Sayeeda Warsi: Morally Reprehensible

Whilst welcoming today's technically impossible resignation of the unelected life peer and made-up 'Minister for Faith and Communities', Baroness Warsi, as it draws attention to David Cameron and the Conservative Party's shameful quietude and acquiescence over Israel's recent acts of genocide and infanticide in Gaza - and whilst acknowledging that even a politician as spectacularly loathsome, odious and reprehensible as this attention-seeking self-delusional careerist loonbag may occasionally get something right, and, further, that we must resist gayist-thinking that tries to reduce everyone down to how they feel about The Gays (yet nor should we let someone being right about one thing let us overlook all their other crimes viz. Pinkwashing) - Fagburn hopes people will bear (bare?) in mind that this scary right-wing bigot has shown herself in the past to be literally incapable of acting on principle and so there's almost certainly something else behind this, like the fact she was pissed off about not being promoted in the last cabinet reshuffle, and then her being banned from cabinet meetings, and she was about to be sacked anyway.

Good day.

Adams' cartoon for the Telegraph, Wednesday.
Politician driven by ego shocker!
Thanks for pointing this out.

Baroness Warsi: On The Wrong Side Of History

“There are those who said that I should not come here tonight. There are those who said that, having been invited, I would not come here tonight, but I did come, and I wanted to come, and it was the right thing to do, because I wanted to first of all put on record what I have said on many occasions and that is that my [homophobic election] leaflet in 2005 and my party’s stance in the past was wrong. We were late in coming to this agenda and we were on the wrong side of history.”

Baroness Warsi of Bigotry, a quite astonishing choice of keynote speaker at a BNP Pariba LGBT event to mark Human Rights Day. 

Pink News reports.

Marriage Bill: Democracy In Action

Peers expect the Upper’s House debate over same sex weddings will go through the night or even into a second day, with a key vote that could scupper the policy regarded as “too close to call”.

The former head of the British army Lord Dannatt and Lord Lothian, a former Conservative Party chairman better known as Michael Ancram, are amongst those set to criticise the draft legislation in next Monday’s session.

Other opponents will include Lord Waddington, a former Home Secretary, Lord Luce, who served as a minister in Baroness Thatcher’s government, and Lord Singh of Wimbledon, a respected figure in the Sikh community.

The Sunday Telegraph has also established that the senior Tory Baroness Warsi, a practising Muslim, refused to lead the bill through the House of Lords when asked to do so by David Cameron, the Prime Minister.

Some peers believe dozens Lords who rarely attend Parliament will flock to Westminster to make their position on homosexual marriage clear...

Sunday Telegraph.  

Think that's all we need to know, thanks.

PS You might also enjoy this gloriously barking piece from The Telegraph by Christopher Booker which EXPOSES gay marriage as a colossal fraud foisted on the nation by the Bilderberg Group and some shape-shifting reptiles. Or something. 

• Screengrab of the Lords last week by Martin Rossiter.

Cabinet Reshuffle: News In Briefs

Lynne Featherstone - It emerged late in the day that Featherstone is leaving her post, Home Office (Equalities) Minister, as Equalities is being moved to the Department for Culture (See Maria Miller below). A good friend to The Gays - unacknowledged architect of getting marriage equality on the agenda. And thus predictably hated by the Daily Mail and the Tory Right.

Chris Grayling - Justice Secretary. Supports hoteliers right to be homophobic. Votes "moderately against gay rights". Irony! Hardline right-winger. Replaces the liberal pro-gay Tory, Ken Clarke, who was attacked by the tabloids for being "soft on crime". Be afraid.

Nick Herbert. Tweeted he was resigning as Policing Minister late this afternoon. It's thought in a queeny flounce at not being promoted.

David Laws - Education Minister. Went to private school, natch. Return of the unconvicted fraudster. Background in business, which shows how the Tories see our schools. Only a slight return - he's an Education Minister, and hasn't returned to Cabinet - notorious heterosexual Michael Gove remains Secretary of State for Education.

