RUSS THE FUSS

The Labour party appeared to be on the right lines when it decided that if Doncaster is ever to be cleaned up, the local party must have as little as possible to do with drawing up lists of potential candidates for council elections. With 23 former and serving Doncaster councillors already convicted of false accounting, local input was excluded from this year's scrutiny process.

Alas the regional panel could only scrape together 30 "suitable" people from which the 21 candidates for next May's elections have to be selected. The approved list includes one octogenarian, two septuagenarians and one candidate who spent most of the last 12 months under arrest before escaping by the skin of his teeth. And then - and then there is Russ Williams.

In the early 90s he was sacked from his job as safety inspector at Askern colliery after falsifying readings in dust samples taken from the pit - as a result of which miners were sent to work in dangerously high levels of contamination. He later won £23,000 compensation for the miners' disease vibration white finger via the discredited Y.C.R.S. compensation scam (see Eyes 1017 and 1020), but had never been anywhere near any kind of machinery that might have caused the condition. He was finally found a job as a youth worker in Doncaster. But earlier this year he was sacked after charges of harassment and bullying were proved against him.

Good to see recruitment of the next generation of squeaky-clean Doncaster councillors is proceeding so well!

Private Eye No.1043 14 December 2001

Bashing the Bishop

In November we reported that Doncaster Labour councillor and former chief whip Danny Buckley had been found guilty of fiddling his expenses.

The judge had warned Buckley that he could face a prison sentence if he persisted in his transparently dishonest defence that the money he had fiddled had actually been stolen by a council officer. Buckley wisely backed down and was given 80 hours' community service. He continued to try it on, however, with a bid for legal aid. This got short shrift, it being pointed out he was actually in well-paid employment.

But who could possibly want to employ such a crook? Step forward the Coalfields Regeneration Trust (chair, the Rt Rev Alan Morgan, Bishop of Sherwood), the charitable trust set up by John Pescott in 1999 to breath life into run-down mining communities. as the £25,000 a year "regeneration manager" for Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield area, the convicted fraudster helps decide how £100m of public and private money is distributed to various "community" projects. Ain't life grand?

Private Eye No.1046 25 January 2002