tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-129332652024-03-07T16:27:27.876+01:00Too early to tell<B>From pop to politics, it's way too early</B>Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.comBlogger228125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-42387561571206015922010-10-20T19:18:00.005+01:002010-10-20T19:45:04.078+01:00This is where we areIn 1997 the British people elected a Labour government, because it wanted a Labour government.<br /><br />A government to invest in a shattered infrastructure and a fragmented society.<br /><br />A government prepared to counter the buffets of the economic cycle by an intelligent growth-oriented investment strategy coupled with a commitment to improving public services.<br /><br />That government, that New Labour government no less, was so committed to change and progress and well ...REFORM<br /><br />So committed was it, that it spent its time in government attacking poor public services, changing delivery, contracting out services - you know reforming.<br /><br />Targets were set to deal with poor performance and when things improved new ones were set.<br /><br />Every morning on the Today programme we heard about their battle.<br /><br />Every day was difficult, every service needed improving (not to say reforming).<br /><br />Through ten long years of economic growth all we heard was bad news - and we weren't listening to Radio Africa...<br /><br />New Labour also triangulated, it took on the Tory's on their own ground - you know, it met them halfway, it used their language, it went round the back ...and then it blew a raspberry; with increasingly little success as the years dragged on.<br /><br />That nice red raspberry got bluer.<br /><br />By 2010 the New Labour Party had spent thirteen long years explaining to the British public why they were wrong to want a Labour government.<br /><br />It took a long time but eventually they agreed.<br /><br />Though they weren't sure they wanted a Tory government either. Indecision eh, its a killer, luckily the British public were helped out by some people who did want a Tory government.<br /><br />Those people were called Liberal Democrats, but actually they were rather similar to the other ex-merchant bankers and global corporate economists that they looked very similar to on the Tory benches.<br /><br />Today as we look at George Osborne's delight lets remember Vince Cable's prescription back in April just before the election: 'five miserable years' promised Vince. Lets hope he was right. More than five will be a killer, even more of a killer than the five coming up.<br /><br />Thanks Tony, thanks Alistair Darling [have you noticed yet that as you briefed against the rest of your party just before the election by saying that their economic forecasts were over-optimistic that they were actually under-optimistic - and you were wrong?], thanks Gordon for your inarticulacy, your tiredness, your lack of ideas and above all your inability to positively motivate anyone other than Paul Dacre - whom you had far too many dinners and theatre trips with. Thanks David 'immigration is a problem' Blunkett.<br /><br />You've got a tough job Ed but at least you havn't got a tough act to follow.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-13776710696123892712010-01-29T02:05:00.006+01:002010-01-29T03:43:12.231+01:00Brown will pay the price for Iraq; but he deserves to.As we prepare for Blair's mesopotamiam swansong before Chilcot later today we reflect and and ponder the many negative impacts of Blair's decision to back Bush's fantasy of preemption.<br /><br />In the here and now it is Brown who will pay the electoral price for Iraq, while Blair's reputation is already too tarnished for his Chilcot appearance to make any difference; but back then what was Brown's position?<br /><br />Steve Richards with his usual razor-sharp analysis, explains why and how the Iraq nightmare began with what he terms, "the origins of New Labour, a frail, insecure and defensive project from the beginning".<br /><br />There is much in this and he is right to skewer Brown's support for it too, he also hints at why, "Acutely aware of Labour's vote-losing past when it was regarded as soft on defence and anti-American, Blair was always going to stick with the US over Iraq and seek as broad an international coalition of support as was possible.<br /><br />In terms of domestic politics, Brown made similar calculations.Working on the wrong assumption that he would be prime minister by 2004 he did not want to inherit a government that had opposed the war, sided with mediocre European leaders against the US..."<br /><br />Yet there was more to it than that, Blair believed; and as a SPAD of the period put it recently: 'he understood the importance of backing America, whatever our concerns about Iraq.'<br /><br />Apparently he elucidated this in one of his regular weekly briefings to his SPADs at the time. Now there is a document I'd like to see the contents of in full; perhaps Chilcot could ak for that.<br /><br />For a broader view and a sharper cutting edge we should look to John Kampfner, whose article sat adjacent to Richards' in the print edition today, spread across the centre of the paper. Kampfner says, "One man bears supreme responsibility for this most ignominious chapter in British foreign policy and political life. But many others played their part too, with their sins of omission and commission. Not one, not a single person, has been held to account, least of all Blair. He got away with it a long time ago. He always knew he would."<br /><br /><strong>Brown and New Labour however won't get away with it, </strong>nor will the rest of us, paying as we are a number of very real prices for Blair's historic miscalculation that Britain's future lay not in Europe but in the Lone Star state and a middle eastern bonfire of his vanity:<br /><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/john-kampfner-and-still-no-one-has-been-held-to-account-for-iraq-1881015.html" target="">John Kampfner: And still no one has been held to account for Iraq</a>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-74833121004168027962010-01-20T03:30:00.006+01:002010-01-29T03:43:46.889+01:00Standing in the way of control<strong>As Massachusetts' voters prepare to derail healthcare reform in the US, Britain's electorate are preparing to vote themselves back into recession by opting for hardcore class war Toryism 1980s-style.</strong><br /><br />What allows this apparently illogical set of outcomes?<br /><br />Despite the gaping gap between reality and Cameron and Osborne's economic analysis, British voters are preparing to choose the two Old Etonians as the individuals they will trust to deliver this economic enema.<br /><br />Meanwile over at New Labour Johnson and Brown were tying themseles in knots over class. Brown is middle class this week while Johnson is too, yet Johnson is nonetheless in touch with his dissolute workerist past and backing the proles right to drink themselves to death at least until the middle class take the pledge. Thus the Home Secretary rejected calls for a minimum unit price for alcohol on the basis that while this was an effective solution to alcohol-fuelled health problems it might enforce its benefits on the poor while as he put it 'allowing the rest of us to carry on as before'...<br /><br />The real revelation here is New Labour's view of the poor: take away their booze and they'll vote Tory? Watch out Alan, they may do so anyhow...<br /><br />The takeaway is that voters in 'big decision' elections don't welcome diffidence and won't vote for parties which triangulate their own position toward their opponents rather than robustly defending it. In big votes voters opt for clarity and the situation is exaggerated by those who are typically non-voters opting to vote in large numbers [which may be an issue in Massachusetts] and voting against encumbent parties of power.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-20993985293188261522009-06-29T14:20:00.004+01:002009-06-29T14:54:50.763+01:00Your Starter For Ten (to 15 percent cuts) AKA Same Old Tories TooThe temptation is to say 'this is where it starts...' but actually it started ages ago.<br /><br />It started when Gordon's men got an itchy election trigger finger, swiftly followed by a squeaky political bum.<br /><br />It started when the financial elite needed a new dialogue beyond Gordon's 'sustained growth that has removed boom and bust'; beyond Boris' 'Don't blame the bankers'; beyond Fred the braindeads 'blame me, I ate all the cakes'...<br /><br />It started when New Labour realised through the Pavlovian masochism of the Ten Per Cent Tax Rate Removal Fiasco that it still had a base to protect, if little else.<br /><br />There was a need for clear blue water. There was a need for a new dialogue.<br /><br />...Once our poor benighted government, not so much a ship of fools as a pig in shit, had used its, for once useful, familiarity with global finance, to actually save our banking system (while the Tories tried to play nationalisation politics over Northern Rock and blame Gordon's alleged profligacy for global financial meltdown, which at best Brown was guilty of watching lazy-eyed from the sidelines while the longest consistent period of growth in post-war history gave his party a lengthy political blow job through two unpopular wars and a perhaps unique disconnect between manifesto pledges and Acts of Government - no student loans, no university fees... err whatever "...f**K that was good Gordon, over to you now, I'm off to make some SERIOUS MONEY"]<br /><br />...De-railed momentarily by Expenses and the Telegraph's uniquely arrogant attempt to flush the toilet known as parliament [by themselves, principally] clean, bi-partisan, non-triangulated out of all linkage to reality, good, old-fashioned, British politics was quietly trying to make a comeback.