Hazel Blears: "I'm a (Completely Undeserved) Survivor..."

The first of two posts about MPs' expenses today. Apologies if I'm boring anyone, but I'm not going to shut up about this. Mainly because that's kind of what the corrupt, corpulent fucks in the Commons want. 

Anyhoo, I read that the Labour Party's pet squirrel has survived a vote of no confidence within her local party. Which is fine, really. I guess now she goes forward to a vote of confidence from her whole constituency at the next election, when hopefully the people will vote to give her more time to spend with Alvin and the other chipmunks. 

But, this being Hazel Blears, contrition was never going to be on the agenda. And so this is how she responds to the news that she has been allowed to carry on by her local party:

"I also heard tonight from party members that events of a few weeks do not wipe out 30 years of a record in local and national politics, fighting and being a champion for some of the poorest people in our country."

Quite simply, I don't know where to start with this fuck awful, self-congratulatory bag of crap. So I'll start at the top. She says "a few weeks" - what she means is "a few weeks" of scandal. But what she fails to take into account is that actually, what caused the scandal is the years she spent beforehand on the fucking take. She wouldn't have had a bad few weeks had she not been rinsing the taxpayer for thousands for a far longer period of time. 

Also, out here in the real world, what you tend to find is that being exposed as a fraud does undo 30 years of a good reputation. You lose your job, you are put on trial, you are convicted, and maybe you even go to prison. Blears is detached from reality - as you might expect from someone who has spent 30 years in politics - but her survival of this no-confidence measure (and her refusal to stand down, unlike other MPs in her position) once again shows how there is one set of rules for MPs, and another set for everyone else. 

And what record does Blears have, anyway? She has been a relentless cheerleader for whoever is in Number 10, in the hope of progressing her career. But as soon as disloyalty might progress her career more, she turns round and knifes the Prime Minister she supported and helped to elect in the most public and embarrassing way possible, before elections that her party is destined to struggle in anyway. She undermined her leader, and her party, and helped them achieve a spectacular electoral kicking. Pretty awesome record there, then. Actually, perhaps the reason why she survived the no confidence motion was because her local party decided not to consider her record at all. 

Finally, fighter and champion for the poor. How, precisely? By working with Tony Blair, a man who gutted and ripped away any commitment to the poor Labour ever had? Or by working with Gordon Brown, with his policies like the abolition of the 10p tax allowance? And how does being on the take with the MPs' expenses help the fucking poor, anyway? Other than rubbing their noses in the fact that their elected representative truly lives a different sort of a life to the people she is supposed to speak up for.

The Labour movement has always been filled with hypocrites - with champagne socialists and other freeloaders - but Blears is amongst the worst. Those who voted for her yesterday made a massive mistake. They showed that it is not just the likes of Blears that is out of touch with the British people, but the Labour Party as a whole.