ARTICLE: Crystal Methodist and New Labour/Co-operative Party Luvvie Paul Flowers investigated 8 years ago

Disgraced former bank boss was investigated for sending an email with alleged ‘sexual connotations’ to colleagues in 2005.

A disgraced banker caught on camera apparently buying drugs was investigated   about his conduct eight years ago, it has emerged.

Paul Flowers, the former Co-op Bank chairman, Methodist minister and local   councillor, was forced to refer himself to the Standards Board for England   for sending a “joke” message that is alleged to have “sexual connotations”   to council colleagues in 2005.

Although councillors who had been sent the message raised their concerns with   the council at the time, five years later Mr Flowers was selected by Ed   Miliband, the Labour leader, for his Business and Industry Advisory Group.

Mr Flowers, 63, has now been suspended from the Party and his church after   film footage apparently showed him discussing the purchase of class A drugs.

He is being investigated by police after being caught on camera apparently   trying to buy crystal meth, cocaine and ketamine. He has now said his   actions were “stupid” and “wrong”.

He was reported to have bought drugs days after giving evidence to the Commons   Treasury committee on how the bank lost £700 million. When Mr Flowers   appeared before the committee he was criticised for apparently lacking a   grasp of the basic facts about the bank or the issues surrounding it. He is   not expected to be recalled, but the scandal has put more pressure on   regulators to increase checks on people appointed to senior banking roles.

Following the drug investigations it has since emerged that in 2011 Mr Flowers   was forced to resign from Bradford council after adult content was found on   his computer when he handed it in for repairs. At the time he cited   “personal reasons” and increased responsibilities at the Co-operative   Banking Group for leaving the council.

Following the latest disclosures, Grant Shapps, the Conservative party   chairman, has written to Ed Miliband telling him the behaviour and actions   of Mr Flowers have “shocked and appalled the public”.

“They have also raised serious questions about the Labour Party to which you   have not yet adequately responded,” he wrote. Mr Shapps added that people   asking “honest” questions about how much the Labour party knew about Mr   Flowers’ past were met with a “wall of silence”.

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls’ office has said that he will not give back a   donation from the Co-operative Group of £50,000, made in March 2012 when Mr   Flowers was chairman of the bank and a director of the group.

Len Wardle, the Co-op Group chairman, yesterday resigned, citing “serious   questions” raised by the scandal surrounding former banking chairman.

Mr Wardle had earlier announced his decision to retire next year, but the   Co-op Group said he has now resigned “with immediate effect”.

A spokesman for Bradford Council said: “A conviction more than 20 years   previously does not prevent anyone from standing for election as, or serving   as, a local councillor.

“The Standards Board for England concluded that the ‘e-mail’ incident was not   serious enough to require an investigation. That was a decision for the   Standards Board for England, not Bradford Council.”

Read on:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/10461306/Paul-Flowers-investigated-eight-years-ago.html

ARTICLE: Ed Miliband held a private meeting with drug shame bank chairman

• Methodist minister Paul Flowers, 63, caught on camera buying drugs
• It was just days after he was grilled by MPs over his bank’s performance
• Flowers boasted of using ketamine along with cannabis and club drug GHB
• Ed Miliband held private talks in Commons office with disgraced bank boss

Ed Miliband held private talks in his Commons office with the  disgraced Co-op Bank boss embroiled in a drugs scandal, it emerged last night.

The revelation left the Labour leader facing potentially damaging questions about his relationship with the Reverend Paul Flowers.

Flowers is being investigated by the police after being caught on film apparently buying hard drugs, including crack cocaine and crystal meth.

But last night it emerged that Flowers had enjoyed astonishing access and influence at the top of the Labour establishment for years.

Labour sources confirmed that Mr Miliband had personally appointed Flowers to his elite Business and Industry Advisory Group in 2010 — and even invited him for private talks in his Commons office last year.

It also emerged that Flowers described Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls as a ‘political friend’ and boasted of helping to arrange a £50,000 donation for him from the Co-op last year.

Both Mr Miliband and Mr Balls deny being close to Flowers, who was suspended by Labour last night for ‘bringing the party into disrepute.’

A spokesman for Mr Balls, one of 32 Labour MPs sponsored by the Co-op, said he had never held a meeting with Flowers and never discussed the donation with him.

The near-collapse of the Co-op Bank is embarrassing for Labour, which has long ties with the organisation.

Last year Mr Miliband hailed the firm as the future of banking in a speech at the its headquarters.

And many MPs receive financial support from the Co-op, including shadow Treasury chief secretary Chris Leslie, shadow Europe minister Gareth Thomas and shadow constitutional reform minister Stephen Twigg.

