Exclusive: "This isn't about George, or you, it's about the Labour Party"

Tory Bear has said it before and will say it again - the Labour Party from the very top, to the grassroots is in a pretty desperate state of affairs. Now you may have noticed that TB has been focusing somewhat on the Rectorial election at Edinburgh in the last few weeks and though some have suggested this isn't exactly high profile news, one campaign in particular has flagged up some fascinating insight into the inner workings of the Scottish Labour Party. Party elder Lord Foulkes has had a colourful career and is now looking to settle into a cosy retirement as a member of the Edinburgh establishment. However things aren't going exactly to plan. Despite being the first candidate to declare, his campaign has got off to a rocky start and has only began clawing back, in terms of impact, in the last couple of days. The campaign team is dominated by members, past and present, of Labour Students but it seems that not all of them have been fully on board from the beginning. TB's sources tell him that it has taken some serious heavy handed techniques from the highest echelons of the party to whip Foulkes's team into shape. It has come to Tory Bear's attention from sources close to the top of the Foulkes campaign that a particular member of the Labour Students was taken aside in the Scottish Parliament and threatened not only by Foulkes but by Iain Gray, the chaotic leader of the Labour Party in Scotland.

TB understands that the individual in question, though a very active member of Labour Students was not happy to support Foulkes as he did not agree with his voting record or outlook on key issues. However Mr Gray can be quiet persuasive it seems: "It'd be a shame if you're career ended here" he apparently said, adding "George is very important in Scotland, and he has a long memory..." The individual in question, for the sake of their career, has now bitten the bullet and is signed up to the campaign under sufferance. No doubt "This isn't about George, or you, it's about the Labour Party" can be a forceful message when whispered in your ear by the Leader of the Party.

As one would expect Gray's not so charming gate keeper denied the story as "nonsense" but there was a slightly more chaotic and nervous reaction from Foulkes's office when TB put this story to them earlier today. (This is what happens when you employ students to run your office, as is seemingly the case with Foulkes's continued employment of Matt McPherson, his campaign manager. If that isn't the case then TB wonders what Mr McPherson is doing answering the phones in an MSPs office.) However both Gray's office and Foulke's henchmen refused go as far as to call TB's source a liar. McPherson stated "I can categorically assure you that no one from within George's Rectorial campaign team has ever issued a threat to anyone." but gave no comment on whether anyone above the level of student team, someone such as Mr Gray had been involved...

Foulkes expected to walk this election for Rector and now that things are not going his way he is calling in favours from his high powered colleagues. The quotes may be dismissed because they are anonymous but Tory Bear is protecting someone who, having been threatened before, isn't too keen on rocking the boat too much. TB is however willing to vouch for the authenticity of the source and has spent the last 24 hours checking out the story. For the leader of the Scottish Labour Party to be putting a bit of stick about, to be bullying members half his age and twice his integrity shows once again just how stale and tired and nasty the Labour Party has become.

L is for Labour...

Further to TB's story earlier about Labour spinning the campus newspaper's polling it seems that their cyber team have been

hard at work

:

20 votes in one hour... who are you kidding Kez?

It's funny that the Labour campaign has been picking up today given what Tory Bear has heard about some strong arming going on from the most intriguing of places...

Carlsberg don't do Parliamentry sleaze, but if they did...

Just when Gordon's weekend couldn't get any worse, the news

has broken

in the last hour of yet more personal data losses. So the Labour government is incompetent as well as corrupt. The fact that a few shady Tory MPs took a couple of dirty twenty pound notes in brown envelopes for asking the odd question in the dying days of the Major government, while inexcusable, has been eclipsed by the news that Labour Peers are accepting hundreds of thousands of pounds to physically CHANGE THE LAW in the interests of their clients.

Labour don't do sleaze in half measures. It's never some crumpled fivers slipped under the table its eye-watering sums in return for absolute pure corruption. Under Labour you can donate a million quid and be exempt from advertising laws, donate to some education policy and get a peerage and a ladyship for the Mrs... and now the news that if you want to change the law, sod lobbying the Commons - just bung a old Peer anything from 30 to 120k and bob's your uncle...

