Guido Fawkes - A bully, a liar and a twat?

The one thing I despise more than anything is a bully. Well actually that's not completely true, even worse is a lying bully. Yesterday a 16 year old pupil of my old school Finchley Catholic High School, Alexander Clayman organised a rally for sixth formers to converge on the Conservative Party Offices in Finchley. The Hendon Times reports that the rally was a success. They also reported that the Barnet Police Chief of Police, Neil Basu praised Alex for hiswork to ensure a peaceful demonstration. Basu told the Times

The most important thing is it passed off peacefully and I must praise the way Alex has organised this. He has been in constant contact with us throughout.

Full Story at  - http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/8676975.Student_protest_passes_off_peacefully/

I published a flyer for Adam to help him publicise the march. I understand how angry he is that people who have had a free university education wish to saddle him with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt in fees. I happen to agree with him, that it is a ridculous way to prepare young people for the future.

Rather sadly, not everyone thinks it a good thing that intelligent young people such as Alex are prepared to get off their but and make their voices heard. Some people have sought to drag Alex into their own little rows, not even having the good grace to check their facts. One such person is blogger Guido Fawkes. He had a spat with former Gordon Brown advisor Damien McBride (he who launched a campaign of smears and misinformation against various Tories spouses and loved ones). So how does Fawkes seek to get back at McBride, who now works at the School which Alex attends? By smear and innuendo, implying that McBride rather than Alex is the organiser of the march. Given that Alex had widely publicised his phone number and email address, how hard would it have been for Fawkes to at least have the good manners to ask Alex if McBride was involved.

Sadly "big cheese blogger" rather seems to enjoy monstering a schoolboy and his campaign. Even more repulsive are the 100 odd "Tory Sheep" who jumped in to stick the boot in with ill informed comments. It strikes me that Fawkes has shown himself to be a bully, a liar and twat with his behaviour. If he were a man, he'd give Alex a bell and apologise for his knobbish behaviour and print a retraction. He may totally disagree with Alex, he may think it's great that students are saddled with debt ( although he himself got a free University education), but surely he should be above telling porkies and not checking his facts. I do wonder if his rather bitchy comments about FCHS are born from prejudice as he is an ex pupil of Salvatorean College - another RC school which is decidedly more middle class than FCHS (a fully comprehensive school) has ever been.

Anyway if you've got absolutely nothing to do, you can read his twattish rant here -
http://order-order.com/2010/11/18/mcbride-rallies-the-boys/ 

And no, I'm not a mate of Damian McBride, I'd left the school before he started at infants.

Tories rattled as Guido loses the plot

There was an intriguiging post on the Guido Fawkes blog. It details how the Conservative party have become rather rattled at the Lib Dems sniffing around some of their candidates expenses claims as local councillors.


To quote Guido -

The holier than now Liberals are attempting to drag candidates into the expenses scandal before they are even MPs. Doing it covertly through personal email addresses even though an FOI request is an FOI request wherever it comes from.

Cowley Street better hope CCHQ don’t retaliate with some FOI requests concerning their PPCs and intriguing leaflet printing financing.

 
Well you know what. I think it's rather good that Councillors expenses are being investigated (all Councillors). I'd rather like them to all be available on-line for all to see. If the Lib-Dems are doing this, maybe a few dodgy Tory candidates will be weeded out. I'd be quite happy to see the Tories do the same to Lib Dems (or Labour) Councillors if they've been fiddling their expenses. I may have got this wrong, but it seems to me that Guido's post is some sort of veiled threat "Don't poke around our expenses and we won't poke around your leaflet printing financing". If that is Guido's intention, I think he's losing the plot. Letting dodgy politicians get away with fiddling, dodgy accounting or anything else which involves public money is despicable. If Guido thinks it's OK, then he has lost all credibility as an independent blogger.
 
I wonder if the Lib Dems have posted one of these requests for the Hendon Conservative PPC and the Finchley and Golders Green Conservative PPC, who are both Barnet Councillors, for the last 4 years expenses. I sincerely hope so. If nothing comes up, then that would reassure everyone very much and we'd all be very happy. I'd happily post the info here, whatever the result.

Has Guido lost his Mojo?????

Was just having a peek at the Guido Fawkes Blog. In amongst all the ads for Pizza's and betfair, I started reading, but got distracted by an advert on the radio for Stannah chair lifts or something. It suddenly hit me that maybe it's becoming rather formulaic, corporate and dull? It's rather like Punk rock, when it became successful, it became part of the establishment. I rather like blogs when they are edgy  & saying something a bit different. Bet's on how long before he's writing the Telegraph diary -Heh, Heh, Heh.

I always quite liked the blog (don't agree with it, but found it funny) as I have some sort of affinity with Guy Fawkes as one of my ancestors - Chidiok Tichborne - was part of the Babington Plot and got Hung drawn and quartered for his trouble - us Tichbornes have got a long history of being troublemakers.

I just hope I give up before I lose my Mojo (and I'm sure many Barnet Councillors will hope that is some time soon) !!!!

Barnet Eye weekly round up

A few blogs to check out (or not ***)
There is a great blog on Barnet Council Watch today about Leo Boland's leaving do,a sking the question - who is paying? Is it the Mayor or is it the Taxpayer?

Another thing which will interest the statto's out there is the Iain Dale blog talking about how many hits he's been getting. Iain is probably the number one Tory blogger and he's pretty established (Given that I've only been on Blogspot since October and the blog is mostly about Barnet and London, I must say I'm certainly pleased wih my number of hits).

Tory Troll does a great blog on Brian Coleman's latest round of excesses. It's a fairly left leaning blog.

GLA Tory Roger Evans CITY HALL blog has an interesting round up of business at GLA members question time.

*** Probably the most revolting Blog entry I've seen this week was BNP blogger Simon Darby. Avoid this with food). He has a load of pictures of a World War II themed fund raising event. The irony of the fact that the whole point of the second world war was to defeat Nazi and Fascist ideology seems to have missed the BNP. I know quite a few vets and none of them support the BNP. The ones I know would find this shameful and disgusting. My dear old dad who was a bomber pilot would have probably thrown a Mills bomb in there had he still been around.

Lastly a blog I usually give a wide berth to, but I thought it deserved a comment. Guido Fawkes comments on the Jonah like effect his visits have to sporting teams. Now I would have thought that as a Scotsman, this would soon be picked up on in his Bonny homeland and the more England games he goes to the more votes he'll get. I suspect that this may be the reason for the resurgence of Labour in SNP seats.

Anyway I hope you've all had a lovely weekend and have a great week.

P.S - I thought I'd just mention a slight change of policy. I used to studiously avoid linking to BNP supporting sites, but I've come to the conclusion that the more people see what the numpties are really like, the better. I trust anyone reading this blog to be intelligent enough to form their own views. The more I see of their blogs, the more delusional it seems they are.