Gordon Browns speech yesterday afternoon at Brighton was a farce as far as I am concerned, it was a speech of desperation and self interest, getting his poor wife to stand up and list all his qualities to the audience both in the hall and on TV was a sign of man who is trying everything he can to stay in the job that he was not elected to do.

A very dangerous person, would you let her baby sit for your kid's?? I think not

Thanking  Harriet Harman was a bad idea, What has she done for this country other than to introduce  politically correct diversity and equality laws, she has introduced laws that will for the first time mean employers can discriminate against white people when there is a choice between black and white, this woman is mad, she does not understand anything about the people of this country nor where they are coming from politically, she hates men and the traditional family, she say’s that men are not important when it comes to raising children, and the government wonder why we have so many feral children running about causing havoc.

The article below taken from the Telegraph Newspaper shows what a sick and twisted creature she really is, please read it and pass it along to your friends-

The Leader of the House of Commons and Minister for Women and Equality, who also sits on a Cabinet committee on young people’s welfare, is being touted as a possible successor to Gordon Brown, .

But she faces fresh criticism from Opposition MPs and campaign groups after The Daily Telegraph obtained documents showing that she called on ministers to make sexually explicit photographs or films of children legal unless there was evidence that the subject had been harmed.

At the time she made the official submission, she was a senior figure in a civil liberties organisation that wanted the age of consent to be lowered to 14 and incest decriminalised. It also defended self-confessed paedophiles in the press and allowed them to attend its meetings.

Last night Tim Loughton, the Shadow Children’s Minister, said: “Clearly there is a serious conflict of interest with the committees she sits on, who might want urgently to clarify her position on the exploitation of children for the sexual gratification of adults.

“It’s a shame that Miss Harman’s zeal for positive discrimination and all things politically correct among adults does not extend to the exploitation of children. Any child who is used for the sexual gratification of adults counts as an abused child and needs protecting.”

Miss Harman, 58, was a newly qualified solicitor when she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties, now known as Liberty, in 1978. At the time its general secretary was Patricia Hewitt, who went on to become health secretary under Tony Blair.

Among the groups affiliated to NCCL were the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, whose members argued openly for the abolition of the age of consent. NCCL complained to the press watchdog about their treatment by tabloid newspapers and said in one article: “We support any organisation that seeks to campaign for anything it wants within the law. They have that right.”

In NCCL’s official response to the Government’s plans to reform sex laws, dubbed a “Lolita’s Charter”, it suggested reducing the age of consent and argued that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage”. It claimed that children can suffer more from having to retell their experiences in court or the press.

Amid growing public concern about adults preying on children, the Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament in order to tighten the laws on child pornography by banning indecent images of under-16s.

NCCL’s official response, signed by Miss Harman and submitted in April 1978, claimed that the new law could lead to “damaging and absurd prosecutions” and “increase censorship”.

She suggested that a pornographic photo or film of a child should not be considered indecent unless it could be shown that the subject had suffered, and that prosecutors would have to prove harm rather than defendants having to justify themselves.

Her submission states: “Although this harm may be of a somewhat speculative nature, where participation falls short of physical assault, it is none-the-less justifiable to restrain activities by photographer which involve placing children under the age of 14 (or, arguably, 16) in sexual situations.

“We suggest that the term ‘indecent’ be qualified as follows: – A photograph or film shall not for this purpose be considered indecent (a) by reason only that the model is in a state of undress (whether complete or partial); (b) unless it is proved or is to be inferred from the photograph or film that the making of the photograph or film might reasonably be expected to have caused the model physical harm or pronounced psychological or emotional disorder.”

It adds: “Our amendment places the onus of proof on the prosecution to show that the child was actually harmed.”

Miss Harman left NCCL in 1982 when she was elected MP for Camberwell and Peckham, by which time several members of PIE had been jailed for conspiracy to corrupt public morals.

A spokesman for Miss Harman said: “She has always opposed child pornography and has never supported PIE and to suggest that she did is untrue and misleading.

“NCCL’s approach to the protection of children’s bill was to argue for clear definitions in the bill to make sure the law was precise so that it was about child protection and not about censorship.”

The spokesman added: “PIE had been excluded from the NCCL before she became legal officer.”

However press cuttings from 1983 make it clear that it was still considered an “affiliate group”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/4949555/Harriet-Harman-under-attack-over-bid-to-water-down-child-pornography-law.html

Major issues literally came pouring out into our path when I went electioneering in the Barrackpur parliamentary constituency of West Bengal with Dinesh Trivedi, the Trinamool Congress candidate a few days ago. 