<br /><br /><strong>...it was time - Time for politics as usual:</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>So obligingly the Tories are going to stop playing 'New Labour Vintage 97' and get back to cutting propgrammes for the poor (and the middle classes)...</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Well lets face it the Tories never represented the mass of the British people did they? But they are on occasion damn good at pretending to.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Still, sometimes they help to clarify things:</strong><br /><br />Tories to bin pledge to protect Sure Start cash<br /><br />The Conservatives have announced that they are reneging on their pledge to protect early years scheme Sure Start from spending cuts if they are elected.<br /><br />Speaking to Haymarket-published magazine, Regeneeration and Renewal Regeneration yesterday, Phillip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, is reported as refusing to commit to a previous guarantee that the overall budget of the Labour government's flagship early years programme would be ring-fenced. "We will be looking at individual projects and workstreams, but we haven't made announcements about individual budgets yet," he said.<br />Last year, at the Tory Party conference, Oliver Letwin, chair of the party's policy review, said that Sure Start would continue under a Tory government at the same level to which Labour was committed (Regen.net, 1 October 2008). "Sure Start is a programme we value and one we intend to continue," he said. "It will not be cut back."<br /><br />But now Hammond has signalled that the programme would be subject to the same scrutiny and possible ten to 15 per cent cuts subjected to all departments.<br /><br />He also confirmed to the haymarket magazine that, as previously announced, the Tories would take part of Sure Start's budget to fund health visits to vulnerable families with newborn children.<br /><br />A spokesman for childcare charity the Daycare Trust said: "We seriously hope that it is not official Conservative Party policy to remove Sure Start's ring-fenced funding. Sure Start has grown into a much needed and valued public service for families, and parents will rightly be angered if its funding is threatened."<br /><br /><strong>Next stop funding the rights and localism agenda, or was that the 'right localism agenda' - lets just see...</strong>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-35038456079835707292009-01-31T14:21:00.020+01:002009-04-29T15:25:28.967+01:00New Labour's Final Ecstasy? - New Labour's leaders have gone from Rabbits in the Headlights of History, to Duracell Bunnies in the Debt DiscoWhen New Labour came to power in 1997 Blair and Brown were paralysed by fear of a radicalism they never possessed.<br /><br />They had been rewarded with a huge majority and an unprecedentedly broad coalition of support for, at the very least a programme of social investment, in a country which was literally falling apart, as both society and transport infrastructure creaked after a period of two decades where major infrastructural investment had been limited to a new bankers metro in the east end and even our great national museums were reduced to excluding the poor and charging the rich in order to remain open.<br /><br />As one senior forex expert of my acquantance put it at the time - it makes more sense for me to vote Labour than to keep buying more expensive alarms for my house'.<br /><br />This was the first time in the 40 or so years he had been eligible to vote that he had felt that such an action made sense, the excesses of Thatcher and the incompetence and thievery of the Major years when, as his patrician city peers used to put it, 'the shit floated to the top', had horrified him - he saw the future and he didn't like it.<br /><br /><strong>Flying over the Favelas of the Future</strong><br />'I don't want to end up like a member of the Brazilian ruling class,' he continued, 'flying home by helicopter to my gated compound, to avoid driving through the favelas'.<br /><br />He had worked across the globe, from the States to Asia, he loved Japan and indeed New York, though more for the salt beef and beigels than for the new Wall Street ethics downtown. He respected the dynamism of the Chinese and hoped that the cultural revolution would be as strong a lesson to the emergent nation as had been the period of warlord dominance, probably the strongest cultural lychpin in the development of the Chinese nation, a sort of outrider of chaos, standing as a warning of what could befall the nation should the unwritten rules of deference be forgotten. He knew the value of money and the fact this was mobile, this after all was his trade.<br /><br />And he voted Labour in 1997, because, like so many of us, he believed in society, in ethics, in the need for laws as well as returns, for values as well as valuations. Because valuations change, because markets can go down as well as up. Because one of his friends spent the cultural revolution paraded in a dunces cap for the crime of teaching and was then sent to work in the fields - but was now an international banker, employed by the Chinese state.<br /><br />He was to be fair an experienced man with connections across global business, whereas the leading lights of New Labour had Peter's friends in Notting Hill, their old [Labour] friends in the unions giving them sleepless nights like a sort of postmodernist tsetzuo or bogey man; and a profound lack of experience.<br /><br /><strong>Rabbits in the Headlights of History</strong><br />So they started not with a Barack-style bang but witha whimper. Two Years of Tory Spending. 'No change while we think of what to do, eh, Gordon,' whispered Tony breathily, 'settle in, find our way around, chat to people a bit, reassure them; really we'll do nothing in the first term, just a sort of creating foundations thing' .<br /><br />'We can play some of those tax changes Kenneth was planning as 'aid for the forgotten poor', though' says Gordon, 'they will help, after all, those who actually work, and we can do some work around the tax credit ideas I have, to emphasise that. Telling a story of hard work and reward, not scrounging and the rewards of sloth and shiftless inactivity'.<br /><br />Thus followed a period in which New Labour listened. To lobbyists, to Thatcherites, to deregulators, to American republicans and democrats in equal measures, to Goldman Sachs, to a brash new city which had found ways for international markets to create money without burdening public treasuries. Growth was to be funded through a proper and realistic assessment of risk and the trading and insuring of this risk to spread it. In a curious echo of the old imperialism, the new imperialism consisted of emergent Asian economies buying Western debt in order to fund the consumerist longings of the developed world they were rapidly becoming a fully-paid up part of.<br /><br />Odd warnings had sounded, banks had occasionally broken throughout this period and indeed before it, the Leeson Barings debacle the clearest parallel, as the trader tried to trade his way out of a derivatives hole in a market which notoriously lacked a ceiling and, he thought, a floor; and operated without either external regulation of any meaningful sort or even the most mundane of internal controls.<br /><br />Yet New Labour, the ultimate professionals, the managerialists who thought they knew the Rulers of the World and worse still that they had been invited to join the club, took a rationalist approach. The institutions would self-police because it was in their own interests not to suffer the ignominious meltdowns that had befallen aberrant old-timers like Barings. The message they heard was that Barings were old-fashioned, unable to cope with brash new realities. The Banks of the New Church, Jesuit priests of international capitalism would take their boys at five and make them compliance-friendly men.<br /><br /><strong>Duracell Bunnies in the Debt Disco</strong><br />So for ten years the Duracell bunnies of New Labour danced in the debt disco. Occasionally they would turn to each other asking,<br />'Any idea whats going on with this economic cycle Gordon? Seems to have been going on rather a long time...'<br /><br />'Huh, huh, huh, no idea Tony'<br />pants Gordon, his huge lop ears flopping to the pumping music,<br /><br />'I doon't really care, but I'm happy to keep dancing as long as someone keeps giving me these brilliant free Es.... sorry dollars'.<br /><br />And traded debt derivative dollars at that.<br /><br /><strong>The bad news</strong><br />The bad news is that the derivative-funded industries in the UK don't simply extend to the financial services sector.<br /><br />A few days ago Home Shopping Direct [Littlewoods catalogues as was] announced huge job cuts.