Labour candidate under pressure to quit over offensive and obscene Tweets... and quits

The Labour candidate for Moray in Scotland, Stuart Maclennan, is facing calls to resign today after details of the messages he has shared with the world on Twitter emerged.

Maclennan works for Labour at the Scottish Parliament and is Secretary of Scottish Young Labour, and his Twitter account has swiftly been taken down. But this was not before the Scottish Sun had got onto him.

As the paper reports, he used his Twitter feed to describe David Cameron as a "t***", Nick Clegg "a b******" and Labour MP Diane Abbott "a f****** idiot".

And his inappropriate comments were not confined to politicians. He branded X Factor judge Louis Walsh "a c***" and made other highly inappropriate observations about life for someone standing for public office, such as:

"Jeezo, I'm as dry as a nun's f**** today"

"Made my connecting train. No first class it would appear. Sitting opposite the ugliest old boot I've ever seen too"

"You know I think I might be completely sober for the first time in 4 days"

Scottish Labour have said his behaviour was "foolish", but the Tory leader in Scotland, Annabel Goldie MSP, says he should quit:

“I am disgusted by this disgraceful behaviour from a Labour candidate. If he has any shred of remorse or decency then he must stand down. If he does not go voluntarily then Labour must sack him. At the very time the public are calling for politicians to clean up politics Labour remain in the gutter. Labour have run a repugnant and desperate campaign so far. Twisting the truth and using fears and smears to scare the most vulnerable people in our society. This candidates behaviour is entirely consistent with this type of campaign.”

11.30am update:

You can download this spreadhseet with details of several hundred of Maclennan's more recent Tweets.

It has also been pointed out to me that Maclennan's activities are in direct breach of the pledge made last summer by Gordon Brown that Labour candidates must uphold the highest standards of integrity. Here's what Brown said on June 25th 2009:

"We've got to make sure that people see that their Members of Parliament and those who seek to represent them are acting in the public interest and not in their self interest. We've got to make sure that people see that their politicians are in it not for what they can get, but for what they can give. That's why today we promise that we will uphold the highest standards of integrity, we promise that there will be transparency in everything we do."

If Brown meant what he said, Maclennan simply has to go.

11.45am update:

The Labour hierarchy have been dismissive of the growing anger about Maclennan's offensive Tweets; but the Labour blogosphere would appear to be more understanding of the unacceptability of what their candidate has said.

Here's what Alex Smith on Labourlist has blogged:

"Why someone who has political aspirations would feel the need to publish these thoughts publicly, I'll never know. Some are unforgiveable. And it's not just one slip-up, it's series of inappropriate and offensive tweets. MacLennan is now under pressure to resign. To avoid causing the party any further embarrassment and prolonged difficulty, it's something he should seriously consider."

And Will Straw has been unequivocal in a Tweet of his own this morning:

"He should resign - it's a disgrace"

Noon update:

The BBC report that Labour are now to remove Maclennan as a candidate - not long after Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy said that he would remain as Labour's candidate in Moray.

12.15pm update:

Here's the statement from Scottish Labour (via Paul Waugh) which confirms the U-Turn it has made over the course of the last couple of hours:

"Stuart MacLennan has been sacked as Labour's candidate for Moray for the totally unacceptable language which he has expressed online. On reading the comments in full, the Scottish Labour Party was outraged by their content and Scottish Labour's General Secretary took the decision to suspend his membership of the Labour Party. Stuart MacLennan is no longer a Labour Party candidate nor eligible to hold office as a Labour Party representative."

Scottish Labour may have been outraged at reading the comments in full today, but what about the fact that senior Labour figures such as Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, Ben Bradshaw and John Prescott have all been following him on Twitter, yet have never batted an eyelid about his conduct?

Jonathan Isaby

Harriet Harman, paedophilia - and double standards

Amazing recent news.

It’s emerged that a very senior Shadow Cabinet member once said that sexually explicit photographs or films of children should be legalised - unless there was evidence that the child had been harmed.

And at the time (the late 1970s), the spokesman was a senior figure in a libertarian group that wanted the age of consent lowered to 14, and incest decriminalised.

