Update: Mark Reckless’s site, along with his letter, has vanished. Originally I had reblogged it here.

There is a VERY interesting letter to Cameron from Conservative MP Mark Reckless. What leapt out at me was comment on the fact that the whips have used illegal blackmailing methods and very undemocratic “influence” on vote outcomes in parliament, to “secure government business” using “dirt book” records, presumably. The letter strongly implies that Cameron is well aware of this. What “personal information” have the whips got, and on which MPs?

How long have the whips been wielding power with that “personal information” to influence outcomes in parliament, bypassing democratic process? This looks like a long-standing crock of corruption that Cameron has used to his own advantage. How long has blackmail been an integral part of parliamentary process?

And see the comments about the shredding of documents: at PMQs on July 9th, Mark asked the PM “Should taxpayer money be used to gather information on MPs that is then retained by a chief whip or shredded?”

The PM “invited him to be less Delphic…”

Mark also states: “The whip admitted government whips decided in December 1996 to shred documents. Who ultimately authorised this Chief Whip Alastair Goodlad or John Major? Why?

Mark joined ex-whip Michael Brown on BBC Radio 4 today to discuss the real need for proper controls in place and compliance with those, as the whips office conspiracy to blackmail has gone on for 14 years, at the very least.

However, the “black book” – the notebook into which whips wrote intelligence about fellow MPs – carried on through the Major years, appears to have disappeared under the Blair government.

Under the Tories, the notebook would be read out to all the whips in the weekly meeting, with contributions made verbally to chronicle MPs’ secret lives and misdemeanours and add to what they knew about an individual MP.

Back in 1995, the late Tim Fortescue, who was a Tory whip in the Heath years, said that party whips would help cover up a potential paedophile scandal to gain “Brownie points”. Footage has emerged of the former Conservative MP suggesting to the BBC in 1995 that party whips might not disclose certain behaviour of colleagues including potential scandal “involving small boys.”

Tim Fortescue from ‘Westminster’s Secret Service’ BBC 1995

 

Fortescue added: “If we can get a chap out of trouble, he’ll do as we ask forever more”.

Mark Reckless has shown some integrity here. What he has quite candidly exposed is a long-standing right-wing process of integrated gross corruption and blackmail, reminiscent of public schoolboy bullying, that has grave and serious implications, and is about as far from our reasonable expectation of democratic parliamentary process as can be.

Furthermore, this blackmail process appears to have been built, in part, upon knowledge, potentially, of children and young people being sexually abused, exploited, hurt, traumatised and dehumanised by an unforgivable elite of wealthy, powerful men.

And Cameron knows something about it.