<br /><br />The really bad news is that cheap credit card debt to fund catalogue shopping you can't afford is just another version of buying houses you can't afford, just another part of the 'debt time bomb' if you like, Daily Express. Leading to the view among some people, not least Foreign Exchange experts that our whole economy may be over-valued.<br /><br />Better start making something fast, but not cars, please, Peter.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-29826692364048554542009-01-27T01:50:00.007+01:002009-01-27T16:53:51.191+01:00Taking Sides Against the Innocent – why is the BBC backing Hamas and the men of war?The BBC [and Sky]’s decision to decline to broadcast the Disaster’s Emergency Committee Appeal for Gaza is wrong.<br /><br />It reveals some profoundly muddled thinking by its increasingly irrational, defensive and spineless DG, Mark Thompson. Thompson’s actions over both this and the recent Ross-Brand-<a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','5','')" href="http://hottiesinthenews.blogspot.com/2008/10/voluptua-pictures-of-georgina-baillie.html">Voluptua</a>-Sachs fiasco, tell us a lot about why the Senior Editor and DG roles should be separate; but a lot more about why Thompson is simply not up to the job he was given on the back of the BBC’s pasting by HM Government and the noble Lord Hutton*<br /><br />[*over, you'll remember, the BBC Today Programme's allegedly inaccurate claims that the government had sexed up its Iraq weapons dossiers - which of course we now know didn't happen, after all those WMDs were found in Iraq ...oh, no, sorry... that was in an alternative dimension wasn't it...].<br /><br /><em>But muddled thinking is not the worst aspect of Thompson’s befuddled decision-making</em><br /><br /><strong>The BBC is a news and editorial organisation – so everything that its senior editor does and says becomes an editorial statement.</strong><br /><br />So by arguing that the BBC cannot be seen to take sides, Thompson has accepted the Israeli government’s implicit argument that its well-resourced and powerfully armed ‘Defence’ forces are at war with the whole Palestinian people.<br /><br />Or at any rate that Israel is at war with the whole population of Gaza, which they have conveniently given the temporary status of an independent state, in order to declare war on it and its population.<br /><br /><strong>Mark Thompson today announced, in effect, therefore, that the targeting of Palestinian civilians by the IDF is reasonable.<br /><br /></strong>Mr Thompson should move to the Hague immediately – after all who needs an International War Crimes Tribunal when Mr Thompson can do the job of deciding whether it is reasonable to use missiles with phosphorous warheads on civilian populations for a fraction of the cost – and indeed in an iota of the time - that it will take to convene the trials which are prompting Ehud Olmert to establish <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','4','')" href="http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=35544">a specialist war crimes defence team</a>, and fund, to protect members of the IDF who may be held to account for their actions in Gaza over recent weeks.<br /><br />Thompson’s stance is doubly unfortunate given the sterling work being done by Jeremy Bowen, BBC Correspondent, in covering this ‘conflict’.<br /><br />Worst of all Thompson is accepting the argument of all men of war, terrorist or statist, over the needs, and, supposedly internationally-assured, human RIGHTS, of civilians.<br /><br />He is therefore implicitly justifying the notion of ‘total war’ which predated the Geneva Conventions and has been exploited subsequently by evil-doers as diverse as Hitler and the militias of Rwanda.<br /><br />Congratulations Mr Thompson, now maybe you can try yourself for incitement to genocide as the DJ’s and hosts of <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','')" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interahamwe">Radio Interahamwe</a> in Rwanda and the Congo were <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','8','')" href="http://www.hirondelle.org/hirondelle.nsf/caefd9edd48f5826c12564cf004f793d/36da2a1bc6e1fb94c125671600744ddc?OpenDocument">tried</a> for crimes against humanity, for you are justifying and inciting future slaughter of the innocents as surely as they ever did.<br /><br />Now perhaps you could also resign while some vestige of the BBC’s independence and moral authority as a news organisation and as an institution committed to the defence of human rights remains. Or are human rights a bit one-sided for you these days, Mark?<br /><br />Though it really ISN'T about sides, is it Mark? Not at all, as it happens, since I imagine that Hamas would agree with your analysis, as much as the IDF will; for it is they who will benefit, while the civilian population continues to suffer; and with each new slight and signal of your imbalance and lack of care for the conditions of the civilian population of Gaza, greater hatred is bred.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-85994938175078957702008-11-05T15:14:00.004+01:002009-01-05T15:24:15.404+01:00ObamaYes he did.<br /><br />'That one' did it.<br /><br />And like most of us, I'm still in the emotional phase - and in a funny way, perhaps just for today, it is an 'us'. Because Obama's universality and the universality of our interest around the globe in his candidacy, has created - if only momentarily - a community of interest.<br /><br />Who knows where this may take us. Who knows how long it will last.<br /><br />But just for a moment it is irresistible to savour the spectacle, the experience, the emotionally buffeting rollercoaster, of history being made. Of history occurring, before our very eyes.<br /><br />Change certainly can happen. Change has happened.<br /><br /><div align="center">-o0o-</div><br />The cynic in me, the realist it likes to call itself, reminds me of 1997 and tells me that another larger generation may have to grow up disappointed. As the red wedgers of the British 80's grew up when the lies and war crimes of blood red Blair came to haunt their 21st century.<br /><br />But I can't buy it because, for all that the day may come when President Obama chooses to bomb somewhere back to the nineteenth century, or when a Pashtun wedding party gets atomised by a high level bombing raid on his watch, it won't change the significance of today.<br /><br />As Justin Webb said last week and indeed last night, when America looks in the mirror it will see a black 'first family'.<br /><br />He may not be the son of slaves but he hasn't married a white chick either. Michelle Obama and those two daughters might just turn out to be the real signifiers of change as much as their husband and father.<br /><br /><div align="center">-o0o-</div>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-56919762130987472022008-10-30T15:37:00.014+01:002008-11-07T19:39:58.886+01:00In Praise of Independents - or Why do Manuel and the Mail have it in for a certain maned male?Firstly yes I have felt moved to comment on Russell Brand and second, no, I don't think its a big deal.<br /><br />But I did love the bitchiness of the Independent's front page today 'Manuel's Revenge' - because that in essence is rather what this is all about.<br /><br />Well that and what exactly we treasure as a nation and why.<br /><br />Andrew Sachs incidentally hates being referred to as Manuel and loathes the fact that his apparently stellar career on stage and screen is often reduced to 12 episodes of slightly racist pastiche performed several decades ago.<br /><br />He has said this. But this is his problem.<br /><br />And he is a national treasure because of those 12 episodes. Not in fact because of all his lovely voice over work for Radio 4, or his serious stage work, or indeed all the other stuff that bought the house and educated the kids, etcetera.<br /><br />Ah yes the kids - well the grand daughter to be exact. What exactly does she do again?<br /><br />She's a dancer isn't she, by the name of Voluptua as it happens and she dances with the Satanic Sluts.<br /><br />So I suppose I'm right to assume that she is a bit of a shrinking violet and probably spends her evenings working in a homeless shelter run by the church she attends every Sunday, with her granddad? ...Oh OK that was another Voluptua, well I'm sure she's lovely anyway, at any rate Russ seemed to think so - and lets face it he doesn't have to pay for it, does he?<br /><br />Though I imagine the holy Voluptua did get paid for her recent revelations to The Sun, which included confirmation that she'd shagged Brand - or at any rate serviced his sexual needs in one way or another.<br /><br />I suppose that after the Daily Mail had publicised the little-noted broadcast by Brand and Ross featuring their childish answerphone messages, Voluptua thought that there was little to be gained from maintaining that "they're just cads grandad and I in any case am still virgo intacta"<br />[as opposed to brando penetrata] .<br /><br />Then I suppose its just a small step from there to telling the paper that features a half naked teenager most mornings, exactly who has been giving you one recently - and, naturally, what a cad they are.