+++SU president gets away with it+++

Via the excellent

Young Conservative

blog it seems Nottingham University's notorious President has survived efforts to have him removed from office... TB broke the story a couple of months ago and was then threatened with some very arsey emails from the bureaucrat in charge at Nottingham threatening to sue unless the stories were removed. Seems they had issue with the phrase "beating up" rather than "head butt". Over to TYC:

"Impact, the ‘University of Nottingham Students’ Union’s award-winning magazine’

is reporting

that disgraced Students’ Union president Nsikan Edung has survived a no-confidence vote by a threadbare margin.

Monday night’s vote ended with a majority - 24 - voting in favour of removing Edung, whose position looked increasingly untenable following revelations last month that he bragged on Facebook of “pissing our [SU] money away” and “ruining diplomatic relations” whilst he was meant to be acting as an ambassador the university in China. The trip was funded from the public purse. Whilst only 16 votes were cast in favour of Edung continuing in his role, the two-thirds threshold which would have seen him dismissed was narrowly avoided.

However the lamentable story doesn’t end there, with Impact stating that "on Friday 28th March he was observed to engage in an altercation involving 40 minutes of sustained verbal abuse and then an alleged physical altercation, which is now pending censure”.

Taken in totality this conduct surely begs the question, what does one have to do to be dismissed as Nottingham’s SU president?"

Quite.

Exclusive: Boris's private army.

Boris Johnson today revealed his new private security guards who have been cloned from the big fella himself:

Those looking to stir up trouble with BJ/DC rift stories better be careful from now on...

Twenty Firsts meme thing.

Messers

Dale

,

Greer

and

Blaney

have tagged TB in this meme question thingy:

First Job
Worked in CCHQ for three months of the summer in 2007.

First Real Job
TB is still a student.. for a few more weeks anyway.

First Role in Politics
Chairman of Edinburgh University Tories

First Car
Ever the green - it was an electric red Jag. TB got it when he was five and was king of the playroom.

First Record
Different Class by Pulp

First Football Match
Ummm Newcastle vs. Wimbledon a long time ago. Think it was a draw.

First Concert
Raging Speedhorn at the Forum Tunbridge Wells aged about 15. Amazing at the time, on reflection utterly dreadful.

First Country Visited
Spain aged about six weeks.

First TV Appearance
QVC - was a bit of a regular on Toy Time when TB was a little bear...

First Political Speech
A passionate defence of the Union in a debate against the SNP a few years ago. The bottle of port really fired things up.

First Girlfriend/Boyfriend
Rebecca. Must have been about ten, our romance bloomed through rehearsals of a school production of Oliver!

First Encounter with a Famous Person
Played Tiny Tim in Scrooge the Musical which starred Anthony Newley when TB was seven.

First Brush With Death
Being born two months early was pretty touch and go. Lets just say TB was blue from day one.

First House/Flat Owned
Pass

First Film Seen at a Cinema
Bambi? Don't really remember...

First Time on the Radio
5 Live last Conference.

First Politician I Met
Had dinner with Nigel Farage when he came to speak at Tonbridge School.

First Book I Remember Reading
Can't really remember exactly but Topsy and Tim would be a safe bet.

First Visit to the London Palladium
JOSEPH! Mummy and Nanny Bear took the little bears to see Philip Scofield don the coat. Still know every word.

First Election
Got owned in 2008 running for President of Edinburgh University Students Association. Might have helped if TB has shown any interest at all in student politics before that.

TB tags:

Gareth Keenan

,

Irfan Ahmed

,

Guido

,

Yapping Yousif

and

Mike Rouse

.

Birthday Bear

Exam done. Candles blown out, cake eaten. Back tomorrow!

Swine Flu.

We're all going to die!

When the going gets tough...

Oh the irony. In a post that actually contains the words "a big fat slap in the face for the ethics of the blogosphere" it emerges that Tom Miller has

turned the comments off

on his blog. He is continuing his, now silent, puppet master Derek Draper's  personally vindictive campaign against

Alex Hilton

because of his involvement in

MessageSpace

. So much from good blogging practice. Wasn't accountability pretty high up that list? Without comments a blog is just a foghorn. 

