My future political direction

NOW THAT THE ELECTION IS UNDERWAY I'D LIKE TO POINT OUT TO THE CONSIDERABLE TRAFFIC STILL COMING TO THIS POST THAT IT WAS A PRE-ELECTION APRIL FOOL! Of course, you had spotted that, hadn't you???

 Although I have serious issues with Bill Wiggin MP and the NHCA hierarchy, I have always believed that real change can only be effected from inside, and have consistently spoken up for decent Conservatives.

This week I have held hard, confidential talks with June French, who is stepping down at these elections.
June has for some time quietly supported me inside the Conservative party and is known to keep her distance from Mr Wiggin and his supporters. I have therefore agreed to succeed her as Conservative candidate for Leominster North.

My nomination does not come into effect until tomorrow (Friday) morning, as I have to resubmit my papers, but it will be in place by noon.

I do not feel I am letting anyone down by defecting from the "Can We Have Our Money Back?" party as I was the only member.
This election is a chance to re-invigorate Herefordshire Conservatism and I hope to be a part of that challenge!

The voters will, of course, decide.

My Council election website: http://www.yourconvenience.org.uk/

Photography - a wonderful hobby!

And well worth being funded out of the public purse.

I thought I was hardened to the extravagance of Bill Wiggin's expenses claims but have a look at this insanity:
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/Photography.htm 

My Council election website: http://www.yourconvenience.org.uk/

Paintshop driving me potty

Finally got my first poster knocked up - this politics lark can drive you round the bend. No wonder they form "parties" to get other people to do the difficult stuff for them. Going into the Electoral Office tomorrow with my nomination papers; still haven't decided what to put in the six-word description box.


Currnet contenders are Whistleblowers Alliance; Can We Have Our Money Back?; Council Taxpayers Against Waste And Expenses; will have a think about it...

New expenses complaint

to the Chief Internal Auditor of Herefordshire Council:
(If you don't like pdf files, here is the Word doc version)

And of course, Cllr Blackshaw may well have presented receipts for over £5,000 in that period, in which case my complaint will be fully answered

"Dear Mr Ford,

I hope this finds you well.

Please see the attached document, detailing my very serious concerns about the expenses system at Herefordshire Council.
Please let me know if you would also wish this to be sent by post.

this is not a confidential complaint and, although no-one else has seen it yet, I may make it available in the public interest.

Yours faithfully
Jim Miller"

Confirmation from the Electoral Commission that they are doing everything by the book.

Bloody hell, that was quick!

The admission that the council have been lying about expenses was sent to me by "Democracy Officer" Sian Clark yesterday, March 17th.

This morning I emailed her thanking her, and asking for the name of the person who wrote & published the lying doc. on Cllrs expenses.

Here is the reply

Out of Office AutoReply: FOI 0001966 - Councillor Expenses‏ 

To Jim Miller

From:	Clark, Sian (sianclark@herefordshire.gov.uk)
Sent:	18 March 2011 10:52:45
To:	Jim Miller (leominsterindependent@live.co.uk)

I have now left Herefordshire Council.  My e.mails will be accessed and forwarded to relevant colleagues for a short while.

Should you need to speak to a colleague, please contact 01432 260635 in the first instance.

Council lying about its expenses

Straightforward admission by Herefordshire Council that it baldly lies about how Cllrs expenses are dealt with:
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/SianClark.pdf
"It is understood that you have also highlighted an anomaly in the notes which accompany the annual public notice." 

It's more than an anomaly.
This document published on the Council's own website states clearly that no money will be paid without the production of receipts.

Very reassuring to concerned council tax payers, eh?

Only it's a complete and utter lie.

So long as they don't go above a limit of £250 a month for travel (ring any Bill Wiggin shaped bells?) our trustworthy Councillors can claim, and be paid, what they like.

Since some of them have claimed many thousands for "travel & subsistence", I think we'll be asking to see some receipts next week...

Oh, and I've made an official request for the name of the Council officer responsible for writing and publishing this document, the sole purpose of which was to pull the wool over electors' eyes.

Among Mr Wiggin's insane expense claims this latest discovery by Wiggileaks appears to be one of the craziest. Add up these two invoices he claimed for in one year:

http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/callingcards1.pdf

http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/callingcards2.pdf

It appears he had a mountain of 90,000 "calling cards" on his desk.

There are way less than 90,000 men, women and infants in the whole constituency of North Herefordshire.

Was he going to come round and give us all a card, with a few thousand left over for spares?