<br /><br />Want more, see <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','4','')" href="http://thelondonpaper.typepad.com/thelondonblog/2008/10/sachs-granddaug.html">thelondonpapersblog</a> or for a more 'eyecatching' approach see more of Voluptua at <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','5','')" href="http://hottiesinthenews.blogspot.com/2008/10/voluptua-pictures-of-georgina-baillie.html">Hotties in the News: </a><br /><br />Want Russell try <a href="http://www.russellbrand.tv/">http://www.russellbrand.tv/</a><br /><br />The Independent incidentally also had two other killer headlines today: A backpage splash of 'Harry Houdini' on Tottenham's great escape from the Emirates last night (and possibly relegation) courtesy of the remarkable Mr Redknapp - who I still think is a bit of bastard for going to Tottenham but can't help respecting as a motivator of men, a manager who knows good footballers when he sees them, and an all round cunning devil.<br /><br />The other was a vaguely approving bit of editorial comment entitled 'Brand Values' suggesting that Brand, by virtue of a well-timed resignation, was coming out of this rather better than the somewhat over-exposed Jonathan Ross.<br /><br />But for all that I think this is a Daily Mail witchhunt led by an embittered old Queen [or two] the best reason to read and savour the Indy today had nothing to do with Brand or Ross, Sachs or Voluptua [somehow I feel there's another joke to be made about 'sacks' and voluptua but I'm sure it'd be bollocks really...].<br /><br />No forget the fripperies of entertainment wars as the Tories look for excuses to humble the BBC anew in preparation for an easy start to their campaign of public service cuts once in power....<br /><br />Instead read a true Independent, Russell can and will look after himnself and Jonathan is as rich as Croesus, but there are more important things going on in the world which demand I'm afraid greater attention....<br /><br />Read Johann Hari instead on how we are fuelling the latest bloody round of the Congolese Resource War: <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','')" href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-we-fuel-africas-bloodiest-war-978461.html">Johann Hari: How we fuel Africa's bloodiest war</a>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-27479107713394169242008-10-16T14:03:00.003+01:002008-10-16T14:07:15.631+01:00The world's not looking 2<span style="font-style:italic;"><span style="font-weight:bold;">France</span><span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span> The French police are investigating the discovery of toxic mercury pellets in the car of a human rights lawyer who was taken ill in Strasbourg on Tuesday, a day before pretrial hearings in Moscow into the killing of one of her best-known clients, the journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya. <span style="font-style:italic;">(B)</span>Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-70957747611736828772008-10-13T20:23:00.000+01:002008-10-13T20:23:00.085+01:00The world's not looking*<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Zimbabwe</span></span><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article4828369.ece"> Last month</a> Robert Mugabe said he could flout the power-sharing deal brokered with the MDC while the world was distracted by the credit crunch. Now he <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7664921.stm">pushes ahead with his plans</a>. <span style="font-style: italic;">(A)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Austria</span></span> <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7664846.stm">Far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider dies in car crash</a> <span style="font-style: italic;">(C)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A - definite consequence of credit crisis<br />B - probable consequence of credit crisis<br />C - interesting coincidence (and gift to the conspiracy junkies ;-)<br /></span><br /><br /><br />*<span style="font-style: italic;">In honour of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1588323.stm">Jo Moore</a>.</span>Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-6417224559637632122008-09-30T13:17:00.008+01:002008-09-30T13:33:28.515+01:00Same Old Tories? Or ‘This is not America’ - Tory Pickles says that British “cities should continue to be built around the car”Remember how Blue is the new Green? You know all that Oak Tree Logo-led Tory Renewal?<br /><br />Not very flexible in wind incidentally oaks and subject to being struck by lightning...still:<br /><br />Tory transport spokespeople may be trying to seem greener than Labour with their talk of new trainlines to replace new runways [as opposed to Barmy Boris' idea of an island airport off Kent to kill our dolphins but make Kew Gardens quieter...] but Eric Pickles, a man who has spent his whole career in politics making Coronation Street look modernist and innovatory by comparison, is not buying any of this socialist claptrap:<br /><br />The prospect of congestion charging in cities outside London "does not have a rosy future" under a Tory government, shadow communities secretary Eric Pickles said this week.<br /><br />Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Pickles said he hoped Greater Manchester residents would vote No in December’s referendum on the city-region’s Transport Innovation Fund (Tif) bid – which would see £3 billion of investment in public transport and the introduction of a peak time congestion charge.He said: I’ve not the slightest doubt [the Tif bid] will be rejected by the people of Manchester and that would be a good thing.<br /><br />Only hours after transport secretary Theresa Villiers attempted to bolster the Conservative Party’s green credentials by announcing its support for high speed rail over an expansion of Heathrow – as well as signaling that under a Tory Government the Tif would be used in more flexible ways to encourage bus and bicycle use within cities - Pickles said <strong>cities should continue to be built around the car. </strong><br /><br />He said: <strong>Public transport can be a very good thing but the way people want to live is with a car</strong>. I think we should a way to make our cities pleasant places to be but they should be places built on consent, without Government forcing an anti-car agenda onto people. I don’t think congestion charging has a very rosy future at all.<br /><br /><strong>GO ERIC - Vote Tory for a sustainable future ...NOT</strong>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-65484482364334526882008-04-15T01:07:00.026+01:002008-04-28T22:58:53.962+01:00Gordon is a Moron - And The Guardian has a 'punt'Michael White starts his blog post analysing the media buzz around Brown's continuing capacity for self-immolation with the potentially hazardous statement 'Here's a punt...' [No, I'm not a betting man, you've <em>seen</em> his byline pic, you KNOW what I mean...]<br /><br /><strong>ANY-WAY...</strong> <strong>call me prescient but not having posted since last October, its like nothing's changed at all...</strong><br /><br />Our new PM is still burning votes like they're going out of fashion and there's a whirlwind of media speculation over why he's such a dork, whether he realises what a dork he is and whether he can 'turn it around'. And the current majority view is that he cannot.<br /><br />This isn't totally un-related to upcoming elections in which the Tories hope to score some high profile victories as a platform for a realistic assault on gaining a majority in the next General Election in 2010 / 11. Nor is it unrelated to the fact that the media needs change and crisis to write about and is showing a depressing willingness to see the Tories as 'new', not to say 'news'; when they are merely the old lot with a few wheelchairs and trees up front.<br /><br /><strong>So, OK something has changed since last October, the wind...</strong><br />- and Gordon Brown's face has got stuck in last Autumn's Mr Bean mode, caught between expressions like a drunk using a self-timer, vapid, flaccid and yet somehow curiously Blairite.<br /><br />And lets get this straight now, the 'dork dialogue' of 'Gordon is a moron' propagated by the sneering public schoolboys over at Dave's house ISN'T THE ISSUE.<br /><br /><strong>Its not even, just, the economy, stupid. Its the policies. And its the decisions, or lack of them. Above all it is the lack of change. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Gordon hasn't dithered, he's hardly made a decison since attaining power. A little window dressing but nothing of substance.<br /></strong><br />A 'Supercasino dropped' soundbite disguises approval for the far more damaging introduction of 20 odd regional casinos. A farcical Iraq withdrawal re-announcement disguises a continuing commitment to a doomed US-led middle east agenda whose most tragic consequences form an atrocity exhibition of misjudgement and misunderstanding from the refugee ghettoes of Damascus and Amman to the broken bridges of the Bekaa Valley and the whirling centrifuges of Iran.<br /><br /><strong>And now everyone has noticed. That tends to happen if you keep appearing in public looking like that... Above all the media have noticed.</strong><br />Thus, a feeding frenzy...<br /><br /><strong>SO, what happens now?