Is Miliband Lying Through His Teeth And Does The BBC Care?

 

 

Is Miliband lying about his involvement with Unite and the stitch up of the selection of Parliamentary and MEP candidates?

And does the BBC care?

　

This quote from a disaffected Labourite in April suggests Miliband may be lying:

The real question is: why was Ed Miliband’s team happy to let this happen?

Or how about this:

Perhaps the leadership thought no one would notice? That no one would care about the fixing involved in selecting Labour’s European election candidates?

　

Well the BBC certainly didn’t notice and even now seems inclined to ignore it as much as possible.

　

However there is more recent evidence….on the BBC itself no less:

Yesterday the BBC’s Norman Smith interviewed Razvan Constantinescu on World At One, a prospective Labour MEP candidate who was eliminated by the selection process in favour of a union candidate.

This story has been around since at least April…so the BBC are once again ‘slow’ in picking it up, especially considering the ramifications.

Constantinescu revealed that the selection process had been ‘engineered’ to ensure that only women were selected…the union choice being a woman…interviews then eliminated further candidates who were ‘threats’ to the chosen one.

Constantinescu said that many complaints were made to Party HQ and a petition personally handed to Miliband.

　

Miliband lies

The outcome of that? Labour’s Party Secretary, Iain McNicol, threatened the complainants with disciplinary action if they didn’t stop raising the issue….in other words they didn’t care about a union stitch up.

We were also told that the local party officials at Falkirk had raised the matter of the mass signing up of Unite members but were told by the ‘Party’ to keep signing them on.

　

Norman Smith raised a metaphorical eyebrow when told of the threat and clear knowledge of the possible union conspiracy, recognising that it was something that was significant in light of the Unite saga.

However immediately following the interview Nick Robinson came on to give us his thoughts on it…and failed to mention what was probably the most salient point raised in it….that Miliband knew about the complaints and not only ignored them but threatened to discipline those who complained.

Miliband hand in hand with McCluskey to rig elections?  Nothing to see there?

BBC Ignores big story

There has been no follow up on the BBC as far as I can see…despite this being possible evidence that Miliband is now lying through his remarkable teeth as he claims McCluskey must accept his responsibilities and that Falkirk is not typical and was the result of a few rogue officials.

　

Strange that World At One’s editor, Nick Sutton, should tweet that the Mail has picked up on the interview…and yet his very own BBC hasn’t…..

Nick Sutton ‏@suttonnick 19h Interested to see @ShippersUnbound on front of Mail picks up on @BBCNormanS‘s #wato intv with Razvan Constantinescu.　

　

The Labour Party are ‘managing’ the news:

Miliband has said: “I will not allow the good name of the Labour Party to be undermined by the behaviour of a few individuals.” And claimed Falkirk is an isolated case.

…and yet we can see from the above that it looks like he knew and approved of what was going on and on a far wider scale.

　

Chuka Umunna has said: “There is absolutely no place in the Lab Party for machine politics of this type …we find it we will root it out and stamp it out” and yet also dismissed the row over Falkirk as “Westminster soap opera“…the rigging of Parliamentary elections and the selection of MEPs a ‘soap opera’!

　

Labour’s Angela Eagle says: “We will not tolerate the kind of behaviour we’ve seen in Falkirk” and yet she too takes Miliband’s line pointing the finger of blame for Falkirk at “partic individuals” in constituency rather than an organised campaign by Unite.

She also says “Falkirk is unique” and says that claims that Unite were involved in “rigging” other selection contests are “rubbish…..hysteria“.

　

But back in April there were rumblings in the Labour heartlands……

　

Richard Angell ‏@RichardAngell 8 Apr @jonworth @annefairweather otherwise known as the members first choice!!! Where is the respect for members?

Jon Worth ‏@jonworth 8 Apr @RichardAngell Absolutely nowhere, by the look of it. And where’s the union stitch up? Everywhere by the look of it.

　

　

Here from some Leftist blogs comes evidence of that discontent and allegations of the union stitch up……

　

South West there’s brewing anger…..

‘It strikes me that some names were deliberately eliminated in order to give some candidates a more or less free run, and the number of candidates with very heavy trade union links is notable, while the number with considerable EU experience is rather fewer.

In the end all of this leaves a very sour taste for me. It might seem fine to do some sort of stitch up, to deny party members the very best candidates by eliminating strong people at the shortlisting stage.’

　　

 

London Labour revolt over Euro-list fix grows

‘Perhaps the leadership thought no one would notice? That no one would care about the fixing involved in selecting Labour’s European election candidates?

Well, the evidence is that they were wrong. Very wrong.

The lightning rod for emerging discontent in London is Anne Fairweather. Ahead of the 2009 European elections she was the top choice for Labour members, securing almost 3,500 votes, comfortably ahead of the rest of the field.

As Peter Watt and Jon Worth have noted, this time round, she was rejected by Labour, without even an interview.

Her crime seems to have been to work in business and not be one of the chosen candidates of the unions and the left.

Out of seven members of the London European candidate selection panel, five are either serving officials in the unions or have been backed by Labour Briefing – a hard left publication committed to establishing the most left-wing policy platform for the party since 1983.

Three panel members in particular are understood to have been influential over the selection approach: Gary Doolan, Steve Hart and Joy Johnson.

Steve Hart is the extremely influential political director of Unite, lest we forget, Labour’s largest donor. Unite are just as clear as the GMB about using their influence to pick specific types of candidates. Last year, Dave Quayle, chair of Unite’s national political committee set out their priorities in an interview for the website of Marxist fringe group, the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty:

“We want a firmly class-based and left-wing general election campaign in 2015… We want to shift the balance in the party away from middle-class academics and professionals towards people who’ve actually represented workers and fought the boss.”

Quite.

The clear political imperative of the unions and Labour’s left is to recast Labour’s political representatives in their own image. In this context, the exclusion of Anne Fairweather is eminently predictable. No one involved has hidden their agenda or their objectives.

The real question is: why was Ed Miliband’s team happy to let this happen?’

 

 

The other question might be why the BBC is so ready to downplay this?  Rather than investigate and dig for dirt they seem quite happy to sit and wait for the story to come to them….at which point they will ensure that the picture we get is that Miliband has heroically seen off the unions but paradoxically the unions actually did nothing wrong being the victims of a smear…it turns out it was all the fault of a few misguided individuals who had the best interests of the party at heart….seeking, as Sarah Montague insisted on the today programme, to ensure that they could get more working class people into parliament and make it more representative….as it clearly isn’t with all those Eton toffs in there now.