Labour’s Business and Industry Advisory Group was set up by Mr Miliband to provide him with personal advice on business policy.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2509659/Miliband-held-private-meeting-drug-shame-bank-chairman-Labour-leader-facing-difficult-questions-relationship-Paul-Flowers.html#ixzz2lmwSS9Qw

ARTICLE AND AUDIO: The Revd Paul Flowers ticked all the right ‘progressive’ boxes — that’s why he could get away with anything

Sustainability. Tick! Inclusivity. Tick! Fairtrade. Tick! All that mattered to Labour was the Crystal Methodist’s show of liberal piety.

Yet again, one particular question has formed on lips up and down the land. How in heaven’s name could so many people have failed to spot such a spectacular abuse of a public position?

We heard it first in the Jimmy Savile scandal, when the posthumous discovery of half a century of predation left people incredulous that so many had known about but done nothing to stop his serial depravities. Now a similar question needs to be asked about the Revd Paul Flowers, the disgraced Methodist minister and former chairman of the Co-op Bank who was filmed apparently handing over £300 to buy a stash of cocaine and crystal meth and also boasted of using ketamine, cannabis and a club drug, GHB.

The real scandal, though, is not just that he was a staggeringly incompetent bank chief who knew next to nothing about banking and presided over a bank that somehow fell into a £1.5 billion black hole. It is not even his predilection for cocaine, crystal meth and the occasional ‘two-day, drug-fuelled gay orgy’ (to use his words). The scandal is that no one spotted that he was spectacularly unsuited to the jobs he was given — or if they did, they chose to do nothing about it. Yet again, a public figure with his ethics pinned to his sleeve somehow existed beyond proper scrutiny.

In the frame alongside the deeply un-fragrant Flowers are various institutions which now have questions to answer. The Co-op Bank, which elected him chairman. The Labour party, which banked his donations. Ed Miliband, who dined with him and appointed him to Labour’s financial and industrial advisory board. And the Methodist Church, which appointed him a ‘superintendent’ minister and designated him a trustee for its investment funds and property — even though he had next to no expertise in business.

Oh — and he has also been a member of the Advertising Standards Authority, vice-chairman of the National Association of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and chairman of Manchester Camerata, the city’s chamber orchestra, not to mention chairman of the drug abuse charity Lifeline and the Terrence Higgins Trust. He is an icon of our time.

So how come none of these bodies ever spotted his spectacular unsuitability to be a member of the Great and the Good?

His striking unfitness to advise anyone on economic matters was demonstrated at the Treasury select committee earlier this month. Asked to state the Co-op Bank’s total assets, he guessed £3 billion; it was actually £47 billion. His performance may well have caused onlookers to scratch their heads and ask themselves: just what exotic substances is he on?

Read on and listen to the audio:  http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9082571/an-icon-of-our-time/

ARTICLE AND QUESTION FOR YOU: You thought the whole ‘EUSSR’ thing was over the top? Have a look at this poster

A “EUROPE4ALL”? Where then is the swastika? Keen observers will also note that the Hammer and Sickle appears the most times on this poster. 

Question: Why is it illegal to fly the Nazi swastika flag but is more than acceptable to fly the flag of the Soviet Union, the Hammer and Sickle?

Answers below, please.

Take a close look at this promotional poster. Notice anything? Alongside the symbols of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism and so on is one of the wickedest emblems humanity has conceived: the hammer and sickle.

For three generations, the badge of the Soviet revolution meant poverty, slavery, torture and death. It adorned the caps of the chekas who came in the night. It opened and closed the propaganda films which hid the famines. It advertised the people’s courts where victims of purges and show-trials were condemned. It fluttered over the re-education camps and the gulags. For hundreds of millions of Europeans, it was a symbol of foreign occupation. Hungary, Lithuania and Moldova have banned its use, and various  former communist countries want it to be treated in the same way as Nazi insignia.

Yet here it sits on a poster in the European Commission, advertising the moral deafness of its author (I hope that’s what it is, rather than lingering nostalgia). The Bolshevist sigil celebrates the ideology which, in strict numerical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ever devised by our species. That it can be passed unremarked day after day in the corridors of Brussels is nauseating.

By Daniel Hannan M.E.P.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100185609/you-thought-the-whole-eussr-thing-was-over-the-top-have-a-look-at-this-poster/

Dennis Nilsen (former Socialist Workers’ Party member) -DISMEMBERED 16 YOUNG MEN

Homosexual mass murderer, Dennis Nilsen, who strangled and dismembered 16 young men in the 1980s, was also a highly active member of Labour fringe groups such as the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers’ Party. That’s when he wasn’t busy boiling peoples heads in a pot, or masturbating over the corpses of his victims. http://tinyurl.com/ys4ll4