Furthermore, paedophile organisations were affiliated to the group - which said that "childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage".

Some of you are asking: what's going on?

Where's the Government reaction, you ask?  The Labour backbenchers calling for Cameron to sack the spokesman?  The Labour frontbenchers not going quite so far, but murmuring that he - or she - has “questions to answer”?  The BBC top billing for the Labour reaction?  The Guardian ringing round parents' groups for quotes, hunting down former members of the libertarian group, and straining to give the story legs?  The left-wing commentators who want the Conservatives to lose - and Brown to win - announcing proof "of what we've always known - that the Tories can't be trusted with our kids".  The right-wing commentators who collaborate in wanting the same result denouncing "the culture of moral depravity which taints the top of the Party"?  The Mirror doorstepping the Shadow Minister? The pressure building on him to resign?  The election campaign thrown into turmoil?  The plunging opinion polls?

The rest of you have seen the point.

The story did indeed break yesterday.  (The Daily Telegraph had it.)  But -

• The politician in question wasn't a Shadow Cabinet Minister.  It was no less senior a Cabinet Minister than Harriet Harman, Leader of the Commons and prospective Labour leadership candidate.
• The organisation wasn’t a libertarian group. It was that establishment body, the National Council for Civil Liberties.
• And although Tim Loughton, our Shadow Children’s Minister, judged our reaction to the story well, there was – guess what? – little BBC reaction, no sign of a right-wing media ring-round, no reaction from the conservative commentariat: no sense of a story gaining momentum.  I can’t find anything significant on it in today’s media.

My point isn’t that Harriet Harman wants to ease the legal restraints on paedophile activity.  (It should go without saying that she doesn’t.)  Nor is it that her views during the late 1970s are worth the kind of media rampage that I sketch out above  It’s simply this.  Had a Shadow Cabinet Minister taken the same view in the late 1970s as Harman did, and the Guardian (say) rather than the Telegraph broken the story, there would have been if not a rampage, at least a big flurry of media interest.  But there wasn’t.  Why?

Because Britain has slowly developed a deep, sustained, self-reinforcing anti-right cultural bias – which helps to drive media double standards.

Now there are of course anti-left cultural biases, too.  For example, it’s widely assumed (I think rightly) that the left’s head is in the wrong place – in other words, that the socialist economic model doesn’t work.  The corresponding ant-right cultural bias is that the right’s heart is in the wrong place.  The industrial-scale murder, mass starvation, institutionalised tyranny and economic collapse of communism has done astoundingly little to dent it.  It’s the default setting of the academic establishment, the state-subsidised arts, the license-fee funded broadcaster, and the big charities – the cultural equivalent of “the commanding heights of the economy”.  And it spreads outwards from there.

It’s easy to believe that the two biases cancel each other out.  They don’t – at least, not during the run-up to a close election.  If Labour politicians are assumed to be good people – perhaps with some wrong-headed ideas, but good people none the less – their motives won’t be questioned unless personal gain is involved.  Consider what would have happened had the politician in yesterday’s Telegraph story been not Harman, but a senior Tory.  Isn’t there something in the picture I sketched out earlier?  Wouldn't the double standard have come into play?

It’s certainly done so elsewhere.  Imagine the reporting if the leader of a flagship Conservative council (rather than Labour-controlled Glasgow Council) had resigned after admitting drug abuse.  Or if CCHQ had issued leaflets simply making up stories about Labour - accusing them, say, of planning to end free bus travel and scrap TV licences for the over 75s?  Or if some Tory councillors in a shire county had the same relationship with a fascist group that some Labour councillors in the East End have with the Islamic Forum of Europe?

On this site, we’ll be watching for anti-right double standards closely and flagging them up unsparingly during the run-up to May 6.

Paul Goodman

Labour candidate gives Nazi salute as he lazily smears Tory allies in Europe

The image on the right is of Daniel Zeichner, the Labour candidate for Cambridge at the general election, speaking at a Cambridge Union debate earlier in the month.