Maria Miller - Culture Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities. As Equalities - bafflingly - moves over to her new department, Culture, she takes over the equalities brief from Lynne Featherstone. I'm not sure where all these shenanigans leave Theresa May. According to a tweet earlier from Coalition 4 Equal Marriage, Miller has not told them whether she supports gay marriage. Votes "moderately against gay rights" (Has only been able to vote on two gay bills, but absent for one, against another). Gay marriage looks ever further off now.

Lady Warsi - Minister for Faith And Communities. Homophobe. Irony! Demoted from party "chairman" [sic]. Knows a lot about faith and communities as when standing for election in 2005 published a special leaflet for Muslim areas full of homophobic lies about Labour [sick]. Unelected. Appointment by tokenism.

[This was updated through the day, so ended up a bit garbled - not helped by different uses of the word "Cabinet". Hopefully it makes sense now]

PS In general, Cameron's reshuffle has been seen as a lurch to the right.  Oh crap...

Lady Warsi: Bigot Bit

Good news!
The latest top Tory to see their career go into meltdown is none other than our old enemy Lady Sayeeda Warsi, the Conservative Party chairman (sic).
Last week she was caught out having claimed around £12,000 expenses for staying occasionally at a friend's flat where she was not being charged any rent.
Then she was discovered to have failed to include rental income from a flat she owns in Wembley in the Lords register of interests.
And now today's Sunday Telegraph reveals that Warsi has failed to register a controlling stake in a spice manufacturing firm with the House of Lords authorities - a breach of the rule that peers must declare such business interests.
The Telegraph has also found that her business partner, Abid Hussain, accompanied her on a ministerial trip to Pakistan where he met leading politicians - exactly the claim that brought down Liam Fox and his "special friend" Adam Werritty.
To fail to register one of these may look like carelessness, to fail to register three makes her look a bit of a crook. 
How pleasing it will be to see this dreadful right-wing bigot brought down.

Sayeeda Warsi: An Idiot Speaks

"I will be arguing for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity. The point is this: the societies we live in, the cultures we have created, the values we hold and the things we fight for all stem from centuries of discussion, dissent and belief in Christianity.
"These values shine through our politics, our public life, our culture, our economics, our language and our architecture. And, as I will say today, you cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes.
"My fear today is that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; when states won’t fund faith schools; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere..."

Baroness Warsi of Bigot-by-barking there.
Her homophobeness is addressing the serial child-rapists at the Vatican today - to make this idiotic point again.
Religion is dead - trying to resurrect its stinking corpse to justify your gay-bashing is sick, sick, sick.

Baroness Warsi: Acceptable Forms Of Bigotry

The dreadful Sayeeda Warsi - Conservative Party chairman [sic] - has leaked to The Daily Telegraph a speech she's giving later today.
"Islamophobia has "passed the dinner-table test" and is seen by many as normal and uncontroversial, Baroness Warsi will say in a speech on Thursday," they report.
"The minister without portfolio will also warn that describing Muslims as either “moderate” or “extremist” fosters growing prejudice.
"Lady Warsi, the first Muslim woman to attend Cabinet, has pledged to use her position to wage an “ongoing battle against bigotry”.
Warsi is something of an expert on bigotry, of course.
She's been spearheading the Tories attacks on gay equalities legislation.
And in the 2005 election used homophobic scaremongering in her election leaflets; "Labour has scrapped Section 28 which was introduced by the Conservatives to stop schools promoting alternative sexual lifestyles such as homosexuality to children as young as seven years old... now schools are allowed and do promote homosexuality and other alternative sexual lifestyles to your children.
"Labour reduced the age of consent for homosexuality from 18 to 16 allowing school children to be propositioned for homosexual relationships."
Warsi told the 2009 Conservative Party Conference; "anti-Muslim hatred is Britain’s last remaining socially acceptable form of bigotry."
The last but one, it would seem.

