Gordon 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 seen his byline pic, you KNOW what I mean...]

ANY-WAY... call me prescient but not having posted since last October, its like nothing's changed at all...

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.

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.

So, OK something has changed since last October, the wind...
- 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.

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.

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.

Gordon hasn't dithered, he's hardly made a decison since attaining power. A little window dressing but nothing of substance.

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.

And now everyone has noticed. That tends to happen if you keep appearing in public looking like that... Above all the media have noticed.
Thus, a feeding frenzy...

SO, what happens now?

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's the party politics - but what about the REAL politics?

Well, wake up and smell the coffee, children of Thatcher, your hearts are about to be broken again.

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.

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.

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.

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...

YES, the Red Wedge generation believed, things WOULD change come 'Gordon-time'...
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...

Oh f**k OFF!

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.

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.

He needs to start understanding this, FAST.

If only for the sake of Ken Livingstone and the people of London.

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...

Nothing ever changes - it all remains the same...

SO - its 'First Lord of the Treasury, Deliver us from Boris...'
Or you'll find that we might just, somehow, deliver ourselves of you...

...Whatever that uber-loyalist punt at the Guardian has to say about it.

Hungry Looks on the faces of the dogs of war

After 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.

What a Difference a Day Makes
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].

Home for Christmas
Why is it that politicians use that phrase? Redolent as it is of the broken promises and shattered skulls of the Somme.

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.

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.

Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away...
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.

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.

How, one asked, HOW, did we get to HERE from THERE?
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.

Be my dog...
Then the Liberals showed the way with a play within a play.

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.

Once more we are reminded why the Liberals havn't been elected to office since the Second World War.

Gordon and more pertinently 'yon Milliband' must learn from this:
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.

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.

Charity Begins At Home ...and legacies fade first where least substantial

Gordon 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.

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.

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.

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.

For many people, influential well-informed people, this policy had been the final straw.

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.

Manchester's ambition and potential was to be prostituted by locally accented croupiers; the whores might come from eastern europe or Somalia but they 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 Indian reservation to get away with.

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.

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.

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'.

If Gordon's apparent common sense take on gambling legislation - and indeed on expanding the supply of affordable housing - 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.

Cleaning 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.

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.

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.

Yes reality is about the crooked, crooked, timber of humanity. From which no straight thing was ever made.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Who 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.

Not content with her crazed fantasy - almost Mosley-ite in its misconception - that 8 out of 10 of her Barking voters might vote BNP Margaret Hodge hit a new high with her call for a 'white is right' housing policy. No 10 rushed to her defence of course, while social housing organisations pointed out that supply was the issue in housing not distribution.

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.

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.

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.

Suicide is painless, Mr Blair

It brings on many changes

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.

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.

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.

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.

The gloves came off. Home Secrataries were no longer safe ... - nor indeed were the domestic servants of their associates.

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.

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.

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.

Same Old Tories?

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)?

Likewise, why are poor single people in work having part of their meagre wealth redistributed by this budget to wealthier members of society?

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?

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.

Sugaring 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 .

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.

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.*

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.

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.

**[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].

*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:
'what's in it for Levy?' Sir Alan said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"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.
"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.
"That to me is his worse [sic] crime."

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'.

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?

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.

Doom laden...

Or scaremongering?

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.

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.

Read on.

The 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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?"

Predictably she also has her thoughts on the Saddam execution and what it tells us about the Maliki government.

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.

Meanwhile Maliki's talk of leaving office may in fact be an attempt to 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

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.

Still I'm sure there's someone somewhere (at Harry's Place for example) who thinks its all for the best...

though I'm not sure that Gene at Harry's Place, like many Americans in public life (though thankfully not in comedy-writing), altogether understands irony...

That aside, its a little late for Harry's bootboys to try shyly laughing at themselves now - endearing it ain't.

Christmas message

The BBC may have the Queen and C4 a comedy turn but Too Early To Tell 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?


Jesus Christ on 12th December, 2006 at 7:19 pm

Oi!

Give it a rest!

Just enjoy yourselves. Even the Muslims. All of you just calm down. I bring peace and goodwill to all men and women.

Chill out.

Drink some wine.

Enjoy my birthday.

Shake hands with a Sikh.

Hug a Hindu.

Kiss your family members.

Say 'hosannah!' to a Muslim if you see them.

Pinch the bottom of a woman in a burqa, you know they probably just want a bit of saucy attention.

But please, stop fighting, for Nebuchadnezzar's sake!

Oy Vez, if it's not one thing it's another. What am I, chopped liver?

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.

nazareth_gangster@yahoo.co.uk

Thanks. And, uhhh, peace and love to you all.

~JC~

Free from the Welsh jackboot?

So Flanders is not declaring independence after all. Watch the spoof news report that threw French Belgium into panic here.

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...?

Day Becomes Night

Bush 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.

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: President Bush: State of Denial About Iraq.

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).

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...

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.

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.

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.

- 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!

