Our Vera hits the headlines again. – The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Anna Raccoon on June 7, 2011

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The house that Vera Baird put on the market for £315,000 last year after she had finished ‘winding up’ her constituents in sunny Redcar, has finally sold for £265,000.

This is the house that ‘we’ mostly paid for, so that Vera could continue the good works of the saintly Mo Mowlem on behalf of the benighted inhabitants of Redcar. We paid for the mortgage interest, the new boiler, the roof, the floors, the windows and furnished it for her.

Fortunately for the scrupulously honest Vera, she was kicked out of parliament the day before the change in MPs expenses rules which would have forced her to give the profit she made on this house back to the taxpayers. Still, last year Vera did say that she would be acting ‘morally and properly’ when the property was sold.

I am sure she has done so, who could imagine anything less of her? She has, she says, ‘made a donation to charity’. We do not know which charity, nor how much the donation was for; it would be uncharitable of us to assume that it was three and sixpence ha’penny to the retired Solicitor-General’s fund, nor even to Astraea Research, conveniently registered to her home address in Crouch Hill, North London, the research facility she set up with her close friend, Professor Jill Radford, (pictured right) now retired from Teesside University.

Even Wikipedia claims that Vera and Jill set up the ‘Astraea Institute for Gender Justice’, a name closely allied to the ‘Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Gender Justice’ a well respected New York Foundation which has financially supported lesbian and trans organisations world wide.

However, there appears to be no trace of the ‘Astraea Institute for Gender Justice’, merely a Astraea Research Ltd company registered to Vera’s home, which, if it has carried out any good works, has carried them out unnoticed by the rest of the world in general and the internet in particular. Jill Radford gave a lecture at the Friends Meeting House in Euston Road last October, and a month later they registered the company at Vera’s home.

In January of this year Professor Radford took herself off on holiday to Cuba, her close friendship with Vera Baird, ex-Solicitor-General, apparently not alerting her to the difficulties this would create in the court case she had brought against Teesside University, for constructive dismissal caused by discrimination against her sexual orientation and age, which she knew was listed for hearing. She lost the case, and her legal representatives, The Legal Bureau, were ordered to pay costs of £52,386.35 to the university.

Our Vera has had a generous £32,383 from the Taxpayer to help her reacclimatise herself to the harsh world of having to work for a living; something made harder for her by the decision of her old chambers to demote her from full board member of Took’s to humble ‘Barmaid’, a door tenant hustling for work with other lowly souls. She was last heard of publicly in February discussing Ugandan matters in Kampala.

Possibly why she also found the time to lick the end of her pencil and claim £1,242.83 from the taxpayer by listing £13.02 miscellaneous stationary and other meagre ‘household costs’ that she incurred after the voters of Redcar kicked her out. At least she didn’t claim for the Taxis she once told a court she would need…..

When the gravy trains stop running, every penny counts.

{ 13 comments }

tris June 11, 2011 at 22:46

She also is awfully ugly…

Psychonaut99 June 9, 2011 at 19:53

A rather odd creature in many ways, is our Vera. A former firebrand radical
barrister at Michael Mansfield’s chambers, her socialistic inclinations did
not extend as far as refraining from billing tens of thousands of pounds to
the Legal Aid Board on hearings which lasted a day or two. This is probably
what prepared her so well for the commons expenses system when she got elected
to Parliament, and to which she took like a duck to water.

There were some unfortunate side-effects, though. The poor thing suffered
from a terrible attack of amnesia, which caused her to entirely forget all of
her deeply-held principles, and made her toe the party line on pretty much
every NuLab folly, including, of course, the one which involved illegally
invading a foreign country and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Her moral suppleness did not go unnoticed, however, and she was duly
rewarded with a job as Legal Aid minister. Naturally, this was a role she was
well-suited for, given that she was very familiar with the Legal Aid system,
at least from the perspective of bilking as much money from it as humanly
possible.

This coincided with the Government’s latest harebrained scheme to reform
Legal Aid, and it might not come as a total surprise to learn that the scheme
did not involve reigning in the few high-earning QCs who absorb an
eye-wateringly disproportionate amount of the Legal Aid budget each year (QCs
such as, say, Vera Baird, to pick an example, entirely at random), but which
instead targeted low-end High Street solicitors, particularly those at the
legal coalface, representing people in family law and criminal matters.

Vera LOVED this idea. She loved it like old ladies love Mint Imperials. She
dismissed protests regarding the effects it would have on the most vulnerable
people in society with a high-handedness which didn’t so much border on
rudeness, as illegally invade Rudeness, bomb the hell out of it, kill hundreds
of thousands of innocent Rudenessians, and reduce it to a state of violent
lawlessness, while nicking all its good stuff and selling it to American oil
companies. To pick an analogy entirely at random.

Also, she has stupid hair.

Mrsknownothing June 9, 2011 at 13:10