The Sunday Times reports (£) on a story which brings together the Falkirk controversy and more recent events at Grangemouth. It centres on emails uncovered by Ineos lawyers:
ED MILIBAND is facing a crisis this weekend as a cache of bombshell emails exposes a concerted union plot involving threats, intimidation and dirty tricks to thwart his inquiry into alleged electoral corruption.
It is claimed that union leaders:
■ Told the union’s PR team to dig out “nasty stuff” on key Labour party figures
■ Wrote witnesses’ testimony withdrawing key evidence of alleged wrongdoing, with the new statements approved by the official implicated in the scandal
■ Tracked Labour investigators as they interviewed witnesses in Falkirk and boasted how one witness had told them to “F*** off”
■ Planned to use senior union and Labour figures to intimidate and disrupt Miliband’s investigation team.
You can avoid the paywall by reading the Daily Mail’s report here.
Labour blogger Ben Cobley notes, correctly I think, that the involvement of Ineos will be used to try to discredit this story. Here is a link to a good piece he wrote back in September on the same topic. And I’ll conclude with his rather stinging observations on the Labour Party, taken from the same post.
As I have argued here and elsewhere before, we could really do with some ethical standards in Labour: institutionalising ethics rather than fixing for one’s faction. The Right and Left factions generally assume the absolute worst of each other, and often they are right (or at least have been in the past).
Hat Tip: Rob Marchant