</strong><br /><br />Well, over at the Guardian Blog, where we started, Michael White tries to persuade us that its all about the moon. Well the timing of the Easter recess at any rate. In fact White ignores the potential for upcoming New Labour electoral slaughter virtually altogether. Something I find myself unable to do, since Gordon Brown's ineptitude might yet [and I still maintain hope that this won't happen] cost Ken the mayoralty in London and land us with Boris Johnson. A disturbingly bright and ideologically right wing politician who disguises his narrow free market instincts behind a smokescreen of bluster and mock-buffoonery.<br /><br />I pray that London will not be taken in mayor-wise. Ken isn't perfect but he's been a good mayor thus far and has started laying foundations for London's future; despite the delays caused by Gordon's PFI nonsense vis the tube and by the mayoralty's odd mix of powers. He's even obtained some new ones in areas like housing which don't come into force until this month. Boris will simply focus on saving money by dismantling strategic institutions designed to protect London's voters from the unfettered profiteering of his mates in big business.<br /><br />Don't be fooled by Boris' vagueness - you can't ask a plc nicely to act against its shareholder's profit-maximising interests. But you CAN use planning control to ensure that it has no choice - give it a choice and it can only reasonably put private profit before public good.<br /><br />Over and above the London mayoralty White may be right to imply (if only through ommission) the limited potential for wider electoral damage to Labour on May 1st. After all, Labour were slaughtered last time around, but these ARE different constituencies and surely Labour doesn't want EVERY council occupying their every waking hour trying to make government look stupid.<br /><br /><strong>That's the party politics - but what about the REAL politics?</strong><br /><br />Well, wake up and smell the coffee, children of Thatcher, your hearts are about to be broken again.<br /><br />Through all the worst excesses and gravest disappointments of Blairism you all persuaded yourselves that one day Gordon [or was that Bevan] would rise from the ashes to reclaim the left's victory over the venal Tories for the, err, left. Or, if we must be less controversial - and, to be frank, more accurate - to reclaim society's victory for society, since the coalition of support for Labour in '97 gelled around belief in the need for social investment, rather than any narrow ideological position.<br /><br />Blair mistook this absence of an old-fashioned sloganeering ideological belief in left-politics for an absence of belief in the ability of politicians to initiate change. He proceeded to spend ten years making this misunderstanding into a self-fulfilling prophecy, since he - like his right wing predecessors - saw society as a creature of market capitalism, rather than vice versa.<br /><br />However the twenty and thirty and forty-somethings who had waited so long for change, through the long years of Tory rule, through the harsh Midwinter of King Tony, believed that under Gordon things would be different. There would be no more of Blair's rabbit caught in the headlights fear of losing the 'middle-England' voters whom he had never understood adequately enough to comprehend his own success in converting them to a belief in the need for public investment.<br /><br />No more kow towing to the scaremongering of the Daily Mail. No more Chequers weekends for Ross Kemp. No more cosying up to Murdoch... well, you get my drift...<br /><br /><strong>YES, the Red Wedge generation believed, things WOULD change come 'Gordon-time'...</strong><br />Gordon believed in society. Gordon - unlike Blair - was interested in politics. Gordon believed in making change not just managing it. In intervention rather than explanation. Gordon would pull the levers of power rather than merely oiling the wheels of capitalism...<br /><br /><strong>Oh f**k OFF!</strong><br /><br />Let's face it anyone who remained in the cabinet throughout the build up to the Iraq War and then stayed on through the debacle which that flawed and fraudulent decision was to become, has to be seen as of questionable morality and above all judgement. But Gordon went further, silently funding it. And that's before we even get onto tax rises for the poor to fund tax cuts for the better off.<br /><br /><strong>If Gordon Brown wants a real legacy, and a positive one, he needs to find a new policy direction, one that he can make his own and yet which will appeal to his base. Thus far he's shown no inclination to do this, or even to understand how important this is.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>He needs to start understanding this, FAST.</strong><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>If only for the sake of Ken Livingstone and the people of London. </strong><br /><strong></strong><br />And 'Team Brown' needs to stop doing what they were up to this morning - which was sending out people like Hazel Blears to talk nonsense assertively. I closed my eyes in pain and exasperation and in that moment realised just how much like Big John Prescott Little Hazel Blears now sounds - try it, its scary...<br /><strong><br />Nothing ever changes - it all remains the same...</strong><br /><br /><p>SO - its 'First Lord of the Treasury, Deliver us from Boris...'<br />Or you'll find that we might just, somehow, deliver ourselves of you...</p><p><strong>...Whatever that uber-loyalist punt at the Guardian has to say about it.</strong></p>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-75460480761653155692007-10-16T00:36:00.002+01:002009-01-05T15:23:16.953+01:00Hungry Looks on the faces of the dogs of warAfter a long break being busy with life and living it, rather than writing about it, I was thinking about a post on how THE WORST place for a post-Blair change-ringing Prime Ministerial appearance would be Iraq.<br /><br /><strong>What a Difference a Day Makes</strong><br />I was pondering a rumination on how Gordon Brown could fail to realise this and preparing to expound upon the nature of the Westminster bubble and its disjunct with street reality. After all few things can be worse in a country which wants to 'bring its boys home' than a publicity grabbing attempt to gain short-term credit from re-announcing the fact that 10% will be 'home for Christmas' - especially when half of those were already home for Indian Summer [a big improvement on Afghan winter].<br /><br /><strong>Home for Christmas</strong><br />Why is it that politicians use that phrase? Redolent as it is of the broken promises and shattered skulls of the Somme.<br /><br />If it was possible to make a bad week worse, this little exercise crossed one of those irony rubicons that the smirking slaughterers of New Labour never seem to spot. Yes, remarkably, its true, Brave Gordon's views on war and the umma are as cockeyed as those of his more generously eyeball-endowed predecessor.<br /><br />Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iraq's Christians aren't coming home for Christmas, or anytime soon, and the dead are all still dead.<br /><br /><strong>Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away...</strong><br />Just a few short weeks ago Gordon was riding high. The sun shone out of his Jacqui Smith and even his Straw cod-piece smelt almost fresh enough to swallow.<br /><br />The only Iraqi's he had to worry about were the suicidal situationist comics of Al-Qaeda's Celtic Fringe, whose pre-Festival tour had ended in an impromptu foam party at Glasgow Airport but failed to ignite popular interest.<br /><br /><strong>How, one asked, HOW, did we get to HERE from THERE?</strong><br />The weekend [13th and 14th October] produced some interesting evidence. After all the phoney election shenanigans, I was already wondering if a Blairite trap had been sprung. All the elements of Gordon's previously unflappable and principled political persona blew away, like so much spinning chaff before the hot blast of Charlie Falconer's disdain.This also led to John Hutton first being quoted as a Gordon apologist and then clarifying that he wasn't really saying that - and was thus doing even less good for faith in Gordon's leadership than employing Dawn Primarolo.<br /><br /><strong>Be my dog...</strong><br />Then the Liberals showed the way with a play within a play.<br /><br />While a right of centre Orange Book-carrying Lib Dem leader might ultimately pressure Cameron more than Menzies Campbell's familiar patrician; it is nonetheless another easy win for Cameron, with barely a finger lifted.<br /><br />Once more we are reminded why the Liberals havn't been elected to office since the Second World War.<br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>Gordon and more pertinently 'yon Milliband' must learn from this:</strong><br />That means protecting you core vote, Cameroon stylee. Not dragging it rightwards until its arms pop out and it forgets whom it is meant to vote for - and who represents what, or whom.<br /><br />Gordon had the benefit of the doubt, now we simply doubt him. Doubt his sincerity, doubt his abilty and doubt he cares or understand the people whom he doesn't trust to elect him.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-33673594719961246762007-07-12T00:42:00.000+01:002007-07-12T01:42:32.887+01:00Charity Begins At Home ...and legacies fade first where least substantialGordon Brown hinted at a decision today, its a generally popular one, at any rate it is with core Labour supporters, with regeneration experts [and indeed inexperts] and with sane human beings everywhere. Supercasinos may just be getting dropped.