Nu-Labour's Train Of Sleaze Rolls On And On This man is Peter Hain. He ran for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour party. Six people ran for the position, Hain came fifth out of the six and in doing so managed to spend £190,000. Yes, £190,000. One hundred and ninety thousand pounds, now to me, that is an awful lot of money. If you were running a general election and had to go out and meet people and print posters and leaflets to push through people's doors I might be able to see how you could spend such a vast sum of money. But, this pile of cash was spent 'in house' as it were. This just seems ludicrous, and rather dubious and worrying. I really cannot imagine how Hain managed to spend all that money on persuading members of his own party to vote for him, or not to vote for him as it actually turned out. What did the money go on ? Correct me if I'm mistaken, but don't all the MP's meet up quite regularly, in a large building known as the Houses Of Parliament ? I would have thought that the entire campaign could have been conducted for a couple of hundred quid by running a few sheets of information ("Hello, I am Peter and I would like to be Gordon's whipping boy etc....) off the office photocopier and then pushing them through his fellow MP's pigeonholes. For no money at all he could have sent an e-mail round with much the same information. How much money then was spent on the campaign as a whole ? Would it be fair to assume that all candidates spent about the same, or might you think that the winning candidates might have spent more ? Was there upwards of a million pounds sloshing around the Labour party at the time of this internal election ? Where did it go, dinners at London's posh and expensive restaurants, evenings at the opera, a day at the races ? I have written a nice polite letter to Peter Hain to ask just what he spent £190,000 on. More dubious is the way that this pile of donated cash was filtered through a strange and faceless organisation known as the Progressive Policy Forum. This was set up after Mr. Hain's campaign began and appears to have no other function than to transfer funds to Mr. Hain, why ? There are so many things about this whole election process that seem shady and queer. I remember when Labour came to power on the back of what seemed and endless parade of Conservative mis-doings and sleaze, Tony Blair said the Labour government was going to be whiter than white, that all it's dealings would be honest and transparent. It has been pretty much the opposite, they don't get voted back out of power partly because the electorate has lost faith with politicians and they think that the new boss will be just the same as the old boss. Blair and his cronies promised that they were going to restore that faith, but they just carried on in the same old manner. The actions of politicians make me a hypocrite, and that upsets me. I keep encouraging my staff to make use of the vote when they reach 18, but more and more often when they ask me why, I just can't give them a positive answer.