Never Mind Jess Phillips, How Much Are Tory MPs Paid on HIGNFY?

As readers of this blog will know, I have very little respect for Labour MP Jess Phillips. She’s a dyed in the wool Blairite, who was very open and unambiguous about her hatred of Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader. She said she’d like to ‘stab him in the front’, a remark about which she was naturally questioned a few years ago when she appeared on Have I Got News For You. She’s another Thatcherite, who apparently believes that privatisation have been wonderful for the national utilities and that life must be made even harder for all those feckless people out of work because they were laid off, are long term sick or disabled. The only aspect of her that strikes me as being at all left-wing is her feminism, for which she has had more than her fair share of abuse on line. This included Carl Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, now of the Lotus Eaters, sending her a text informing her that he ‘wouldn’t even rape her’. But now I feel I have to defend her, as she’s been targeted by mad right-wing YouTuber Alex Belfield over the amount of money she was apparently paid for appearing on Have I Got New For You.

Belfield has put up a video claiming that she was paid £15,000 at the rate of £5,000 an hour, for three hours work. He seems to have lifted this story from the Heil, which I gather has been the source of so much of his content. Belfield was annoyed that she was receiving this money on top of her MP’s salary. He felt she should have considered this simply as part of her outreach work as an MP, and just been paid expenses only.

This looks to me like a bit of tit for tat because of the way Tory MPs have particularly come under criticism for raking in the money from their second jobs. This is to me a fair criticism, especially as the amounts they are paid are well into the tens of thousands and there is often a very clear conflict of interest between their role as an MP regulating or overseeing a particular industry and their involvement through their commercial interests. This is rather different to appearing on popular television panel shows.

There’s also the issue of Belfield’s and the Heil’s selectiveness in criticising Phililips, because it’s not as if she’s the only politico who’s appeared on the programme. Not by a long chalk. Over the decades the show’s been on their guests have included politicians like Lembit Opik from the Lib Dems, Derek Hatton of the Labour party, Cecil Parkinson, a former member of Maggie’s cabinet and Boris Johnson, amongst others. My guess is that they would all have been paid the same or similar fees for their time on the show according to the pay rates at the time. I don’t see Phillips’ fee of £15,000 as anything extraordinary or remarkable.

But it does two things that please the Tories. It allows them to make it appear that the BBC really is biased towards the left and that its presenters are massively overpaid. This supports Murdoch’s demands for its privatisation. But always be aware that, as Murdoch’s networks are private, the amount he pays his presenters and executives is kept very secret.

Thus, as much as I despise Phillips, I have to say that this time she’s undeserving of the criticism that’s being thrown her way. She’s almost certainly been treated no differently than every other politician that’s been on the show.

One of whom, a former motoring journalist and editor of the Spectator, has shown himself to be far more greedy, not to mention incompetent and malign, than Phillips.

Vox Political on Hillsborough Victims’ Legal Victory

Mike over at Vox Political put up two pieces yesterday reporting the judgment that the 96 football fans, who died in the Hillsborough disaster, were the victims of unlawful killing. In the first article, he notes particularly that the victims and people of Liverpool were smeared, and the people of Britain deceived, by three people in particular: the head of the police, Margaret Thatcher, and the Sun under its editor, Kelvin MacKenzie. And he posted up this mock-up of how the sun’s cover should have looked in 2012 to make the point.

See Mike’s article at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/04/26/fans-were-unlawfully-killed-in-the-hillsborough-disaster-and-we-were-all-deceived/

Mike’s second article also reported that the Crown Prosecution Service is considering pressing charges after the decision of the jury. They ruled that the police, Sheffield Wednesday, and Eastwood and Partners, the construction company that built the Hillsborough Stadium, were at fault and made the serious errors that led to the deaths of the 96 fans. Crucially, the fans Thatcher and co blamed for the disaster, weren’t responsible.

CPS to consider criminal charges over the unlawful killing of 96 people at Hillsborough

It isn’t remotely surprising that Maggie, the police chief and Kelvin MacKenzie all lied about the fans’ behaviour. Maggie had a visceral hatred of the Left and the working class, and Liverpool was a thorn in her side because of the Labour council led by the controversial Derek Hatton. The Tories wasted much taxpayers’ money launching pointless inquiry after pointless inquiry trying to prove Hatton was a crook. There was corruption on Merseyside. Merseyside council was so dodgy that it used to appear in Private Eye’s ‘Rotten Boroughs’ column as ‘Murkyside’. But to my knowledge nothing was proved against Hatton.

As for Kelvin MacKenzie, he shared the political animosity of the Leaderene to Liverpool, along with the peculiar hatred of the city common to Fleet Street. For some strange reason, a large number of hacks of the time had little but contempt for the town and its people. This even extended to some of the hacks writing for the liberal papers, like the Graoniad and the Absurder. The Scum’s smears led to the paper being publicly burnt in the city, and wiped out its circulation there. In more recent years, it has apologised and tried to put the record straight. But only after Kelvin MacKenzie had departed. He hadn’t changed, and took his bile and hatred of the town to whichever rag he started editing after he left the Sun.