Cyril Smith the Man: RAP Take the Great Lump at his Word

As it goes this RAP edition - featuring an exposé of Cyril Smith's activities at Cambridge House which is if anything too polite and generous to him - was published just ahead of a parliamentary election. This had not been planned. The investigation had been running for more than six months. But as the RAP team pointed out Cyril was fighting the election with little or no reference to his party or their (ahem) policy platform.

Cyril Smith MP continued with his personal attacking ways and sneering at the standards of others. He was single handedly leaking shiploads of Westminster secrets of a personal nature. It was vote for Cyril the Man. This brought his character front and centre. So be it.

UPDATE Thu 18:47: Some anonymous reader has had a dig in comments. I'll answer on the face of the blog, including their words in bold:

Anonymous 17:00 say:

I have realised that the reason you ask for the identity of anyone who dares to disagree with you is so that you can trash them and in turn their arguments. So it's strange that you seem to fully support the allegations of someone who has been slightly less than open, transparent and honest in many of his dealings in the last few years.

Really not sure who you are referring to here? Spit it out. Let's have a name. You aren't referring to the authors of the RAP piece or indeed presumably the 2010 Private Eye piece? Which are the items I'm relying on. So what are you on about?

I have no intention of thrashing anyone who is open and honest. I generally only ask commenters to identify themselves honestly when I believe they are themselves vested interests or might as well be. For example that shrivelled mescalic worm David Hennigan has a track record of assuming identities and posting bile and mischief even when and where he promises he will *never* post except under his own name.

Malcolm Porn-O at Rochdale Online knows Hennigan posts under all sorts of assumed names and has a squadron of winged monkeys with multiple personalities who would do likewise at his behest. "Lie my pretties!" Rochdale Observer and MEN almost certainly also have IP records showing this activity. In electronic forums and also in furnishing incredibly inauthentic letters for publication on behalf of sock puppets.

Hennigan has been forced to retract and apologise for and desist from some of this poison. he was sacked by Paul Rowen - who tolerated drunkenness, smearage, lies and deceit, inappropriate behaviour and pure vile nastiness but finally came the straw that broke the Rowen's back. Wonder what that was? Actually Rowen is no longer keeping it to himself. But that's for another time.

"Julia Mahon" did not really post those comments [on Cyril posts]. I think it is reasonable to challenge whoever did put up these Henniganesque comments to show themselves. Don't you? If they come from the paid employee of an MP or of a Council group or of a party it makes a difference as far as I'm concerned. Don't you think?

Anonymous 17:00 went on:

You might disagree but I know it's would you would be saying if these claims were being made in the other direction.

This is just too cryptic for me friend. Also ungrammatical. Skipping words rather than slurring? Slow down. Kick back. Smell the coffee, or the roses.

And what's more anonymous 17:00 adds:

I'm equally sure that if a Lib Dem or Conservative had put out leaflets inciting race hate with the aim of "making the white folk angry" you would have been up in arms about it.

They - Tories and FibDems - have done this sort of thing and not infrequently. Sometimes directly, sometimes via proxies.

Getting people to vote and/or stopping them vote and/or having them vote in certain ways is of course the objective of the candidate, the agent and the apparatchiks. There is a practice in all parties of identifying who is interested in what message and giving them that message. FibDems have famously taken this to the nth degree. Politics is about getting things done and you have to win to have any agency in that. To state the blooming obvious.

The words you quote are I understand from some rather silly private email and not from the relevant candidate but from someone shooting the breeze. I'd be interested to have a close look at Mr Hennigan's postbags, wouldn't you? Some vile stuff there I'd expect, wouldn't you? In fact Hennigan shared quite a lot of his vileness on Rochdale Online forums and in blog comments.

Some examples.

In 2004 Chris Davies MEP and his then colleague Sajjad Karim made an appeal to voters who were asian and muslim to vote in a communalistic way [in the European elections]. Pretty shabby I think. Davies defended this simply saying that his claims were true i.e. that Karim was the only asian and muslim candidate from any party high enough on a list to be elected.

Yes, true, but what were his policies? There was no real indication of these policies. They were hidden from the electorate you might say. Or this segment of the electorate. I would always rather be represented by someone with similar ideas and policies than someone down my street, of the same race, of the same gender, of the same background etc etc. Wouldn't you?

Chris Davies is and was a fool to do this. It green lights the BNP doing the same kind of thing IMO.

One of Sajjad's cronies was Faraz Bhatti of course. Elected as a Lib Dem cllr - and privately comunalistic and nasty I'm hearing in an extreme way - but he soon followed Karim to the Tories - where the same traits have been displayed. His attempt to get a young somethingly hot-headed lad - Hussain - elected as an accomplice in 2009 included the lovely ruse of distributing some dishonest hate mongering from Hizb-ut_Tahrir alongside their bland Tory blandishments. This material included the assertion that the Holy Qur'an was to be banned along with some possibly photoshopped picture of GW Bush and G Brown together.

The purpose of this Tory distributed leaflet was "making the brown folk angry" although I can't say I have an email in which any of the conspirators stated this as a specific objective. They didn't need to. It's obvious.

Of course another instance of this was in Rochdale 2005 when local forces - let's leave it at that for now, but there is a post in the pipe ready almost to be launched - distributed leaflets designed again for "making the brown folk angry" which claimed inter alia that the Labour candidate was Jewish which was untrue and hardly relevant to the voting decisions of an electorate who really ought to be concerned about which party or candidate would serve them best.

That electorate picked Paul Rowen which probably shows that the vile leaflet worked and led to a rather stupid suggestion which put Rowen and Hennigan into power. Yeuch!

Finally, though I have not been able to make it to Watkins's expensive and probably futile court hearing in Saddleworth, I do have some insight into the way the said muppet Watkins waged his own campaign. They say if you want to cry foul in such cases, say something is not equitable, you really need to have clean hands yourself. Elwyn Watkins has some of the grubbiest hands in the business.

I've heard that one of the things EW bah gum published amongst about 60 (yes SIXTY) significant distinct pieces of print in the 6 months to the election was a leaflet/letter, in Urdu I believe, which was naturally enough posted without the benefit of an English translation to muslim households. This, I'm told, had the express purpose of "making the brown folk angry" as did a MPACUK leaflet which was possibly in English only and is openly published by MPACUK, not sure.

So, faced with this, one of the things the often robust street fighting Labourites did was have the Urdu translated and show this to other audiences.

It all gets a bit viral this stuff doesn't it?

A leaflet along these lines was used by Manchester Lib Dems in 2003 in the local government elections in which I stood. With the express purpose of "making the brown folk angry". About the war. It was concocted by a known Lib Dem activist whose name and mobile phone number were on it.

The text was changed mid campaign from something a bit illegal. Both versions were distributed without a P&P or any identification. But it clearly drove the Lib Dem vote.

There are lots of examples and I don't really like any of them - including those I know about from Comrade Phil - however, these sorts of things were in use by both sides in Oldham and Saddleworth. And once they start e.g. MPACUK/ARM in the next constituency in 2005 and Elwyn this time and so on and so forth, they escalate and become the norm. Tit for tat.

My ridicule and disdain for Elwyn's case is on the basis that he would be a rotten MP (as he was/is a rotten councillor IMO) and he doesn't have the sense to recognise that he was using the same tactics and stands to lose his shirt and what's more his bollocks challenging what is normal for the context up there in them there hills. For defamation purposes they talk of "the cut and thrust of politics" or the like.

It's endemic in the area. Regrettable but true. I may well re-write this as a blogpost with links and illustrations. Though I'm a bit busy. Comments and more examples welcome.