Questions from a constituent

MP Bill Wiggin made us pay £431 to have satnav installed in his motor (that's one top of the range satnav!) Here's the invoice.

When presenting this expense claim he signs a promise that it was "wholly, necessarily and exclusively in pursuit of my parliamentary duties".

When I read this I felt a letter to my representative coming on!

Did the Fees Office fund Tory takeover of Herefordshire Council?

Now, I don't see how Bill Wiggin can honestly or legally pay any public funds to Nth Herefordshire Conservative Assn, but the different amounts he gave them in different years are intriguing:

In 2006 he gave them £1,800.
In 2007 the donation soared to £5,000.
Then in 2008 the amount falls back to £800.

What on earth could have been so different about 2007?
It couldn't have been that there were County Council elections in May of that year and NHCA needed a warchest?

Five grand can buy a lot of leaflets, a lot of petrol for getting around such a huge County.

Did taxpayers' cash fund the Tory takeover of Herefordshire Council?

Mr Wiggin on Guido Fawkes AGAIN!

Here is today's Guido

Mr Wiggin has appeared there five times to date!

Surely he must now hold the record for greatest number of appearances in Parliament's premier online Hall of Shame?

Well, if they're on expenses...

I'll have the most enormous sarnies you've got please.




Thanks to Harry Cole of the Centre for Open Politics!

The Sunday Mirror has run a second story on Wiggingate.

I see they're going after the 'sleaze' angle, probably to invoke memories of the dire days of John Major's government.
Is Bill Wiggin perhaps David Cameron's Neil Hamilton?

They could be on to something.

It's possible that the very poshness of this Tory govt. could be its downfall. My impression of toffs, since I first encountered them at Oxford, is that they can be pretty cavalier with other people's money.

And they are inculcated with a sense of 'entitlement' which makes them incautious of consequences. This is why - in the original expenses scandals of 2009 - so many of the outrageous claims (duck moats, wisteria-clearing) came from the upper class Tory MPs.

The Labour fiddling was more sleeves-rolled-up, workmanlike embezzlement.

The biggest local paper, the Hereford Times, is firmly controlled by Herefordshire Conservatives and is conspicuous by its almost total lack of coverage of the Wiggileaks scandal.


But cracks are showing: one of their reporters, under the nomme de guerre 'Hereford Hack' has today posted the following to a Facebook thread which has been mocking the paper:
"Some of us are here in Hereford for the long haul and share your frustration that we are occasionally turning a blind eye to the big stories. You will know that we regularly check out these pages and pick up on a few leads. Please don't give up on your local jobbing reporters just yet."

Clearly an honest, local reporter waiting for the editor - who has been bought by Wiggin's cronies - to go.
Interesting.

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Received a letter today from the Crown Prosecution Service. A clear effort had been made to open it, but the CPS had sellotaped over the seal.
I got a letter last year from the Police which had obviously been opened then resealed.

In neither case was it because of who the letter was to ( a nobody in the sticks) but who it was from - important bodies in our society.

Not only the CPS, but the Met, now routinely sellotape down the seals of their letters.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards goes one further: he seals his letter in an envelope, then this is placed inside a larger envelope which in turned is sealed down with a printed label.

Clearly, all of the above expect someone within the postal service to attempt to read their mail.

The question is - who is trying to watch the watchdogs?

Bill Wiggin's Wikipedia entry

Now I am no great respecter of Wikipedia.

When it started they had a purported "list of the greatest post-punk bands of all times".
My contribution -'Give Her One From Me' - stayed in their top 20 for a full year before they spotted that no such band had ever existed

So, one treats Wikipedia with caution.

Nonetheless, here is Bill Wiggin MP's entry. And bear in mind that this is his entry AFTER his supporters have challenged all the "disputable" info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Wiggin

As a friend of mine has commented:
"This is not the biog of a sitting MP so much as a Police charge sheet..."

Recent media coverage

In the fortnight since I referred my concerns to the Standards Commissioner and it was reported by the Sunday Mirror there has been a wee flurry of media interest in this whole Wiggileaks thing.
So I thought I'd recap on the recent coverage that I know about:


The BBC
Daily Mail
Hereford Journal
Worcester News
Mr Wiggin's local Ledbury Journal


And then, of course, there is Britain's top political blogger, Guido Fawkes.
Now Guido may very well have a soft spot for Bill wiggin MP, but by crikey is Guido good at hiding it:
Guido 1
Guido 2
Guido 3
Guido 4

Just spent a pleasant afternoon potting up the mizuna and working out that what the terribly clever Standards Committee are saying is that they can't take any action against councillors because there is no evidence that any councillor ever voted to have me declared a "vexatious hooligan" or whatever it is I'm supposed to be.