The apparently massive rejection– I was going to say disenchantment but it is not a strong enough word – of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose Left Front government has run the state for 32 years, was expressed by many people, especially women, during three hours I spent walking around the Amdanga area with Trivedi, a former Rajya Sabha MP who is standing for the Lok Sabha in Barrackpur for the first time.

“I wish you to win. I want peace and an end to terror,” said Arpita, an 18-year old student who will be voting for the first time on Thursday, when West Bengal goes into the second of its three election stages. “We want a peaceful election. Here people force us not to vote”. Many others expressed similar views with stories that alleged the CPI(M) threatened violence against whose who would vote. People said the government had failed in terms of development – in one scheduled caste village there was no electricity, even though it was adjacent to a road. 

I went to West Bengal – as I did earlier in Orissa – to see if votes would be swung by clashes over the socially crucial issue of using agricultural land for industrial development. In Orissa, problems over controversial Posco, Tata and other projects seemed to have little impact in the election.

Pro-Tata poster with Nano factory in background - pic taken Nov '08

Here in West Bengal however, Tata’s car factory at Singur (above), and plans for a chemicals special economic zone (SEZ) at Nandigram play large, along with localised issues such as demands for a separate Gorkhaland state in the north of West Bengal and police violence against tribals.

This is firstly because, unlike Orissa, these two now-abandoned development projects became, and remain, a primary battleground between the two major political parties – the CPI(M) and the Trinamoool. Secondly, Singur and Nandigram showed the CPI(M) at its worst when its cadres used force to gain control and to try to force implementation of the projects. Consequently, they have provided a base for wider opposition, especially in rural areas, as was shown by the women of Amdanga.

In such places located far away from the two projects, the Trinamool has focused local attention on Singur with a horrifying poster (below) of Tapasi Malik, a young girl protestor who was raped and burned there by two CPI(M) officials in December 2006. 

The open way that people dared to come out of their homes to meet us seemed to illustrate a significant anti-CPI(M) tide, at least in these rural areas.

Many Kolkata observers suggest the Left’s 35 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal (out of a total of 42)  will come down by about 15. An official at the CPI(M) headquarters said it would only lose three to five seats, and a strong supporter said seven. The Trinamool, led by Mamata Banerjee, was tipped to be the main beneficiary, with its Congress Party ally benefiting less.

I heard many reports, both in Barrackpur and elsewhere, of CPI(M) ballot rigging. Trivedi has done research that shows the party has prepared dual election lists for this election – he has tabulated evidence of over 8,000 names – despite the introduction of electronic voting. This allegation was supported by others who said that, when they went to a booth in the past, they were turned away by officials saying “your vote has already been cast”.

Other people told me that the CP(M) can switch perhaps 10% of the votes providing it has about 40% of the locality on its side and controls the bureaucrats in the voting booths. I was also told that two past leaders of Congress used to be good at counter-fixing, but that they are no longer available.

It could be argued that these issues show that the general election is being fought in Bengal, as elsewhere, on local and not national concerns. That would however be wrong because, alongside the CPI(M)’s rough and often violent power tactics, there is the crucial national issue of how India can provide land for industrial development without the agricultural poor being deprived of their traditional livelihoods – though this of course is not being debated by the parties in the election campaign.

What happened at Singur and Nandigram, and in Orissa, underlines the urgent need to repeal the 1894 Land Acquisition Act and replace its powers of compulsory acquisition so that sharecroppers and landless labour, as well as landowners, receive adequate compensation. A way also needs to be found for these stakeholders to have some lasting investment as compensation, which cannot be quickly lost or frittered away, for losing land that has been held for generations – a problem which was clearly evident when I visited Singur last November.

Secondly, governments need to note that society has changed and it is no longer possibly suddenly to push through disruptive development projects such as the SEZs that were promoted without adequate policy preparation by commerce and industry minister Kamal Nath, and were then enthusiastically picked up by influential business groups.

There is also a lesson for political parties: you cannot expect easily to take away that which you have given. Specifically, as Rajat Roy, a local journalist and former newspaper editor, pointed out to me, it was a major misjudgement of the CPI(M) to believe that it could compulsorily acquire rich agricultural land from people to whom it had given that land as part of its widely-admired land reforms over the past 30 years.