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

Meanwhile Mr Talabani rages at the coming of the night

Saddam prepares for his, as Riverbend discussed, appropriately enough one might say, on Guy Fawkes Night: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html

And over at Iraq Body Count 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.

And perhaps they should start adding Lebanese casualties too, not exactly, after all, the law of unintended consequences, when one talks of 're-making the middle east'...

Night becomes day

I actually agree with every word Tony Blair says. In particular I am pleased that the government appears to be finally making the link between Islamic facism and the home-grown kind.

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.

Thought for the Day - Is John Reid the Anti-War Candidate?

A couple of weeks back John Reid, Labour's weegie hardman par excellence, (by way of contrast for example to Ian McCartney - who is their whining lard-man par excellence) had some kind of cerebral aschemic attack and came over all reasonable on the Today Programme.

This was such a remarkable event that my half-dressed partner rushed out of the bedroom and into the bathroom where I was shaving to tell me. Her unusual speed (normally nothing can interrupt her leisurely progress toward 'readiness' of a morning) was fortuitous. Had she left it a few seconds longer we might have clashed at a high speed on the short flight of stairs between our bedroom and bathroom, as I was just about to launch into a similarly motivated race into the bedroom to relay very much the same expression of surprise; and it has to be said that in such instances my progress is rarely leisurely.

The Reid reasonable-ness was triggered, intriguingly, by an exchange with Jim Naughtie over whether Reid would back extending the time for which 'terrorist suspects' could be held without charge [I could start to mull whether in the interests of journalistic accuracy the term 'terrorist suspect' should in such instances be replaced with the far more accurate and easily understood term 'anyone' or 'you or your family' ..but now is clearly not the time for such argument over mere semantics...]

Naughtie was musing on whether evidence from opinion polls about 'support for jihad' among the UK population should lead us to conclude that millions of our muslim brothers were secretly plotting to destroy our way of life. In a sort of reverse attack word use of historical analogy he reminded the former Glaswegian Stalinist that he would surely remember a time when opinion polls taken in Western Scotland could have demonstarted similar levels of support for our last major bunch of (sort of) homegrown terrorists - the IRA.

Its unclear whether the analogy helped Reid get in touch with reality over the issue of what 'support' constitutes or whether he is simply becoming a cleverer politician since his last abortive re-positioning effort, when he attempted to persuade us that he was a sort of anti-war candidate for Governor of the Pashtun, went tits up in the face of a Taliban resurgence.

Or perhaps he just saw this as a rare opportunity to put some clear blue water between himself and Tony Blair or more intriguingly between himself and Gordon Brown - who had earlier indicated a desire to increase the period to 90 days like his putative pedecessor.

Brown wants to watch himself, as he backs 90 day detention, Trident replacement and every other Blairite sacred poisoned chalice he can wrap his blubbery lips around. Soon he will have nothing left (oh...forget it...) to reposition himself with except the possibility of re-launching Blair's war with his own party; perhaps coupled with a comedy caper in which he argues with his own chosen successor at the Treasury over how to pay for all this craziness.

Reid on the other hand came over all David Davis-like and said he'd not seen any convincing evidence for this yet - it could be nothing or it could just be his cunning plan to stuff one up Peter Hain, if he can't stuff it up Gordon himself.

Hain, like the rest of the Cabinet has been making very Blairite noises lately - not least about uniting behind the decision to take the most expensive option in Trident replacement. There is a sense in which all the bigger beasts are trying to play the same game so that they all have an equal claim to at least their current share of the cake when the new chief dinner lady turns up. This is also linked to an awareness of the almost suicidal level of damage done to government and party-alike by events around the succession earlier in the year.

So there is an attempt to even the keel, to stop as Hain (and others) earlier put it 'urging more open debate in the Labour Party on replacing Trident, and start talking about the responsibilities of global power '"we're a serious Government and a serious Cabinet ...in charge of one of the world's global powers" said Hain yesterday to the BBC's AM Programme, in a moment of self-delusion chillingly reminiscent of Dr David Owen.

But 'Dr' John Reid, as he was briefly known during his time at Health, is taking a more interesting path. A subtle piece of personal re-positioning may be in the offing as the former bully boy seeks the role of eminence gris, Willie Whitelaw style, in an effort, if not to decide the future of our nation, at least to have a long-term career in the cigar clubs of social democracy.

Reid is playing a long game and I suspect his revenge on those who have questioned his ability will be bitter indeed.

Or that, failing this, there will simply be a lot of bitterness, as Labour positions itself for an internal cold war over who backs which weapons systems and abuses of civil liberties while Reid looks wearily on and wonders how all these kids who havn't even had to make such decisions can possibly have the right to express an opinion.

Reid is distancing himself from his own opportunist past and those leaping into his discarded shoes may come to find themselves barred from the swimming club because of the verukas they catch in the process.

Reid has realised that these will be yesterday's positions and that tomorrow's victors will be those who appear to have moved on.