And on that basis, a nice email to the Town Clerk:
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/VexatiousNonsense.pdf

Have a nice weekend, Town Clerk!
You'll find a spot of gardening keeps your blood pressure down!

In January this ludicrous letter landed from the cross-party Bill Wiggin Fan Club (they call themselves Leominster Town Council):
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/LTC.jpg

When I stopped shaking with laughter I realised I couldn't comply with the provisions of this 'Trumpton banning order' if I wanted to.

It orders me not to email any councillor - the Mayor's emailing me all the time to find out what I'm up to!
Not supposed to converse with any cllr - every other day they puppy up to me in the street dying to know how Wiggingate is going.
Not supposed to phone any cllr - last year's Mayor Richard Westwood (so-called 'Labour' but doffs his cap to Tory HQ when called to heel) recently left a garbled message on our bleedin' answering machine!

It's as if Kafka had been turned into a strip in The Beano.

More sinister, perhaps, they also later confirmed I was banned from the Town Council offices, banned from attending public Council meetings and banned from inspecting Council documents when it is my legal right to do so. I should be flattered the lengths 'socialists' and 'independents' will go to to bash me on Mr Wiggin's behalf.

So I referred the letter to the appropriate authority: Herefordshire Council's Standards Committee and here is their considered decision (note it took 'em a month to send it to me: were they running it past their lawyers to see if they could get away with it?)

This document is almost as absurd-sinister as the original one from LTC:
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/StandardsMarch10.pdf

Have a read of it: Herefordshire Council’s policy now is that councillors can break their own Code of Conduct; they can disrespect electors; they can bully and intimidate electors; and they can prevent electors from accessing information to which they are legally entitled.
 So long as they do so at secret meetings at which no minutes are taken.

Hooray for democracy – Banana Republic of Hereford-style!!

The complaint:
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/March8thletter.html
wll now be with with the Chief Constable of West Mercia (possible offence in Leominster, hereafter reffered to as Leo) and the CPS and Met (possible offence in Westminster, hereafter referred to as West).

Right!
Hopefully I can get some work done this weekend on me allotment: bringing down the corrupt political establishment of Nth Herefordshire manures no parsnips.

Today I received a second letter from Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, John Lyon.
Blimey!

The letter is marked "Restricted Access" and the Commissioner has made it plain in the past that it would be a very serious matter for me ever to divulge the contents of one of his letters to anyone.

Do they think that scares me - a Democracy Ultra??

You can't "restrict" The Truth: I am going to PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED, SIR!
http://www.yourconvenience.co.uk/TheyDontScareMe.jpg

MARCH 9TH 2011

Having yesterday evening sent a detailed complaint to Cressida Dick (Assistant Commissioner of the Met) about false accounting, fraud and possible breaches of electoral law, this afternoon I posted a copy of the complaint to the Crown Prosecution Service.

On Monday I popped into Hereford Police Station giving them notice that I would also have to present my evidence to West Mercia Police: part of my complaint is that a fake invoice was printed and signed at Nth Herefordshire Conservative Assn offices in Leominster, which obviously falls within W. Mercia’s jurisdiction.

4 45pm, a call from Hereford station telling me there was a duty sergeant at Leo police station & I should go down there. I got to the station at 5, was met by a sergeant O’Reilly who took me to an interview room. I assume the 5 minute interview was recorded but here is, from fresh memory, the extraordinary exchange that took place there.

Sgt O’Reilly: I already know what this is about, expenses. I am not able to take any complaint from you about these matters

I TAKE OUT MY FOLDER OF EVIDENCE – THE SAME AS SENT TO THE MET & CPS. THE SGT LOOKS AS IF I’VE PRODUCED THE HEXED PIECE OF PAPER IN THE FILM “NIGHT OF THE DEMON”

Me: I just want to present evidence of what I believe is a serious offence committed in Herefordshire

Sgt: I can’t look at any of that. Listen, I’ve already investigated all this, it is all taken care of.

Me: Well, I’ve reported this potential crime to Cressida Dick at the Met and also to the CPS

Sgt O’Reilly: I know. I know all about that

(THIS IS STRANGE, AS I'D ONLY POSTED MY COMPLAINT TO THE CPS THAT AFTERNOON, TO THE ASST COMMISSIONER THE PREVIOUS EVENING EVENING.)