It didn't take long for Gareth to show his true authoritarian colours now did it...

Caption Contest - Birthday edition

"Hello, we're from the government and we're here to help..."

Upping the pace...

Buried next to a

ridiculous story

about how Brown now has to pay his MPs £5000 to get them to vote for his expenses plan, TB spotted this in the Mail:

Seems the campaign is gaining traction... have you signed yet?

Blogs are the new black...

You may have noticed TB has been lacking in some serious substance recently, and posts rarely longer than forty words this week. Well his finals start tomorrow, his birthday, and thus the blog has suffered. Here's a guest post to keep you all going. TB is turning over the tables to the editors of the new blog

Keep Right Online

, that seeks "to right the wrongs of the past twelve years through informing on right of centre views."

Dear reader, allow me to regale you, with why blogs such as Tory Bear,

Iain Dale

,

Guido Fawkes

and

Keep Right Online

are fast becoming the staple of the right, while the left haven't quite gotten the hang of it. Progressive nothing. This is freedom of speech at its greatest.
Over the past year, the prominence of major Conservative bloggers such as

Hannan

,

Delingpole,

 

Guido

 [Ed. don't forget

Dizzy

, he's fab.] has given the right a (sorry to sound so clichéed) fresh new voice: one that people actively seek out, and one that is, in fact, so sensational that the mainstream media clamour for the latest breaking stories.

We saw it at Smeargate, we saw it at Crewe and Nantwich, we saw it after the Budget, and we'll see it again and again. Vibrant and energetic, giving way to independent opinions and without the 'party line' mandate, web 2.0 exploitation should be encouraged and fostered as one of THE best marketing tools we have.

That’s not to say it’s simply the medium. The quality of our journos and pseudo-journos is impressive to say the least. The

BUCF blog

,

Sassy Conservative

,

The Young Conservative

and more offer both wider scope, but also niche and targeted pieces: and we’re not even close to saturation on this. The average hits on ‘our’ sites are devastating to the soon-to-be opposition. We can only imagine how much money Tory Bear rakes in Google ads - eh, TB?

But be wary, dear blogger, of complacency, and certainly of embarrassment. CF itself is not without its renegades, and in reading these blogs, we offer a self-regulatory solution to our writers. We’d hardly like to see one go the way of

Miller 2.0

, or whatever that hack calls himself nowadays. (Can't wait for Miller: Reloaded.)

Going forward, over the course of the next eighteen months, we need to see a surge in how many people are visiting, debating and discussing views mentioned on these blogs or sharing videos and posts on Facebook/*insert social networking site of choice here*, and thus truly contributing to this 21st century library of opinion. You may not agree with some of the things you read, but, by jove, if you’re not informed or informing others upon your trip on the "series of tubes".

Elections are coming- in a variety of forms. We mustn't lose a grip on what I call the ‘informative scene’. Stoop to their levels, we shall not. The difference between left of centre blogs and our own? Substance. We have it; they don't even come close.

If you would like to write a guest post for Tory Bear get in touch.

Hannan's speech:

Shakespeare, Europe and Labour lies:

Teaching the people of Britain a new vocabulary, one speech at at time.

Tories! Live!

If you didn't make it to Spring Forum either, you can watch it live from 1.30 until 4.30. Speeches from Osborne, Hannan and Cameron all coming up:
(gone)
Back to the books for TB though.

 

UPDATE 15.45. Well that was an excellent revision break... Hannan gave a barnstorming speech about Europe and was given the biggest standing ovation of the day so far:

Video to follow.

This is Dan Han speaking II

Ok last post of the day about Hannan, promise. But if you watch one video on YouTube today, check out his address to the Freedom Association fringe meeting last night:

Via

Play Political

.

Hannan for Congress

It's pretty obvious that Daniel Hannan is a man the party should be listening to. His book "

The Plan

", that he wrote with Douglas Carswell MP, should be in DC's desk draw. His YouTube video has finally got the

remix

TB never had time to do, but it's his profile in America that is truly staggering. Just came across this

hilarious site

:

Back off America. He's ours.

Don't forget - to meet Daniel Hannan click here.