CPI(M) supporters counter this by saying that the government has distributed 30,000 acres under land reforms in recent years, which far outstrips that needed by the projects, and that the government has to use some agricultural land because it accounts for 78% of West Bengal’s land area – far more than in many other states. That may be true, but the Singur and Nandigram land was part of a highly fertile belt that stretched down the state on either side of the Hooghly River.

Mamata Banerjee addresses a Nandigram meeting - pic Frontline magazine

The first major project on this rich agricultural land was a new town at Rajarhat built about nine years ago on the edge of Kolkata. This was followed by Tata’s would-be Nano small car factory at Singur, which was then followed by the SEZ at Nandigram promoted by the Salim group of Indonesia.

Rajahart was built without protest, but Trinanmool’s Banerjee then saw Singur as a platform for opposition in 2006. After many months of secret negotiations with Tata Motors, she returned to oppose the car project again at the end of 2007 when Nandigram had blown into a focal point for opposition.

Uday Basu, a veteran Statesman journalist, told me that she “cleverly turned the land grab issue into populist politics”. She had – and has – no primary policy agenda but then “hijacked the Left’s old land-for-the-poor policy”. He foresees bloodshed if the Trinamool does so well in the general election that the CPI(M) feels vulnerable for the 2011 assembly elections, and for Kolkata municipal corporation elections due next year.

All this is quite a change for Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, chief minister since late 2000, who became the darling of the west in his early reformist years when he seemed to be successfully industrialising the state. This attracted foreign companies and enriched local business houses, especially those involved in real estate that are now locked into the CPI(M) system.

Editors of foreign titles such as the FT, Economist and Fortune, and other visitors, would rush eagerly to Kalkota (not usually on their travel itineraries) to meet this new paragon of liberalisation.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee, an editor at Kolkata’s Telegraph newspaper, remembers that Henry Kissinger likened Bhattacharya to China’s great economic reformer, Deng Xiaoping, when the two met in November. Henry Paulson, then US treasury secretary, and Dick Parsons, then chairman of AOL Time Warner, had been there the previous week  – all of them after attending conferences in Delhi.

Kissinger of course was nearer the truth than he realised because Bhattacharya clearly thought he could take over land occupied by the rural masses in the style of China’s leaders. Many people would say that this brought out the CPI(M) in its true colours. The voters of West Bengal now have a chance to pass their verdict.

This is a slightly extended and illustrated (and unedited) version of an article in Mint, an Indian daily newspaper – http://www.livemint.com/2009/05/04000418/Massive-rejection-of-the-CPM.html – starting with the same walk that I reported here last week.

FOR MORE POSTS ON INDIA’S GENERAL ELECTION TYPE General Election IN THE SEARCH BOX – OR CLICK ON General Election BELOW

True to form, the Telegraph newspaper has roundly denounced the news that there is to be a criminal investigation into allegations of complicity in torture by the UK security services, and urged the Attorney General – a political appointee – to intervene in the judicial process in order to stop the investigation.

In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, and during the subsequent campaign by Bush administration hardliners to convince the world of the need for a war against Iran, the Telegraph security commentator Con Coughlin famously published a series of articles containing  false and misleading information that appears to have been fed to him directly by the intelligence services. Now that those same intelligence services risk facing serious public scrutiny, the Telegraph is leading the calls to get the criminal investigation stopped.

Check out this picture gallery from the Telegraph Newspaper from the UK – Very good Click here to view all images

Check out this newspaper article from the Telegraph. This week they have been doing a list of the top 100 most beautiful cars as voted for by their readers. It’s a fascinating list and there are some BIG surprises. Click here to view

Nobel prize laureate Amartya Sen had just finished his lecture when the announcement came: Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had been assasinated. Kolkata may be as far from the Indo-Pakistan border as you can get, but it doesn’t really matter.

On the subcontinent, what happens in Pakistan reverberates across India.

I found out about Professor Sen’s lecture in the Metro section of Kolkata’s Telegraph newspaper. And it was in the next day’s edition that I read about a rival ex-prime minister’s trip to Bhutto’s deathbed:

As word of Bhutto’s death spread throughout a shaken and distraught Pakistan, [Nawaz] Sharif rushed to the Rawalpindi hospital where she died and sat silently next to her body. “Benazir Bhutto was also my sister, and I will be with you to take the revenge for her death,” he said afterward, his eyes at times welling up with tears.