Adoption: The Parents Are Not All Right

You gotta love The Daily Mail.
Not only do they wilfully grab the wrong end of the stick, but they'll then start beating people round the head with it.
Today they are wibbling on about the Coalition being " silent" over the Sexual Orientation Regulations which outlaw adoption agencies discriminating against gay couples.
I find their silence on this rather worrying for the opposite reason to the Mail, but anyway...
The law is quite simple; if you provide a public service, you can't let your bigotry stop you providing that service to members of the public you don't like.
The adoption agencies this has affected have all been Catholic-run.
The Mail has dreamt up a fantastically arse-over-tit term for this.
They call "the bar on adoption through Christian agencies that do not approve of gay rights" "Christian discrimination".
For the Daily Mail it would seem, lesbian and gay parenting is only okay if it's on film, and not in reality.

• Photo from the Swedish film, Patrik Age 1.5

Sayeeda Warsi: "We Do Do God"

Be afraid - be very afraid.
Baroness Warsi, the dreadful and divisive Chairman (sic) of the Conservative Party, gave a big speech in Oxford on Wednesday to the bishops of the Church of England.
This was reported in the press along the lines of; 'The Coalition "does God", says Baroness Warsi.' [The Guardian].
As ever, the devil may have been in the detail.
Sayeeda Warsi said; "it seems clear that the previous government did get things profoundly wrong. It got things wrong because it sent the wrong signals about the right relationship between state, faith and society..."
"They were also too suspicious of faith’s potential for contributing to society – behind every faith-based charity, they sensed the whiff of conversion and exclusivity."
Despite having been the shadow "Minister for Communities Cohesion", Warsi has used homophobia as a political weapon in the past.
Fagburn wonders if these rather innocent-sounding words are the start of an attack on Labour's gay equality laws?
Interviewed on Newsnight on Wednesday 16th about her speech, Warsi twice refused to answer a question on whether religious charities would be allowed to override gay equalities legislation.
Emily Maitlis: "I'm just looking for concrete examples to help people understand what your government would do if you like to prioritise faith groups, if faith groups ran homeless charities or drugs charities would they have the power - or the choice - not to employ gay people, for example?"
Warsi: "...I'm not prepared to discuss it in those terms..."

Sayeeda Warsi: Hello Nasty

The Guardian's G2 section devotes three pages to a profile of Sayeeda Warsi.
"David Cameron's minister responsible for community cohesion on why she thinks the constant references to her background and ethnic origin are irrelevant."
Perhaps she should tell David Cameron, who boasted on TV that; "She is the first Muslim in a cabinet or shadow cabinet."
If Warsi's not a mere token for the Tories, she's certainly a trophy.
In the article, Decca Aitkenhead writes that Baroness Warsi is "a confident, likable, modern Muslim woman, the antithesis of a stereotypical Tory and apparently proof that David Cameron's Conservatives were no longer the nasty party."
Really?
Aitkenhead has a lot of things she wants to ask Warsi, the Minister For Community Paperclips Cohesion.
They talked about the burka and the BNP, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, multiculturalism and immigration.
They couldn't talk about everything - even in a three page feature.
But why didn't Aitkenhead ask Warsi about her election campaign in 2005?
Her election leaflet warned; "Labour has scrapped section 28 which was introduced by the Conservatives to stop schools promoting alternative sexual lifestyles such as homosexuality to children as young as seven years old... now schools are allowed and do promote homosexuality and other alternative sexual lifestyles to your children.
"Labour reduced the age of consent for homosexuality from 18 to 16 allowing school children to be propositioned for homosexual relationships."
It was all bigoted bollocks, of course.
But she boldly promised voters; "I will campaign strongly for an end to sex education at seven years and the promotion of homosexuality that undermines family life."
Thankfully she lost - she's never won an election.
The Guardian reported at the time that "Shahid Malik, Labour's candidate, said the Tory leaflet containing the remarks about homosexuals had gone out only in Muslim parts of the constituency, while white areas got a section about immigration."
Minister for Community what?