Horribly busy morning polishing up on Wittgenstein, but TB just had a click through the papers with a cup of coffee...

• Fraser Nelson wants to know what the plan is Dave in the NOTW.

• Nigel Lawson slams the Budget in The Telegraph
  .

• As does ummm Andrew Lloyd Webber in the Mail.

• The Mail also reports about Gordon's raging at DC and Clegg at the expenses meeting.

• The Times interviews Dave.

• Also the Times reports that the criminal Lords get slap on the wrist and no expenses for year. Diddums.

...and finally in true Mail style, check out which buildings did and didn't fly the St George's Cross the other day.

Lib Dem PPC does the right thing.

ConservativeHome is

reporting

that Norsheen Bhatti,

Liberal Democrat Campaigner

for Chelsea & Fulham, has joined the Conservatives and it seems she has some pretty

damning things

to say about Nick Clegg...

"When I heard you speak I realised that you as leader and the Liberal Democrats are the not the party I had once believed in and is so very out of touch with everyday life and people in our country.

"It saddens me to say but that day I lost all faith in you and the party and I can no longer continue to be a part of the Liberal Democrat party of today."

Will this be the first of many Lib Dems seeing the light?

This is Dan Han speaking...

TB sadly couldn't make it to Spring Forum, but so it came to be, that at the seventh hour, on the first day, the golden child doth speak:

Rousing stuff apparently.

Yes that's the point...

Remove the word "however" from the last paragraph, and that should be the wording of the manifesto. 

State funded yes, State controlled no.

When does this end?

London Conservative Future have a good little recruitment video out this weekend:

Check out their website

here

.

Looking for a summer job?

Dear all,

Liberal Youth have now decided the content of their Freshers campaign, and we're now looking for designers to take on either the whole project, or designers to take on individual campaigns.

Our campaign briefs are as follows:

Debt Busters

Our tuition fees/student debt campaign. It was decided that the campaign will have a Ghostbusters theme/format.

We need a logo for the campaign, which ideally can also go on a t-shirt, along with posters. We also want I.O.U. cards. So "I.O.U. a free education" signed by Gordon Brown.

"Choose the Lib Dems"

After discussing rewriting the "What Lib Dems Believe" (WLDB) leaflet we have that some of you may have seen, we decided we wanted to have a campaign built on the wider idea of why people should join/vote for the Lib Dems.

The campaign will be done in the style of Trainspotting, with posters done in the style of the famous Trainspotting ones. You may have seen the ones we've just done for the budget on Facebook. If not see

here

.

We want the WLDB leaflet redone as a business card sized fold-out leaflet, like the Make it Happen leaflets that were produced, but in keeping with the Trainspotting visual design.

"Let's Speak Up"
This will be our campaign on I.D. cards. We'll be re-working the "First they came for the writers, but I didn't speak up because I was not a writer.....and then they came for me. And there was nobody left to speak up for me" to something along the lines of:

"First they came for the airport workers. But I didn't speak up because I was not an airport worker. Then they came for the foreigners. But I didn't speak up because I was not a foreigner......Now they're coming for us. So let's speak up."

This is the one campaign where we're not set on a design, so is the one where you can be most creative.

Please send emails of interest/design ideas to elaine.bagshaw@liberalyouth.org

We will be making a final decision on designers on June 1st at the latest, but will appoint earlier if we find good people!

We are willing to negotiate on pay, but as we have a limited budget would appreciate volunteers or things in kind, e.g. you design for us, we'll do some delivery for you.

Apologies for the long post!

Best wishes,

Elaine Bagshaw
Chair, Liberal Youth
elaine.bagshaw@liberalyouth.org

Totty Watch winners - Week 2:

Tory Bear, the Acting Returning Officer for Researcher Totty Watch, hereby gives notice that the percentage of votes given for each candidate at the election of 24th April 2008 was as follows;

Jessie Lever: 19%
Victora Parker: 81%

Jack Colson: 65%
Paul Foote: 35%

And that Victoria Parker and Jack Colson have been duly elected to Westminster's Researcher of the Week.

Prizes are in the post to your MPs office. Get nominating contestants for next week's edition.