Sgt: Are you the victim of the alleged fraud?

Me: Not personally, but the public purse is.

Sgt O’Reilly: You cannot report a fraud unless you personally are the victim

Me: Really??!

Sgt: No one is allowed to report a crime “third person”. If you are not the victim you cannot report a crime. That’s it. I cannot look at your evidence you have to go now.

Me: you are refusing to look at evidence presented to you about a potential serious offence committed in Herefordshire?

AS HE SHOWS ME TO THE DOOR I REFLECT THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE CPS OR THE MET TO YET HAVE CONTACTED HEREFORDSHIRE POLICE TO ALERT THEM THAT I MIGHT MAKE A COMPLAINT. BUT OF COURSE – I MADE IT CLEAR TO NHCA A WEEK AGO THAT, IF THEY COULD NOT ADEQUATELY EXPLAIN THE INVOICES, I WOULD HAVE NO OPTION BUT TO GO TO THE POLICE.

Perhaps NHCA had been talking to Herefordshire constabulary, alerting them of a possible complaint by me?

I’ll take this to the Chief Constable of West Mercia and, if necessary, the IPCC.


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ARCHIVE OF BLOGS (in progress)


This will initially seem haphazard as I blog in pieces from other websites I've posted on, and from my diaries, but hopefully in the end it'll be a decent record of the last year and a half of digging into my MP's - and my local councillors - outrageous behaviour! And with some laughs along the way...
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FEBRUARY 27TH 2011

The morning of Kate's birthday and we are in her home-(and, in my view, England's finest) town: Liverpool.

We're staying on Hope Street exactly mid-way between the College where John Lennon studied Art, and the most gorgeous pub in Britain, The Phil. Paradise.

We're paying top dollar for the hotel so after breakfast I trouser an Observer & a Sunday Mirror (yes, I have been corrupted by all the expenses fiddling I've witnessed!)

Back in the hotel room and - oh 'allo, what have we here?

It appears that Mr Self was not merely a touch of cameo colour in an early episode of 'Life On Mars' after all...
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/02/27/tory-mp-bill-wiggin-to-face-anti-sleaze-probe-115875-22952034/

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FEBRUARY 24TH 2011
The Sunday Mirror Always Rings Twice


I was up in the loft printing out my letter to the Commissioner for Standards when the doorbell rang. By the time I got down there was no-one there. But a tiny, ridiculous, 1970s silver sports car was parked outside.


Brian from next door poked his head out: "Said he was a journalist, and he'd be back". Kate came down. She'd managed a quick peek out of her window as the visitor left: "He looked like a bailliff" she commented. Well, she is a Scouser, and perhaps has more idea of what a bailliff looks like than I have.


A half hour later and I was there when he called again. As I opened the door he thrust a gnarly paw towards me.
"The name's Self. Alistair Self. Sunday Mirror. Believe you have a dodgy doc for me".
I looked at him in his leather blouson with upturned collar, an upraised eyebrow in a face furrowed by decades of booze'n'fags, and in front of that outrageous sports car, and thought: "This is the first time I've ever been in an episode of Department S".


"Saw a cool looking jazz cafe down the road, care for a coffee and a confab?"
"Yeah, I'll just nip up and get my coat. And the er, dodgy document"


Upstairs, Kate whispered: "It's okay he is a genuine journalist". She'd already googled Mr Self.
She's been fancying lately that local Tories might lure me to a lonely place and settle their issues with me out of court, as it were.


At the Bluenote Cafe we sit down to coffees (somehow I have paid for them).
Fellow local troublemaker Joe Cocker - who was already in there - and I stare at the seasoned pro as he unfolds the £5,000 invoice I have given to him.


"You see, Jim, what it says right there? 'For hire of room for constituency surgeries'. Yeah. Right there".
He looks me straight in the eye. There is a pause. then one word.
"Fraud".


He downs his coffee in one, rises.
"Good doing business with you, Jim". I grasp the gnarly paw.
"Gotta be in Brum within the hour. Story up there".


He pauses at the door.


"They say you're a writer, Jim. Working on anything?"
"Well, I've got an idea for a play, maybe telly drama"
"Got a title yet?"
"I was thinking of 'How to Bring Down Your MP'..."
"See you at the premiere, Jim"


And he was gone.
The ordinary punters of Leo gazed after him, at the alien who had landed, had a swift coffee, then taken off again.


I gazed along with them.













FEBRUARY 24TH 2011