<br /><br />Gambling policy as a whole is being reviewed and recent controversial enabling legislation along with the regional casinos it was to enable may go too.<br /><br />However for all the goodwill this ghost of a decision, this, mayhap, hint of a policy shift, is getting, we have to note that it has not been taken yet. Which is a worry, because dollars, many many dollars, will even now be starting to be spent in lobbying and PR firms on reversing it.<br /><br />But fear not, Gordon is firm and he may just decide to prove that in one area at least he is not a Blairite, by keeping his hand out of the till that Bernie Ecclestone, Philip Anschutz, Lakshmi Patel, the Brothers Hinduja, Lord Browne, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Lord Sainsbury all shut Tony Blair's begrimed party and corporate [ergo national] paws in.<br /><br />For many people, influential well-informed people, this policy had been the final straw.<br /><br />At one and the same time a reminder of the very first things to go wrong with 'whiter than white' Blairite probity in public office, and equally the ultimate expression of policymakers lost in the corporate funhouse, as befuddled as the tame business unions brought to Manchester to persuade the local TUC that a deal could be done to remove the danger of competition from cheap, un-unionised, immigrant labour.<br /><br />Manchester's ambition and potential was to be prostituted by locally accented croupiers; the whores might come from eastern europe or Somalia but <em>they</em> were, in the current legislative environment, outwith the regulatory framework to be administered by the 'family-friendly' US conglomerates bidding to do in Manchester what back home they would need an <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','4','')" href="http://www.cognizantcommunication.com/filecabinet/tgail.htm">Indian reservation</a> to get away with.<br /><br />Maybe, just maybe, if Gordon Brown sticks to his apparent policy shift and kills Jowell's bloated pig of a policy to tax the poor and call the moral degredation of licensing policy a form of urban regeneration, he has drawn a line in the sand.<br /><br />Maybe, just maybe, his charity toward the predilections and aspirations of the core voters who can keep him in power in two years time marks the start of something genuinely new; rather than just a gesture to buy a hundred days of poll ratings to be squandered come the winter.<br /><br />On the positive side Gordon posited 'regeneration' as an alternative to super-casinos. An industry heaved a huge sigh of relief. For over a year frustration has mounted over the idea that it is necessary to explain to GOVERNMENT that a super-casino is not a regeneration option in any traditional sense. Not least because it exists purely to draw money out of the local economy and can economically survive only as long as it does so on a massive scale and because its business model is based on maintaining the maximum possible separation from surrounding retail and leisure infrastructure to avoid 'revenue bleed'.<br /><br />If Gordon's apparent common sense take on gambling legislation - and indeed on expanding the supply of <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','2','')" href="http://www.politics.co.uk/News/domestic-policy/housing-and-planning/right-buy/brown-in-affordable-housing-pledge-$474454.htm">affordable housing</a> - is a sign of things to come, he may just convince a cynic or two and persuade a few voters that New Labour is not so utterly amoral and compromised by power that it might just be time to give the Tories a go. He only needs to do a bit of that to survive. Cameron, after all, is just Blair as Mr Punch - and that is not a show many will yet pay to watch on primetime.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-52487853537721466502007-06-27T23:43:00.000+01:002007-06-28T01:10:26.205+01:00Cleaning Out My Closet - or: I hope you're going to clean up that mess after yourself, Tony [as if...]Tony Blair's time in office has been about nothing if it has not been about the rewards of deluded expectation.<br /><br />Commentators have spent ten, perhaps twelve, years queueing up to acclaim Blair as Social Democracy's Rubicon-crosser, the third ways herald, and other such non sequiturs.<br /><br />One always felt that a social democratic Labour Party in government would be a big growing up experience for the adolescent left which occupied the farthest flung corners of New Labour's big tent. Tony was not to disappoint us. Nor for that matter were his cronies or indeed the band of phonies and crazies who populated his wake - when Ian McCartney, John Reid, David Blinkered and Peter Mandelsson have all fulfilled multiple roles in your administrations, one has to accept that you are truly an equal opportunities employer.<br /><br />Yes reality is about the crooked, crooked, timber of humanity. From which no straight thing was ever made.<br /><br />Blair asked what Labour was, challenged it to be anything other than what he made it. A challenge that it often appeared to flinch from.<br /><br />Blairism was undoubtedly a phenomena of power and about power; and like all true excercises in power made extant, power exercised, power apparent; it asked us either to take it like men or to try and take its horse.<br /><br />However, for all that Sedgefield's Fettes Cowboy showed a distinct attachment to the saddle, there was nonetheless a feeling that maybe, just maybe, the media's heralds of the new dawn, the high priests of Hip Hop-racy and the Lords of the Labour New Church were all just a tad previous - and that, after all, the oft-derided real left, or 'Old Labour', would cope.<br /><br />Cope, not because of its strength, nor because its support, nay not even because of inertia - but, above all, simply because disappointment and disillusion were after all A Way Of Life. For all that there may have been times when Old Labourites simply felt that the Labour Party was Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition - which of course, 90s dance club references aside, it was - one still felt that something called Labour might just survive the premature reports of its demise.<br /><br />And, in a sense, perhaps those feelings were right. For it is after all Tony who has finally walked away from Labour and not vice versa. Nor indeed have the voters quite deserted the party of government yet.<br /><br />Yet Tony has perhaps finally crossed a Rubicon, if only an ironic one. After months in which his team have attempted to persuade us that Iraq and crisis in the middle east are not in fact Blair's true legacy, [then pray what could be? - broken-hearted Trotskyists with tears down their parkas?], he finally finds himself washed up, on a sand bar.<br /><br />Yes after all those months of trying to scrape the word 'Iraq' from Tony's political tombstone, the big ego has finally bitten the bullet [so as to speak] and determined that he must go with the flow and take his next thirty pieces of silver [or £100,000 per annum] where the tidal flow of his story [or was that history] drives him. And that is, inexorably, to the disputed shores of the orient.<br /><br />One thing is for sure, Tony Blair's legacy will indubitably be found in the middle east. He at least has now accepted this, as, like a weary pasha, bloody but unbowed, he finally rises from his diwan to meet his nemesis. The question that he and all the other actors in this revenge tragedy must ask, is when the killing can stop and the healing begin; and who can turn the bone train around.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-87951453622760665812007-05-22T00:55:00.000+01:002007-05-23T17:36:48.425+01:00Who said the BNP don't have a voice in parliament?And to think I used to get hot under the collar when David Blunkett talked about the 'problems of immigration' in his Sheffield constituency.<br /><br />Not content with her crazed fantasy - almost Mosley-ite in its misconception - that 8 out of 10 of her Barking voters might vote BNP <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','')" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/04/16/nbnp16.xml">Margaret Hodge</a> hit a new high with her call for a 'white is right' housing policy. <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','4','')" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6676471.stm">No 10 rushed to her defence of course</a>, while social housing organisations pointed out that supply was the issue in housing not distribution.<br /><br />Meanwhile Cameron's grammar school games indicate that he at least has the sense of humour required to deal with being continually out-manouvered from the right by New Labour. Gordon Brown's conversion to the joys of the 11Plus is eagerly awaited.<br /><br />Oh and Ruth Kelly is keen to abolish local communities right to oppose unacceptable developments; while simultaneously abandoning her right to intervene on their behalf - thus creating a perfect New Labour managerialist system where noone can be held accountable by anyone for anything.<br /><br />She also failed to use the opportunity provided by a live radio interview this morning promoting her rollback of the state, [or handover of its planning responsibilities to those whom it is meant to regulate] to slap down Hodge's far right dalliance. Plus ca change. Let us hope she regrets this.