Betty Said:

Join New Labour they do it best.?

We Answered:

Like all decent minded people I cannot condone the behaviour of anyone who breaks the law Roy. I wonder if you could take a moment out of your busy schedule to comment on the following actions of BNP members:

March 2007 David Copeland

The Appeal Court increases David Copeland's sentence to a minimum of 50 years. The London nail bomber, who had been an active member of the BNP, had originally been sentenced to a minimum term of 30 years for the three bombs he set off in 1999 which killed three people and injured 139 others.

February 2007 John Laidlaw

John Laidlaw is sentenced to life after going on a shooting spree in north London in May 2006. He shot Abu Kamara in Upper Street before accidentally shooting Emma Sheridan at Finsbury Park Tube station, as he aimed at a second man. Laidlaw had a string of previous convictions starting at the age of 14. They included property damage, public order offences and 16 counts of theft and possession of knives. He also carried out seven armed street muggings and had been in and out of jail several times. In October 2004 he attacked a black motorist, hurling racist abuse at him. A police report written after Laidlaw was arrested for the attack said he behaved violently in front of officers and was "foaming at the mouth". "In the presence and hearing of the black female gaoler the defendant made racist comments and remarks, stating he was a member of the BNP and that he hated all black people," the document says. He also said he was going to "kill all black people". He was convicted of racially aggravated actual bodily harm and using racist language.

February 2007 Robert Cottage

Robert Cottage, a BNP member and former council election candidate, pleads guilty to possessing explosives. He denies, however, as does his co-defendant David Jackson, conspiracy to cause an explosion. The jury are unable to agree a verdict. A retrial will take place in July.

January 2007 David Enderby

David Enderby, a BNP councillor in Redditch, is found guilty of assault on three members of his estranged wife's family. He is fined £100 for each assault and ordered to pay £100 costs. His wife later told the local newspaper that he had a history of domestic violence.

January 2007 Mark Bulman

Mark Bulman was jailed for five years for setting fire to Swindon's Broad Street mosque. He used a BNP leaflet as a fuse for his petrol bomb.

December 2006 Richard Mulhall

Richard Mulhall, the BNP's council group leader in Calderdale, was sentenced to do 200 hours of unpaid work on four counts of benefit fraud. Branding him "thoroughly dishonest", Recorder Felicity Davies said he only escaped jail because relevant legislation was not yet in force when he committed the offences. He was also ordered to pay £2,000 costs and to repay £603.18 in jobseekers' allowance. He had already repaid the housing benefit and council tax benefit. A jury had found him guilty in October of falsely claiming a total of £3,002.95 in benefits by concealing the fact that his partner was working.

November 2006 Darren Francis

BNP member Darren Francis is given a five-year restraining order after being found guilty of harassing Sally Keeble, the MP for Northampton North.

September 2006 Robert McGlynn

Robert McGlynn, a Swansea BNP activist, is fined £200 plus £200 costs for shouting racist abuse at an Asian woman. He was convicted on evidence from a passer-by. He later loses his appeal against conviction and is ordered to pay a further £140 in costs.

July 2006 Allen Boyce

The former National Front Remembrance Day parade bugler Allen Boyce, 73, now a BNP supporter, receives a two-year suspended sentence for giving bomb-making instructions to Terry Collins, a BNP member, who was sentenced to five years in 2005 for conducting a racist hate campaign against the Asian community in Eastbourne.

May 2006 Angela Clarke

A former BNP councillor Angela Clarke is fined £200 for resisting arrest during a fracas.

May 2006 Kevin Hughes

Kevin Hughes, who acted as election agent for the BNP Redditch councillor David Enderby in May 2006, is sentenced to 30 months in prison for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker. The sentence is later reduced to two years on appeal.

March 2006 Luke Smith

A former BNP Burnley councillor Luke Smith is imprisoned for 11 months for violent disorder, and a further six months for other violent offences. He is also banned from football matches for six years. Smith was expelled from the BNP in 2003 following an assault on a BNP organiser.

