackpool regeneration. It [Blackpool] is very sad and run down.” 

Another generous donation came from BSN Capital Partners, a London-based hedge fund advisory business run by two Americans and a Briton. It is ultimately owned in the Cayman Islands by a company which is in turn partly owned by Icap, the Conservative Party treasurer Michael Spencer’s vehicle. Their gift of £100,000 amounted to nearly a quarter of last year’s profits. 

Asked why the money had been paid to the Tories this way, an Icap source said: “The board of that organisation are entitled to choose whether they wish to do [so].” Party funding has been pushed back into the political limelight after a letter to The Times from Nat Rothschild on Monday about George Osborne and the oligarch. 

Foreign donations were widely thought to have been abolished when Tony Blair introduced the antisleaze Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act in 2000. Parties became responsible by law for ensuring that they only took money from eligible donors. The Conservative Party’s own account of what happened on the sunny shores of Corfu this summer is telling. 

A version of events was released on behalf of Mr Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, and Andrew Feldman, the party’s chief executive. The pair described drinks at the Rothschild family villa with Nathaniel Rothschild, the mutual friend of Mr Osborne, the Russian aluminium magnate Mr Deripaska and the then yet-to-be ennobled Lord Mandelson. 

“Mr Feldman, Mr Osborne, Mr Rothschild and two other house guests gathered on the villa terrace,” the Tories said. 

“There was a discussion about British and American politics in the course of which Mr Rothschild suggested to Mr Feldman that his friend, Mr Deripaska, could be interested in making a party donation.” 

The Tories recalled their response to this idea. “Mr Feldman made clear that there are very strict rules on donations to political parties in the UK. He explained that there are only two ways of giving a political donation. Firstly, if you appear as an individual on the UK electoral roll . . .” 

At this point, Mr Feldman might have been expected to rule out a donation since Mr Deripaska is clearly ineligible to vote in Britain. Instead, he continued. “. . . Secondly, if the donation comes from a legitimate UK trading company. This is an explanation Mr Feldman gives regularly when asked about donations,” the statement added. Mr Rothschild explained that Mr Deripaska was the owner of several British companies, including Leyland Daf. The Conservatives insist they later declined an offer of a payment from Leyland Daf. 

Perusing the list of Tory donors published by the Electoral Commission, the figure £50,000 and its multiples pop up with remarkable frequency. There have been 23 corporate donations of exactly £50,000 and five of £100,000 during the Cameron era. 

Michael Spencer explained that this figure was first suggested by Sir Hay-den Phillips during his official review of party funding. “When David became leader of the party he suggested we use that as a sort of benchmark that would not be considered controversial by anybody, including the Press,” he told The Times.

Mr Spencer said: “If you are going to have people who support the party, they would expect to meet people in the party including the leader of the party and other Shadow Cabinet members. That’s a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to do. We wish people to feel they are part of the project to get David elected as Prime Minister. continues here

Lunatics take over Westminster asylum

Ministers are preparing to allow people labelled “idiots” and “lunatics” by archaic laws to stand for parliament.

Though it may come as a surprise to voters, laws dating back to Elizabethan times bar this category of people from becoming MPs.

Idiots are defined as those “incapable of gaining reason” and lunatics as people only “capable of periods of lucidity”.

The rules ban lunatics from standing as MPs in “their non lucid intervals”. They also ban anyone sectioned under the Mental Health Act from standing for parliament, even if they have made a recovery.

MPs have to give up their seat for life if they are sectioned for six months.

Bridget Prentice, the justice minister, is to consult on scrapping the laws after complaints from MPs and mental health charities that they are discriminatory. continues here

Many will say that, “idiots” and “lunatics” already hold sway at Westminster but they’d be wrong, parliament heaves with the avaricious, the duplicitous and the traitorous not the lunatic, there is nothing lunatic in what they do, it is planned, fashioned, designed, every tiny change thought out. There is not a one that works in the peoples interest, not one party or individual that advocates for you, you who suffer for their crimes, they suffer an illness it has to be said, an illness of soul not of mind.