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-34282338394027066642007-05-11T02:01:00.000+01:002007-05-11T02:52:19.801+01:00Suicide is painless, Mr Blair<a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','2','')" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-g0aBYVCgE">It brings on many changes</a><br /><br />A BBC correspondent reflected this evening on Blair's departure and signaled the mass demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq as a turning point. He cited the way in which the decision to go to war alienated Blair's natural supporters, as the axis upon which our Dark Knight's fortune turned.<br /><br />Whisper it softly, but it is now acceptable to say how many people attended the demonstrations against the war without a bizarre and unfeasible reference to the Blairite fantasy that the Poll Tax Demo was larger.<br /><br />Curiously the Blair babes forget how Major accessed the thorny throne. So perhaps do the Brownites, barely distinguishable as they are to all but the blind who of necessity must listen carefully for content and meaning; and for whom it has been a hard, if ultimately rewarding, decade.<br /><br />The BBC report of course propogated a classic Labour believer's error, or at least a daydream believer's, far more important in fact was Blair's loss of his wider coalition.<br /><br />The gloves came off. <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','')" href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/bookshelf/story/0,,1922562,00.html">Home Secrataries were no longer safe ...</a> - nor indeed were the domestic servants of their associates.<br /><br />Now of course this should not distract us from the fact that Paul Dacre is a crazed loony who thinks that Blair damaged his baby, nor that we, the Labour Party's natural supporters, were generally opposed to 'the Iraq intervention' too. Indeed, given our greater knowledge of the Iraqi exile community - and indeed of middle eastern politics in general - this was mostly with good reason too.<br /><br />But what Iraq tells us, apart from the lessons about imperialism and its all-but Fanonite dis-junction with neo-conservativism in the third world - which we knew anyway, is that Blair was never about the left.<br /><br />This above all was why he siezed upon the neo-conservative paranoia of 2002 like a debtor meeting an old friend; why he was a master of missed oportunities; why two years of To[n]ry spending plans were Blair's breathing space; and why Gordon will be hard-pushed to escape the sense of guilt by association as the death toll, and indeed the bills, mount.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-13991553706168230562007-03-22T02:30:00.000+01:002008-12-11T18:48:49.496+01:00Same Old Tories?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6c1-_PEOWG1j6iX5rCguM03aQyZGRQrRfwJOe-cLc5B_zk_lTaanKe8f-AeJ0Vc-EA8Wnb5-8VYU1Ihb7Et-Z2r6maWyThocVfpn0ttndNkEwuGZ6a1d8ZW_0s7PfNty5Eeg/s1600-h/Torytax_lies2.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044558516628618834" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6c1-_PEOWG1j6iX5rCguM03aQyZGRQrRfwJOe-cLc5B_zk_lTaanKe8f-AeJ0Vc-EA8Wnb5-8VYU1Ihb7Et-Z2r6maWyThocVfpn0ttndNkEwuGZ6a1d8ZW_0s7PfNty5Eeg/s400/Torytax_lies2.jpg" border="0" /></a>If it makes sense to take poor pensioners out of the tax and benefit systems by raising taxation thresholds (or 'tax free allowances'), then why does it also make sense to abolish the 10% rate of income tax and to make a larger number of low income families more benefit-dependent (as opposed to taking them out of the system as well)?<br /><br />Likewise, why are poor single people in work having part of their meagre wealth redistributed by this budget to wealthier members of society?<br /><br />And why are tax credits called tax credits when they are not automatically delivered as a credit against tax and instead have to be claimed like a benefit?<br /><br />And why is an allegedly social-democratic government cutting corporation tax? Something, one imagines, to do with Tories - and nothing to do with the left.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-85117452727505707682007-03-09T13:40:00.000+01:002007-03-09T19:49:42.954+01:00Sugaring the pill: Is it really racism which has left Lord Levy, Blair's Little Drummer Boy, out in the cold over cash for honours?Today a strange PR campign started in which friends and associates of Lord Levy (well his local rabbi and Alan Sugar at any rate) started talking up the notion of a racist witch hunt against Blair's tennis partner, chief fundraiser and Middle East envoy extraordinaire .<br /><br />I use the term extraodinary advisedly, if only in the sense that his embassy appears to have achieved precisely nothing during one of the most volatile periods in modern Middle Eastern history - unless you count Jordan recently closing its border to Iraqi refugees.<br /><br />Sugar talked of Levy's 'blind loyalty' and in an intentionally homespun, halting and bonhomie-laced performance stuttered confusedly and contrivedly about how he couldn't really see what Lord Levy got out of this personally - I mean he opined its not like he's making lots of money out of this or anything.*<br /><br />Interviewing Sugar on the issue on this morning's Radio 4 Today Programme, John Humphrey's mentioned the whole Middle East envoy thing - which if nothing else gets one regular stays down at the Dead Sea spas courtesy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan**. Sugar didn't seem convinced that this role was of any significance in what was, on reflection, the most believable part of his interview - after all noone in the Middle East believes that Levy's role as an envoy should be taken seriously either.<br /><br />That said this hasn't stopped him accompanying 'wor Tone' (as he is rarely known in his North East English parliamentary constituency) to the region on an alleged trip of great diplomatic importance as recently as December 2006.<br /><br />**[Note the British public purse never pays for Lord Levy's trips except when he is entertained by our Ambassador's according to ministers Kim Howells and Geoff Hoon in answers to questions by Mark Francois MP (Conservative) recorded in Hansard dated 19 Feb 2007].<br /><br />*For the record here is Sugar's slightly sickening homily to the man who arguably has done more than anyone since Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton to destroy trust in our political system:<br />'what's in it for Levy?' Sir Alan said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.<br />"This is not a man who has lined his own pocket, this is not a man who has done some insider trading dealing or something like that in the stock market and has stolen from shareholders.<br />"This is a man who has blind devotion - I don't know why - to Tony Blair, blind loyalty for Tony Blair and has gone out and blagged people for money for the party.<br />"That to me is his worse [sic] crime."<br /><br />I suppose that in the New Morality of New Labour that is OK then. And I suppose Lord Levy's crimes or misdemeanours may be slight alongside invading a country and destroying it as a functioning state on the basis that you have managed to convince some naive backbenchers and racist tories that you thought the country concerned, authoritarianism notwithstanding, might have a weapon that could threaten Cyprus in 45 minutes despite the fact that the name of the country didn't begin with 'Turk' and end in 'ey'.<br /><br />But then again maybe you have to consider what, or who, after all Lord Levy was fundraising for. If you are Tony Blair's Middle East envoy you can hardly plead ignorance of the effects of his policies can you?<br /><br />I suppose that explains why he might well have felt safer asking donors if they wanted a peerage, rather than asking them if they wanted the blood of 100,000 Iraqi civilians on their hands - ermine, after all, being so much nicer to the touch than gore.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-1169487190830298972007-01-22T18:27:00.000+01:002007-01-22T18:47:26.360+01:00Doom laden...Or scaremongering? <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.<br /><br />The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units. </span><br /><br /><a href="http://http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=1&cid=1167467762531&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull">Read on</a>.Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-1167956637128918642007-01-05T00:34:00.000+01:002007-01-05T01:25:26.873+01:00The Russians Love Their Children Too - but don't try telling the Bee Gee in Number Ten that the Iraqi's do...A seasonal message from Iraq.<br /><br />Riverbend reflects on the price of delay, overstay and the disaster that our friends in Number 10 and the White House visited upon the Iraqi people and by extension on our people too, or at any rate on those who have the misfortune to find themselves fighting there.<br /><br />"Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.<br /><br />Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.<br /><br />Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.<br /><br />Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?"<br /><br />Predictably she also has her thoughts on the Saddam execution and what it tells us about the Maliki government.