February 2006 Stephen Bailey

Stephen Bailey, a Lincoln BNP activist, is convicted of 35 charges of criminal damage and 19 of arson. He set fire to sheds, litter bins and a car and is believed to have vandalised more than 80 cars by slashing tyres and damaging bodywork. Bailey was arrested after police seized computer equipment and documents from his home.

November 2005 Roderick Rowley

Roderick Rowley, a former BNP candidate in Coventry, is imprisoned for 15 months after admitting 14 charges of making, distributing or possessing obscene images of children. He is also ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years.

May 2005 Karl Hanson

Karl Hanson is fined £400 for possessing heroin and crack cocaine. News of his arrest broke a few days before the May 2005 local elections in which he was a BNP candidate in Huddersfield.

April 2005 John Cope

John Cope, a Cheshunt BNP member and election candidate, is fined £750 and ordered to pay £104 costs for harassing an anti-racist campaigner.

March 2005 Terry Collins

Terry Collins, a BNP member, is sentenced to five years in prison for a year-long campaign of terror against Asian families in Eastbourne. He claims the BNP "brainwashed" him. Collins, a former Territorial Army soldier, admitted charges of arson, racially aggravated harassment and criminal damage. He also admitted the possession of bullets found in his home and asked for 11 further offences of racially aggravated criminal damage to be taken into account.

Deborah Said:

Why do Sheffield City Councillors want asylum seekers to be allowed to work immediately?

We Answered:

This is as they say totally wrong, asylum seekers should be fast tracked back to where they come from, we do not need them, regardless of what the politicians tell us. Our borough council just rolled over and welcomed hundreds of thousands and quite literally we are now swamped with people from every port you can imagine.

Alfred
when my taxes pay for their home comforts but my mother can't get help with just little things that would make her life a bit easier, i don't ******** think so. Your kind of thinking has got us to where we are now, overburdened with people, too little doing good for people who have paid all their lives into Britain, not handouts for those who know we are a soft touch.

Gerald Said:

Am i the only person who has never got the Liberal Democrats?

We Answered:

No.

I was a party official in the SDP during the 1980s. I also voted Liberal when I had a general election on my 18th birthday and was the youngest voter in the constituency. In my heart of hearts though, I remain an independent.

The problem the LibDems share with certainly New Labour and probably the Tories too is that they have lost their philosophical roots. They become just another bunch of career politicians putting the correct spin so they can be elected, but all the parties these days are interchangeable.

The old Liberal values were to make as much as possible controlled from below - the individual carried the most responsibility, followed by the family, then the community, then the area, and only then the nation. The ideal size of a unit is the village. A Swiss friend once said that largest workable democratic unit was the Swiss canton. Anything bigger just lost touch with humanity.

The best illustration was when a large area of S.E.London came up for redevelopment. The Tories wanted to create an enterprise zone full of offices with tax relief on bonuses for the corporate entrepreneurs and speculators - the wealth creators and go-getters. Labour wanted the whole are put aside for social housing for the disadvantaged, ethnic minorities, single mothers and such like. The Liberals wanted to create a mixed village with big houses, little houses, little workshop areas, small shops, maybe a school and a pub, all self-contained and jumbled up.

[I can't remember precisely what happened to it, but if it was the Isle of Dogs, then the corporates got their way, and if it was North Greenwich, then a great white elephant was erected there in order to spend millennium money that should have gone to repairing church roofs in every village in Britain].

Nobody was to be hidebound by convention or conformity. In fact the more diverse and varied folk are the better, since the richer the society when there is a wide variety of talent to call on in every village. Everyone is entitled to their personal interests, values, tastes, and illegality should be limited to where it inflicts harm on others, and not as a means of central control. Nobody dictated to by centrally imposed regulation. The price of this however was a much greater degree of self responsibility and willingness to recognise the talents of those around one.

The duty of a Liberal government is to enable as many, and preferably all people to be a valued part of society, to contribute and to benefit from the finite pot that is the world's resources. Like a well tended garden, this may mean cutting down a few invasive nettles in order that the flowers may flourish.

