cookie65

Bearing in mind the current sleaze incompetence and general un- accountability of politicians from all parties in general might these be a move forwards to us being electable?

1
Any ukip member who holds an elected position (elected by the public i.e. MP, MEP ,Councilor )and who is later found(or suspected by 2 days newspaper coverage in the majority of papers) to have been unfaithful to their current partner or partner to whom they are known to have been living with at the time of their election will be made to appear before a PARTY committee consisting of at LEAST one peer(MP, MEP ,councilor) one party functionary(chairman) one party member(from their electorate) ,and one member of the press. Should they be found guilty of impropriatory they would be expelled from the party and encouraged to resign their seat as soon as possible.
2
Any ukip member in a position of political power (cabinet, committee at any level) who is widely acknowledged to have committed a major blunder in their position will become liable to the above disciplinary procedure.

3
The ukip branch in that constituency that achieves a majority vote against an ukip (MP, MEP, or Councilor) will trigger the same procedure.

4
Any constituency that can achieve a 25% public petition (of the constitutional electorate all parties) against an elected ukip representative will trigger the same result

5
All ukip candidates for any electable position must sign a declaration that in the event of being removed from their party they will resign their position and force a by election.

Hartlepool

What about burning them at the stake or stoning them even?

We dont need to inflict this kind of threat to those who wish to stand in Elections do we?

If we do we had better do a name change to the UK Puritan and Chaste Party I think. ops:

pentameter

Be very careful. The Prescott episode shows how silly it is to take a high moral position which can't be sustained.

Setting days of newspaper coverage as a formal measure of misbehaviour is maybe a tad dangerous.

cookie65

yep sorry perhaps the media coverage idea was not my best ever idea.
but i think we should take a moral stand regarding polititians behaviour i would think that most labour members would think they should have some say over prescott/clarke and not be reliant upon blairs judgement.
what has happened has brought labour into even more disrepute than before and is harming the party as well as the individuals. we should be a bit wiser than that, if a member of our party is caught with his pants down we should have a mechanism in place to cut them loose if it is damaging to us
the public are very two faced and most people calling for prescott to go will have had affairs themselves,it is just that they expect better judgement from people on 100k a year
a party that says we cant stop our mps playing away or making blunders but we will get rid of them if they do must be in a stronger position than lib/lab/con

Hartlepool

I'm sorry but I dont think people will sign up to what you propose.

pentameter

The seriousness of sex scandals depends on several factors:

1. The importance of the politician. It's much more serious for a Cabinet minister than a Lib/Dem MP who isn't a spokesman on anything.

2. The extent to which office has been abused.

3. The extent to which it interferes with the job. e.g. Blunkett totally overcome with emotion and playing schmaltzy songs down the phone to Kimberley Quinn and lip-quivering over 'the little lad'. Not exactly what you expect from an effective Home Secretary. Ties into 1.

4. The extent to which they make fools of themselves (partly related to 3) E.g. Blunkett making a song and dance over DNA testing and finding that the child in question wasn't his.

5. The luridness. Photos, any sort of deviancy, vast difference in age, tales of bonking on the ministerial desk, all that sort of thing.

6. The moral stance compromised. If you've been banging on about family values you can't expect to be taken seriously if you also have a couple of illegitimate kids, conceived while you were married to someone else.

Dealing with these things is always going to come down to judgement on the part of the party leader. In this case, I'd say that Blair's determination to leave his 'legacy' is seriously affecting his judgement. His job isn't to create a place in history for himself, it's to show leadership and any place in history that results would be a consequence.


The real scandal of Nu Labour is that they were a very successful vote winning PR campaign and had absolutely no idea of what to do beyond the eye-catching initiative and absolutely no kind of moral compass to guide them.

Of the three stories that have emerged this last week, by far the worst is the Clarke fiasco. It goes far beyond the personal incompetence and duplicity of Clarke and is based in a politically correct and poorly thought through open-door immigration policy which allowed people into the country in an uncontrolled way. There was no thought as to the consequences, eg housing, health, prisons, and any objection was beaten down as racist.

Sheila

The press has its own agenda when deciding which politicians it "exposes". I could tell you (but I won't!) of one fairly prominent politician who has had more than one affair, of which the press must be aware, which have never been written about in the papers. Possibly because the person concerned is rather boring, and it wouldn't make for a very interesting story.

(And I could tell you (but I definitely won't!) a few anecdotes from my somewhat less-than-innocent past, involving politicians, that might raise a few eyebrows.)

People have affairs. It happens. It shouldn't, but it does. And unless it can be shown that a politician's affair has seriously affected his/her work then really I for one couldn't care less.
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