Maybe that is what is moving the normally admirable Max Stafford Clark to call for the ditching of 'dabblers' like Reid and other Cabinet 'amateurs' who he says endanger judicial principals and civil liberties in the pursuit of policies inspired by opinion polls then leave after only a few havoc-wreaking months in the job to find another department of government to confuse.

I can only hope his speech for the Longford Lecture has been under-reported however, since his notion of professional law-makers being a solution for political opportunism smacks even less of human rights than the former positions of Uncle Joe Reid.

Meanwhile back in politics...
If (sorry 'when', fate notwithstanding) Brown wins the Labour leadership, he would do well to exile Reid North of Hadrian's Wall - to Nato maybe - or more intriguingly perhaps back to his 2001 job in Northern Ireland - where, who knows, he might actually be able to make a real contribution to something substantive.

However it is more likely that the eternally disappointed members of the benighted British party of democratic socialism will find themselves feasting on the wormwood of John Reid as a defender of the left's traditions (if not its policies, a la Prescott) come 2009.

And of course those various final scenarios are not mutually exclusive.

Generation Game, Countdown, or the Price is Right?

A couple of interesting passages from Michael Scheuer's latest bulletin for your soaraway Global Terrorism Analysis.

On the MI5's Dame Eliza's latest assessment on the threat to the UK:

A final note that will please al-Qaeda was the Dame Eliza-Prime Minister Blair refrain that it will take the UK a generation to defeat the threat. For al-Qaeda, this is a clear signal that British leaders still believe they face a limited threat that can be defeated over time, a conclusion which Islamist leaders—who know their forces are growing geometrically—will welcome as a self-defeating delusion.

On a potential "phased" withdrawl of US forces from Iraq:

Quite simply, that decision would allow bin Laden to score, in the perception of most Muslims, an unprecedented hat-trick of successes; U.S. withdrawal would: (1) Allow the redeployment of many Iraq-based foreign fighters to the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, the Levant and the Horn of Africa; (2) Dramatically increase bin Laden's stature as a leader—and almost a prophet—by disproving the Islamist leaders who damned him for bringing down the "unbeatable military wrath" of the United States on Muslims via the 9/11 attack and validating his contention that Washington lacked the will and ruthlessness to defeat Islamist forces; and, by far the most important, (3) Exponentially surpass the motivational power of the Afghan-Islamist defeat of the Soviet Union via the Arab-Islamist defeat of the United States, the world's second and last superpower.

C2 or not C2...

I've never been a fan of Carling, obviously, but after a night of sticking to the 3.7 per cent Youngs for the morrow was a "school day" I like the look of their new lager.

According to the breweries it's perfect for a swift one-at-lunch pint, a cheeky on-the-way-home pint, a rewarding after-football-training pint or a responsible big-meeting-tomorrow pint.

Or indeed a Know Your Limits pint?

8 November 2006 to...

Maybe it will be picked up more widely, but in the event that it is not, I think this is the most omninous development to come out of yesterday's Beit Hanoun attack.

"America is offering political, financial and logistic cover for the Zionist occupation crimes, and it is responsible for the Beit Hanoun massacre. Therefore, the people and the nation all over the globe are required to teach the American enemy tough lessons," Hamas said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.

While critical of the U.S., Hamas has always focused its violent campaign of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli targets. Wednesday's threat signaled that the group is identifying with global Islamic extremist movements, such as al-Qaida.

I wonder if future historians will consider this thus-far little-remarked upon announcement marks the moment when the War on Terror became the Third World War? Hamas, after all, is the government of the Palestinian state entity and as the article points out this effectively globalises the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict. I don't think their claims that the military and political wings are separate - pace IRA/ Sinn Fein - will cut much ice with the Americans.

Pickled

I know, I know... but it's not easy to keep opining. Well, actually it is, but not necessarily easy to find the time to actually blog...

Also, winter's coming on and you know sometimes I'm just too irritated to go on about another idiot politician, of whatever ideological hue.

Meanwhile, note an addition to the side bar - Pickled Politics - which I've recently been reading and enjoy.

So, enjoy!

Stoopid

Alan Johnson's "25 per cent" sop on religious schools does little to ameliorate a problem entirely of the goverment's own making. What non-Muslim parent of a girl would send them to a school where the second-class status of their daughter was institutionalised?

But perhaps I am being unreasonable...

Yesterday Leicester City Council said it did not believe the scarves would deter non-Muslim parents from sending children to the school.

Education spokesman Hussein Suleman, who is also a member of the school's temporary governing body, said: 'We have to find a balance.

'Governors have to take into account the fact that 10 per cent can be of a non-Muslim background and use discretion where appropriate.

'At the same time, parents have a right to send or not send their children to this school. I hope discretion will be used if there are any disagreements.'

The school, which is not expected to make boys cover their heads, was also backed by Suleman Nagdi, of the Federation of Muslim Organisations.

He said: 'All Islamic schools have certain criteria for school uniform. I can't see anything different about the criteria they are setting in this instance.'

How about a benchmark for the idiocy of any Labour policy being the extent to which it is supported by the Conservative Party?