In a debate about whether the Conservatives are ready to run the country again, he ventured onto the topic of the European Conservatives and Reformists - the grouping in the European Parliament which the British Conservatives helped establish after last year's European elections.

Criticising David Cameron for taking Conservative MEPs out of the federalist EPP group, Mr Zeichner continued:      

"You don't go and have an alliance with Angela  Merkel, you go and find some people in the Polish Law and Order Freedom Party - some people who think that the best thing to do on a Sunday morning is to go out and celebrate the achievements of the Waffen SS in the last war - a bit of this kind of thing [does Nazi salute], you know that's the kind of thing they like. Quite frankly it is shameful that a leader of a major British party in this country has got anything to do with these fascists across Europe."

For a start, there is no such party as the Law and Order Freedom Party in Poland (the Tory partners from Poland are the Law and Justice Party).

But for a parliamentary candidate to parade around the floor of the Cambridge Union giving a Nazi salute as he makes what is in any case a grotesque smear against Conservative allies is simply extraordinary, as is the suggestion that Tory partners in Brussels are "fascists". It is a lazy, unfounded attack and one that Mr Zeichner should withdraw.

The other members of the ECR group are in the political mainstream and if you don't believe my acceptance that the Law and Justice Party fits into that description, perhaps you'll take the word of the Chief Rabbi of Poland.

The ECR group leader, Michal Kamiński, also responded to the kinds of smears being perpetuated by Mr Zeichner and his ilk when I spoke to him at the Conservative Party Conference last year. Many of the MEPs from the ECR group spent much of their lives under Communist regimes, and the idea that they in any way support equally totalitarian Nazi or fascist idology is offensive in the extreme.

You can watch the Cambridge Union debate below, with the offending passage at 26 minutes and 55 seconds in.

6.45pm update:

I have been alerted to the following three links which set out the truth as regards the smear against Latvians in respect of their alleged "celebration" of the SS. The FT has covered it here whilst the Lativan Foreign Ministry has published statements here and here.

7.30pm I am aware that not everyone is able to view the comments below this thread. We are trying to fix this. 8.30pm Is now fixed.

Jonathan Isaby

Chris Grayling brands the Government "a complete disgrace" for suggesting that opposing mass immigration is "racist"

The Daily Express splashes today on a story which almost beggars belief:

"Labour dismissed the British public’s widespread opposition to mass immigration as “racism”, a Government document revealed yesterday. Officials made it clear that public opinion was strongly against relaxing border controls.

"But ministers were urged to ignore voters’ “racist” views and press ahead with a secret policy to encourage migrants to flood into Britain. Whitehall experts even proposed a major propaganda campaign to soften up voters in preparation for the mass influx of newcomers. The details were laid bare in the original draft of a policy document released for the first time under the Freedom of Information Act."

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling has branded the Government a "complete disgrace" over the matter:

"The Government has simply not been telling the truth about its policies on immigration. More and more evidence is now emerging to show that they deliberately planned a big jump in immigration for their own political purposes."

“Now they are trying to rewrite history to pretend those decisions never happened. Their conduct over all of this has been a complete disgrace.”

Jonathan Isaby

"The Tory party's intellectuals are clambering on the "global warming isn't caused by mankind" bandwagon with as much enthusiasm as they used to oppose the Maastricht treaty or speak up for apartheid South Africa."

That reprehensible sentence is unworthy of Jackie Ashley but she writes it in today's Guardian.

"Dear Ms Ashley,

Five things:

1. I am open to the possibility that the climate is changing and it is man-made.

2. We should improve energy efficiency and diversify energy supplies but I do not believe that we should turn the UK economy upside down in order to reduce our carbon footprint when I think it highly likely that small changes made here will be overwhelmed by what happens in India, for example (where 30% of people have no electricity), and China.

3. If we want to improve the welfare of the world's poorest we are better focusing on giving them clean water; fighting malaria, HIV/AIDS; and, in particular, lifting trade barriers.

4. A richer world is much more likely to cope with extreme weather events.

5. I have never supported apartheid and resent what you wrote this morning.

Tim Montgomerie"