Tory candidate Ian Oakley quits over hate crimes arrest

David Cameron faced embarrassment yesterday when one of his parliamentary candidates for a key marginal seat quit after being arrested in connection with a hate campaign against rival politicians. 

Ian Oakley, 31, resigned as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Watford after the allegations were made. He is on bail pending further police inquiries into “a series of criminal damage and harassment offences”. He has not been charged. 

The seat, where the sitting MP, Labour’s Claire Ward, has a majority of just 1,148 votes, is one of the Tory party’s key targets. 

Oakley, a Durham University graduate who used to work for the Financial Services Authority, won the selection contest in an American-style open primary, a high-profile Cameron initiative. 

He lists the shadow cabinet members Chris Grayling and Grant Shapps, and the “chick lit” author Louise Bagshawe – herself a Tory candidate – as friends on his Facebook entry. 

The Conservative party last night confirmed that Oakley was on bail following questioning about three possible offences. 

Liberal Democrats in Watford claim they have been the victims of a campaign over the past 3½ years involving criminal damage, poison pen letters and nuisance calls. 

According to the Lib Dems, senior party activists in the area have received offensive literature through the post, been subjected to anonymous telephone calls in the middle of the night, and been targeted in whispering campaigns. 

Party sources claim there have been at least 100 incidents of vandalism involving property and vehicles belonging to local party activists, sometimes repeatedly at the same address. 

In an incident that caused widespread anger in Watford, a leaflet purporting to be from the Lib Dems, and expressing support for the building of a new mosque next to an existing one, was delivered to scores of householders. 

The leaflet allegedly decried anyone who opposed the controversial mosque development as racist. 

At the time of the incident in February, Mike Jackson, chairman of the Watford Labour party, said the document had “all the hallmarks of the far-right neo-Nazi parties” and was a deliberate attempt to “stir up tension against minorities”. 

Hertfordshire police’s major crime unit was drafted in to investigate last year after six poison pen letters making allegations against a Liberal Democrat councillor, Mark Watkin. 

Lib Dems claim that fake and anonymous leaflets circulated to the public in Watford have falsely alleged that certain councillors and candidates were convicted sex offenders. continues here

Old Friends Say Drugs Played Only Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life
SERGE F. KOVALESKI

Nearly three decades ago, Barack Obama stood out on the small campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles for his eloquence, intellect and activism against apartheid in South Africa. But Mr. Obama, then known as Barry, also joined in the party scene.

Years later in his 1995 memoir, he mentioned smoking “reefer” in “the dorm room of some brother” and talked about “getting high.” Before Occidental, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and sometimes cocaine as a high school student in Hawaii, according to the book. He made “some bad decisions” as a teenager involving drugs and drinking, Senator Obama, now a presidential candidate, told high school students in New Hampshire last November.

Mr. Obama’s admissions are rare for a politician (his book, “Dreams From My Father,” was written before he ran for office.) They briefly became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival, suggested that his history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee.

Mr. Obama, of Illinois, has never quantified his illicit drug use or provided many details. He wrote about his two years at Occidental, a predominantly white liberal arts college, as a gradual but profound awakening from a slumber of indifference that gave rise to his activism there and his fears that drugs could lead him to addiction or apathy, as they had for many other black men......Article conts (-)

Political Views May Be Genetically Influenced, Twin Study Shows

Research by Rice University professor of political science John Alford indicates that what is on one's mind about politics may be influenced by how people are wired genetically.

Alford, who has researched this topic for a number of years, and his team analyzed data from political opinions of more than 12,000 twins in the United States and supplemented it with findings from twins in Australia. Alford found that identical twins were more likely to agree on political issues than were fraternal twins.

On the issue of property taxes, for example, an astounding four-fifths of identical twins shared the same opinion, while only two-thirds of fraternal twins agreed.

"What we found was that it probably is going to take more than a persuasive television ad to change someone's mind on a certain political position or attitude," said Alford. "Individual genes for behaviors do not exist and no one denies that humans have the capacity to act against genetic predispositions. But predictably dissimilar correlations of social and political attitudes among people with greater and lesser shared genotypes suggest that behaviors are often shaped by forces of which the person themselves are not consciously aware.".....Article conts (-)