The big problem the Liberal Party faced in the 1980s was that as a collection of villages, there could be flat contradiction from one to the next. For example - environmentalists within the Party were flatly against the destruction of the many SSSIs and historic monuments during the construction of the Newbury bypass, yet the Newbury Liberal MP was all in favour of it. David Alton, a devout Roman Catholic from Liverpool was adamantly opposed to abortion, yet David Steel, the leader at the time, was the very MP who introduced and got through the Abortion Act in 1967 legalising it.

The SDP attempted to bring order to this chaos by organising the party on a coherent national platform, at the cost of allowing local differences to spring up all over the place. It improved their national standing, but I do feel they lost something in the process.

These days, I am perplexed by contradictions in what were once thought core values, for no clear philosophical reason other than a cabal has pushed it forward. Take for example the cutting of Income Tax during a time of heavy overspending. Or the removal of opposition to student tuition charges.

My own local LibDem council (Malvern Hills) lost control and all but five of its councillors when they voted to close a number of the public toilets. Most folk thought that if the LibDems stood for anything, it was for the safeguarding of local amenities such as public toilets.

Maria Said:

What do you think of these remarks by Nick Clegg?

We Answered:

Nick Clegg and his party prior to the election agreed mainly with the Labour party ref' our debt.
He said he couldn't work with Gordon Brown, Gordon Brown stepped down.
Nick Clegg agreed there was no big rush to pay off our debt, he felt that immediate massive cuts would harm the poorer among us.
His initial fears were well founded. Never mind he is now deputy PM I never heard of him making any sort of protest!
His main idea of going hand in glove with Cameron was to get more of his merry men in power in parliament. He felt that this would bring his party more members and more votes in any local elections, all he has really got is the vague promise that Cameron's clowns will 'eventually' look at the question of our present voting system! Who cares a fig about that?
Come next month people will see what these clowns can really do. and realise the mistake they have made.
They whole deal he has made with the clowns has badly backfired ! Savage cut backs to all public services including our police yet they tell us this will not increase our large unemployed list. It certainly will. How can it possible not?
Massive cut backs on benefits, we truly are becoming another 3rd world country. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel, where is it coming from? Certainly not from this bunch of clowns!
Can anyone see any light, or am I on my own here?

Philip Said:

What do you think of these remarks by Nick Clegg?

We Answered:

The first paragraph, is pointing out that a few years back, some people who had been affiliated with the labour party defected to the LibDems. Now that the LibDems have some (albeit very limited) influence on the way the country is being run, some people are unhappy and have efected the other way.

I think the point he is making is that the Lib-Dems are their own party, with its own ideology, its own policies. They are not there solely to provide a little respite from labour. They are not "labour-lite". There is no future in trying to be an imitation of another party.

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I'm sure some people will mock the paragraph above. The truth is though, that the Liberal Democrats are very much the minor party in this coalition. 57 seats vs 307 seats. 16% vs 84%. Whether you like tory policy or not - it's no surprise that the majority of what the government is doing is tory.

There have been concessions to LibDem policy - the referendum on AV, the increase in income tax threshold easing the burden on low income families, the exemption for low & middle earners from child benefit cuts, the exemption for low & middle earners from the public sector pay freeze.
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Just to add, I don't necessarily agree that there's no future in imitating another party. Tony Blair proved with labour's lurch to the right that you can stay in government for 13 years by imitating the tories.

That said, as somebody who voted LibDem at the last election, I'm very glad the lib dems aren't doing that.

ETA: @hey you: Where does it say he's a tory?

Rose Said:

Is this a joke?

We Answered:

Crazy world we live in

Jackie Said:

which liberal democrat councillor was claiming his camden council allowance whilst studying in usa?

We Answered:

Dunno. But I know a certain Conservative London mayor who claims £100,000 salary, plus expenses, when he gets paid £250,000 a year by the Daily Telegraph.