<br /><br />Though we can read our own message into Maliki's pathetic complaints about the woes of office as his bizarre execution-timing backfires. I suspect, however, that this was driven more by a need to see Saddam executed for Bush's sake, before he announced his notably delayed 'new' Iraq policy. Using the execution as a laughable 'achievement line' in the sand Bush will try to talk about part one of the mission being accomplished and an end-game being in sight as he launches a rise in troop numbers after sacking the two senior military commanders who opposed this lunatic policy.<br /><br />Meanwhile Maliki's <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6226953.stm">talk of leaving office </a>may in fact be an attempt to <a class="" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6228857.stm">get US support, having done as Bush asked and timed the execution to insanely bridge the religious festivals of Christians and Muslims and indeed guarantee a symbolically bloody end to 2006 and start to 2007 - not to mention maximising TV coverage </a><br /><br />I'm sure Bush wasn't hoping this would work as a distraction from the Democrats seizure of the House and Senate, itself a comment on his failed middle east war strategy (if we can honour it with such a term); but if he was, New Speaker Nancy Pelosi ensured in her opening address that the war didn't slip off the agenda.<br /><br />Still I'm sure there's someone somewhere (at <a href="http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net//">Harry's Place</a> for example) who thinks its all for the best...<br /><br />though I'm not sure that <a href="http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2007/01/03/other_people_talking_about_us.php">Gene at Harry's Place, like many Americans in public life (though thankfully not in comedy-writing), altogether understands irony</a>...<br /><br />That aside, its a little late for Harry's bootboys to try shyly laughing at themselves now - endearing it ain't.ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-1166307372778014362006-12-16T23:04:00.000+01:002006-12-16T23:19:25.926+01:00Christmas messageThe BBC may have the Queen and C4 a comedy turn but <strong>Too Early To Tell </strong> can exclusively (well, actually its lifted from the comments on a post on Pickled Politics in response to a lengthy slagging match) bring you an early Christmas Message from the geezer whose birthday we're supposed be celebrating.... remember him? <br /><br /><br /><em>Jesus Christ on 12th December, 2006 at 7:19 pm <br /><br />Oi! <br /><br />Give it a rest! <br /><br />Just enjoy yourselves. Even the Muslims. All of you just calm down. I bring peace and goodwill to all men and women.<br /><br />Chill out.<br /><br />Drink some wine. <br /><br />Enjoy my birthday.<br /><br />Shake hands with a Sikh. <br /><br />Hug a Hindu.<br /><br />Kiss your family members.<br /><br />Say 'hosannah!' to a Muslim if you see them. <br /><br />Pinch the bottom of a woman in a burqa, you know they probably just want a bit of saucy attention. <br /><br />But please, stop fighting, for Nebuchadnezzar's sake!<br /><br />Oy Vez, if it's not one thing it's another. What am I, chopped liver?<br /><br />And if anyone has Mel Gibson's contact details, could you pass my e-mail onto him please? I have a bone to pick with him about something.<br /><br />nazareth_gangster@yahoo.co.uk<br /><br />Thanks. And, uhhh, peace and love to you all.<br /><br />~JC~ </em>Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-1166170834610668442006-12-15T09:16:00.000+01:002006-12-15T14:35:39.366+01:00Free from the Welsh jackboot?So Flanders is <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/15/wbelg15.xml">not</a> declaring independence after all. Watch the spoof news report that threw French Belgium into panic <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6178671.stm">here</a>. <br /><br />Shame, as a region boasting Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent is unfairly tarred with the boring brush. More to the point I was wondering - when Scotland becomes independent, will England be able to win independence from Wales and Northern Ireland? And if the Scots woke up to what side their bread was really buttered on, as the Wallonians recognise theirs, wouldn't they be the ones to panic if the BBC screened a spoof on a snap move for English independence...?Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-1165801174756490892006-12-11T01:43:00.000+01:002006-12-11T02:46:14.756+01:00Day Becomes NightBush and Blair may agree that, as they subtly put it, 'we are not winning' in Iraq, but unsurprisingly Iraqi President Jalal Talabani disagrees with their developing strategies.<br /><br />In Bush' case this seems to be to let his successor organise a pullout while he talks big and serious, and, as even the odd correspondent, on Fox News' site is now allowed to suggest, sticks his head in the sand, see Susan Estrich: <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,235767,00.html&e=15171&sa=X&oi=news&ct=result&cd=3&usg=__V2LDzXVdfL_mGqU7yQUia-ISRzU=">President Bush: State of Denial About Iraq</a>.<br /><br />Blair meanwhile is talking about regional stability again - and talking up our friends in the hijab and our friends in the Baath (Iran and Syria).<br /><br />Still Jack Straw always argued that a bird in hijab was worth two in the baath but hey that's another country, I mean story...<br /><br />More pertinently old cronies like Geoff Hoon appear on Radio 4 to remind us that the Brits were never in favour of disbanding Saddam's army - that was those crazy yanks with their failing Iraq policies which we have been so successful in mediating through our participation in them.<br /><br />Remember how we were showing them the way in Basra - before the shit hit the fan and we got confined to barracks and handed the streets over to the militias. Jesser Greenstock has been making similar noises to Geoff's recently on this front, explaining how well it was all going before the Americans f**ked it up. As Tony's red-handed loyalists try to persuade us all that they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong rednecks - and that really this unfortunate (if bloody) mix-up should not, God forbid, constitute the legacy of their leader's poppy-red reign.<br /><br />Oddly none of that early positive stuff ever matched what soldiers returning from Iraq would tell you even in the early days; when they wondered whom they should tell the real story to, the press or the politicians. 'Stay quiet' advised wise heads of military families, unwisely, though perhaps they knew that only individual careers would be at stake, since policy was, so as to speak, so embedded, at that point.<br /><br />- Well so much for defeating fascism Geoffaroony, there was I thinking we were at least principled in our dementedly ignorant approach to the whole post-conflict[sic] situation. Never mind the pre-conflict choreography of lies and hysteria - never frankly a great basis for a principled liberation - heck sometimes even the liberated get the wrong end of the stick!<br /><br />Then again it was Tony your mate who offered Saddam a last minute reprieve, so what the hell - after all, that kind of thing can really muddy the water<br /><br />Meanwhile Mr <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=http://www.forbes.com/home/feeds/ap/2006/12/10/ap3242870.html&e=15171&sa=X&oi=news&ct=result&cd=1&usg=__ygWxQQG8ZeIpujIBd1SIbTED-zU=">Talabani rages at the coming of the night</a><br /><br />Saddam prepares for his, as Riverbend discussed, appropriately enough one might say, on Guy Fawkes Night: <a href="http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html">http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html</a><br /><br />And over at <a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','4','')" href="http://www.iraqbodycount.org/">Iraq Body Count</a> the figures keep climbing. Though as reporting deaths becomes ever more disorganised with increasing social breakdown, their methodology, while applaudable, looks to be reaching the limits of its usefulness.<br /><br />And perhaps they should start adding Lebanese casualties too, not exactly, after all, the law of unintended consequences, when one talks of '<a class="l" onmousedown="return clk(this.href,'','','res','1','')" href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20031101fareviewessay82614/joshua-micah-marshall/remaking-the-world-bush-and-the-neoconservatives.html">re-making the middle east'...</a>ChrisBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16698825582028906689noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12933265.post-1165591134354815012006-12-08T16:07:00.000+01:002006-12-08T16:22:15.786+01:00Night becomes dayI actually agree with every word Tony Blair says. In particular I am pleased that the government appears to be <span style="font-weight:bold;">finally</span> making the link between Islamic facism and the home-grown kind. <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Those whites who support the BNP's [British National party] policy of separate races and those Muslims who shun integration into British society both contradict the fundamental values that define Britain today: tolerance, solidarity across the racial and religious divide, equality for all and between all.<br /></span>Questristhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04123542854501150403noreply@blogger.com0