When a Tory does his job and exposes the government for lying he gets his home and office searched and is arrested... These Labour peers should have exactly the same done to them. The Green treatment should be invoked by the Met first thing tomorrow morning. These Peers should be dragged kicking and screaming from the Parliamentry Estate by their overfilled boots.

This government is corrupt to the very core. The Labour Party, from the grass roots to the very top, stinks of greed and lacks an ounce of the morality and equality that name once apparently stood for.

Shame on them.

Dolly and friends...

TB has been taking a look at the new

Labourlist website

that has launched in a preview mode. It's the brainchild of Derek Draper and represents Labour's top down attempt to fight the grassroots movement that ConservativeHome represents, an almost perfect analogy of the Lab/Con view on how the country should be run. It lists who it's contributors will be and he was rather surprised to see

Sarah Mulholland

included. She is the Chairman of Labour Students and generic Unite drone but doesn't exactly strike it big on the blogosphere...

Indeed she hasn't even updated her riveting

Labour Student's blog

for over six months... The CF online presence is updated multiple times a week.

Dolly is going have to try harder than this...

Seems Adrian McMenamin's bosses at the CBI have got the better of his not so secret alliances though. He is very absent from the list.

Let the games begin...

Tory Bear is about to get on a plane back up to Scotland (sorry Lily,) so will follow this up later but it according to

The Guardian

it seems Dolly Draper is about to launch his much anticipated attack on the right wing blogosphere:

"Now Labour is fighting back in the battle of the blogs, with a new website to be launched this week aimed at sparking an online debate among what it calls "Labour-minded" people over thinking inside the movement. It forms part of Labour plans to "take the fight to the web", with ministers fielding questions in online forums, such as the price comparison website moneysupermarket.com and "virals" - internet spoofs designed to be emailed between friends - increasingly sitting alongside conventional party political broadcasts.

LabourList.org was controversial even before it was born, with established Labour bloggers complaining at being left out, and Tory bloggers warning that it would be so heavily censored as to be little more than party propaganda."

Load... Aim...

Imitation is the highest form of flattery...

Having posted the previous story about Foulkes, TB decided to google the Rectorial candidate and found his newly

launched website

, complete with video:



Watching various students be asked questions about something they should know the answer to, such as what does their Rector do, TB was sure he had seen the excellent concept used very effectively before. He just couldn't think where... and then it came to him. In the last lot of Edinburgh University student elections a certain Tory

candidate

caused a bit of upset by suggesting no one knew what the union was, or what they did:



Once again Labour shamelessly ripping off the Tories. But the plot thickens...

The Foulkes campaign is being run by the university's Labour club and the site is

registered

to one Matt McPherson. Lets have a look at Mr McPherson's Facebook page:

A gentle search led TB to discover that he has apparently been George Foulke's Parliamentary Assistant since February of this year, though strangely Foulkes doesn't mention this in his

declaration of interests

. Is McPherson being paid to be his researcher, or paid to run Foulkes's campaign? He is a first year student and therefore can't exactly be a full time assistant, so what exactly is McPherson doing other than securing Foulke's legacy?

Foulkes is standing down from Holyrood at the next election after a very long parliamentary career and what a greater position to retire into than the esteemed role of Rector of Edinburgh University, in the path of some of the country's best politicians and err Gordon Brown. Worth paying a young hack to make it happen?

TB wouldn't put it past him.

Bad news for Foulkes...

TB is never normally one to agree with anything that the SNP say but one of their bloggers asks an

interesting question

- what is the point of George Foulkes? Foulkes drains the taxpayer of thousands of pounds every year in rather

dubious circumstances

and in return all he seems to do is ask pretty pointless questions in Holyrood and make crap YouTube

videos

. This doesn't bode well for his bid to take the esteemed position of Rector of Edinburgh University. TB can't remember anyone asking what the point of Churchill, Lloyd George or Gladstone was!

No other candidates are yet to declare in the race, but TB happens to know of one and will reveal their identity in the new year... Let's just say it's going to be an entertaining race.

Spot the difference...

Jonathan Isaby is on form over at

CentreRight

...

Adrian misbehaving again...

Guido is

reporting tonight

that the left of centre great and good are coming together tomorrow for a meeting with Derek Draper at Labour HQ to hear the pitch, again, on how the left can catch up with the right online and have a pitched interwebby battle at the next election.

A few months ago Tory Bear and

Dizzy

uncovered that the former Labour hack and now

CBI

employee Adrian McMenamin was the author behind a right wing hate blog and hatemytory.com. (both subsequently removed.) TB understands that he was given a hell of a bollocking from his bosses at the CBI for his behaviour while working for a supposidly political neutral organisation. Well it didn't take long for him to slip into his old ways again. Having nearly been fired last time round Adrian is still apparently planning on attending tomorrow's meeting and taking an active role in attempting to give the Tories a good kicking.

TB wonders what his boss at the CBI will have to say about this?

Do as they say not as they do...

Seems Home Information Packs are for the masses but not for the government.

Won't make the same awful pun the

Telegraph did

.

Why... WHY?

Why must Gordon Brown ruin everything Tory Bear loves?

Mad Rush by Philip Glass is one of TB's favourite pieces of music and how dare Gordo use it in his latest video. Aside from him now ruining this forever, this video is a marked improvement in the drivel NO10 was putting out in the summer. Gordon is loving this recession, it plays to his strengths and dare TB say it... makes him able to look like a normal human being?

Gone is the Prime Mentalist stutter and the paedophile smile... Looks like the youtube war may just have kicked off...

Let the games begin, and please no more good tunes Mr Brown.

Not in my name...

This just pinged into my inbox:

Spread it around!

Dolly digs in...

The effect of Derek Draper on the interweb has been noted

elsewhere

today, but TB has spotted a rather irratating reminder slightly closer to home.  The GoogleAds on the right hand side of torybear.com are now being flooded by Labour Party attack ads. They are cleverely tagged as conservative ads and are cropping up all over right wing blogs purely because of what is discussed on them.

Does anyone know how TB can stop this?

May the battle commence...

There are 17 people in the blogsphere who matter and

Derek Draper

isn't one of them. A while back there was talk of Mandy's former assistant and lobbying sleazebag-in-chief leading

Labour's assault

against the right-wing bloggers. Well Tory Bear can't help but think this assault might well have begun. There was talk

this week

of a meeting of Draper's attack squad that included some lefty bloggers.

Draper and an unknown female blogger.

The papers today were full of little snippets from comments left on

ConservativeHome

, especially in the Mail's piece on George Osborne (which sadly isn't available online.) TB couldn't help notice a certain Tory hater used exactly the same quote from ConHome on

his blog

yesterday-

Is there some sort of Labour press officer pushing this quote around in the last 24 hours?

Is the Draper attack team up and running?

The crap Conservative and Unionist attack blog, hosted at

toryparty.net

emerged in late September at exactly the same time it emerged that disgraced Draper was being bought back. Whoever is behind it seems to be very good at picking up irrelevant stories from minor local papers - just the sort of thing the Labour party press office would have to monitor.

Of course this is all speculation on the part of Tory Bear but he wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the toryparty.net blog was linked to this supposed fightback by Labour on the blogsphere. Have a read of it for yourself and see if you agree, it just doesn't flow like an independent and free-thinking blogger but instead reads as the work of someone having a party line whispered in their ear.

Only time will tell, but TB is confident that the first shots of the Labour blog coup may well have been fired this week.

New Glenrothes MP goes off message...

Ah to be a fly in the wall in Alex Salmond's office today...

TB wonders if the Grinner of the North had that horrible little smirk wiped off his face today. Despite the spin being put out by Downing Street and the Labour goons today, that the Glenrothes result was a vote of confidence in Gordon Brown and the economic plan etc, the victorious candidate - who is fast becoming a spin doctors nightmare told it

how it really is

:

“It’s not a referendum on Gordon Brown at all. What we’ve done is put forward key polices in this area. It’s about the policies that have been presented to the people.”

He described his campaign as a “by-election fought on local issues, but there were obviously macro issues.”

Asked whether Prime Minister had called to congratulate him he said, “He’s tried to phone me three times this morning, but I’ve been elsewhere.”

Good lad.

People 'can't wait for ID cards'

TB just choked as he read this on the

BBC website:

Jacqui Smith says public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months.

The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said: "I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."

TB doesn't believe her.

Freedom of Infomation letter anyone?



Noticed

Shane

has just got this story too.

And your point is?

The increasingly irritating, obnoxious and comically bad

Conservative and Unionist

blog that is hosted in the States at "toryparty.net" (and registered to a PO Box in Vancouver that is associated with serious internet fraud,) seems to have had another session on google... The elusive tory hate blogger seems to simply trawl right-of-centre blogs all day and try make witty or obnoxious comments about what he finds. However TB doesn't really get his point today... He links to the McCain Bournmouth 2007 speech in praise of David Cameron:

“So, my friends, let me close by reiterating how grateful I am for this opportunity, and how greatly encouraged and proud I am to the see my fellow conservatives in Great Britain, under David Cameron’s very able and determined leadership, stand up to stake your claim for leadership with honesty, courage and resolve. You claim the future, and you will see more of it than I will. But I am content and inspired in my late years to know still, as I have always known, that there will always be a Britain, and that the future is in the safe hands of the two great peoples who long ago decided to make history together.”

Yes... and your point being?

The last word on the Osborne donation saga...

Congratulations to

Donal Blaney

who has

scalped

Raf Sanchez the editor of York University's left wing campus rag "Nouse" over the

illegal donation

scandal to the Obama campaign.

What TB found interesting was the Labour PPC's (whose idea the fundraiser was,) response:

"In a joint statement Hazelgrove and Sanchez said: “As far as we know it is not a crime to have a bad idea and then not act on it in either this country or the United States. No money was exchanged and none will be. Nor did we solicit, it was just an idea we decided against.”

Hazelgrove remains a parliamentary candidate. At the time of going to print, Sanchez is understood to be preparing to resign from his editorial post."

"As far as we know it is not a crime to have a bad idea and then not act on it." For all the stink that Labour kicked up over the Osborne donation nonstory, it's nice to know that the Labour grassroots are on the Shadow Chancellors side and agree with his defence.

The nouse is tightening on Hazelgrove...

haha sorry TB couldn't resist that last line

Fun and games at the Freshers Fair

Having been up since seven sorting out a Freshers Fair, TB is exhausted.

Was a very eventful day - not just in the extremely successful recruitment drive. - Thank you to the kind providers of the huge Gordo cut-outs and the now infamous Serene John-Richards pointing banner.

Oh no the fun and games started after lunch when a pitchfork-brandishing, torch-burning hoard of unruly hippies descended on the Tory stall, picking twigs out of their hair and shouting.

It seems the "Life's better under a conservative..." poster caused a bit of stir. It was vandalised, torn down and there was quite a scene. Armed only with CF bottle openers and very colourful t-shirts, the bastion of freedom resisted the attack of the angry hoard of communist rebels.

Before anyone could say "Matt Drudge" the inquisitive and eager young hacks of the esteemed student newspaper were already on the scene.

TB gave them this statement:

"Well its common knowledge that right-wing girls are more attractive than their lefty counterparts so why not capitalise on that fact... As per usual the hippies have displayed their characteristic and famous lack of humour over this issue"

During a lull in the constant stream of freshers and seedy 3rd years loitering around the freshers, TB took a moment to go undercover to the deepest darkest corner of the room, that occupied by Labour Students...

Picked up all sorts of leaflets and invitations, anyone fancy coming to this?

Well next weeks student rag should make amusing reading, in the meantime TB is off to crash Labour Students "Champagne Socialism" reception. Guest speaker: Margaret Curran MSP - defeated Glasgow East by-election candidate. Will be sure to pass on all of your commiserations...

Will TB's cover be exposed...? sssssh don't tell.

A message to the voters of Glasgow East....