Blair To Brown: Spin To Spinelessness
The art of spin is, by its nature, underhand, artificial, duplicitous and deceiving.
It was what ordinary people, less skilled in the black arts of politics, would call lying.
During the First Coming of Tony Blair (zealots across the world are awaiting his Second Coming as Emperor of Europe later this year) spin was all the rage. Real news was blotted out by fairytales; concoctions of pipe-dreams and wishful thinking were paraded as reality; newspeak became the political lingua franca.
Under Gordon Brown, of course, all that changed. Creating as much distance as possible from the new pariah Blair became essential. All well and good.
The downside of this, however, is that we can all now see that the new emperor has no clothes.
We thought that Tony Blair’s oleagenous toadying to the rich and famous would be consigned to history and not be the shape of things to come. Looks like we almost got conned again.
As Paul Routledge says in The Mirror:
If you want to change this government’s mind, don’t be poor, don’t be old and don’t work in the public services.
No. Be wealthy, have influential friends in high places and the power to blackmail weak politicians.
Chancellor Alistair Darling spurns the claims of pensioners and people on benefit, and insists that low-paid government employees accept real cuts in living standards.
But he’s caved in to the rich and powerful. He backed down on plans to tax traders who sell their business. Cost to the taxpayer? £200million a year.
And now he’s backtracking on proposals to soak the super-rich who live here but don’t pay taxes, the so-called “non-domiciles”. Cost? Many hundreds of millions.
The Telegraph is no more charitable to Darling of the Treasury:
HM Revenue and Customs has written to tax lawyers withdrawing some of the most contentious aspects of the non-dom plan.
Mr Darling’s retreat follows last month’s climbdown on plans to raise capital gains tax and threatens to make his first Budget next month a public humiliation.
The Chancellor still plans to charge long-standing non-doms a £30,000 annual levy, but other measures are significantly watered down.
These include no longer asking for detailed information about offshore trusts, not taxing works of art brought into the UK for public display and not taxing money brought into the UK to pay the £30,000 levy.
According to Forbes:
‘This clarification is a victory for common sense,’ said John Cridland, CBI deputy director-general.
‘The proposals were clearly cobbled together in a hurry … we need the government to be more careful in future about sending out a message that Britain is no longer interested in attracting talent and ideas to our shores, or that those people already here, who contribute over 23 bln stg to the UK economy each year, are no longer welcome,’ he added.
From the day that Mrs Thatcher told Rupert Murdoch that Tony Blair was “a safe pair of hands” and therefore allowed him to be elected, to the tea-party with Mrs Thatcher when Gordon Brown had only just moved into 10 Downing Street, the signs that New Labour is just the old Nasty Party in disguise have been there for all to see.
Tony Blair tried to disguise it, but Gordon Brown is just blatantly shoving it in people’s faces.
If you are not rich New Labour is not interested.
Keep Eurozone Blair-Free
If you subscribe to the view that Tony Blair’s whole life has been nothing more than a desperate attempt to make people love him, it is, of course, both a monumental and abject failure.
Not in the sense of being a tragic, heroic struggle played out on a stage of vast scale, but just a petty waste of everybody’s time - and, of course, a great many lives lost in an attempt to bolster the mental instabilities of a fundamentally small and inconsequential person, suffering from simple delusions of grandeur.
The sigh of relief when Blair finally left office was only saved from being deafening by the fact that the process took so long that everyone had given up holding their breath.
Off he went to perform a non-job to perpetuate the pretence of being a statesman and then the overriding love of money appeared as if it would finally take over as expected. Everyone thought that the world would be a safer place if he and his cronies simply thrust their snouts in the trough and we could be rid of the spectacle of a grinning imbecile at the helm of anything more significant than a pedallo.
Then he saw the job of Emperor of Europe advertised and obviously, lacking any sense of his own catalogue of incapabilities and probably thinking that his mate God would want him to take the job, he starts making overtures to secure it, despite the fact that nobody else thinks he should be in charge of anything beyond an end of pier whelk stall.
In The Guardian, Malcolm Rifkind said this:
Ultimately, however, the question is whether Blair is the appropriate person to do the job. The answer to that has to be no. At the time of the Iraq war, he divided Europe in a way not seen for 40 years. His foolish decision to side so unequivocally with George W Bush has damaged his own credibility across Europe to such an extent that he would find it difficult to forge a consensus on political issues or to speak on Europe’s behalf.
Blair’s own political record on Europe is hardly covered in glory. He came to office promising to put Britain at the heart of Europe. He left office with Britain no closer to Europe’s heart that when he began.
Which pretty much covers the whole of Blair’s record in office: empty promises, spin, sound, fury and artificial nonsense. Except, of course, in the case of war, where his achievements in getting millions of people killed are beyond doubt, but where the purported aim of bringing about a better regime has been a total failure.
Despite the fact that the Blair legacy for New Britain is nothing but eroded freedoms and a government dominated by a class of avaricous idiot never before seen in politics, there are some chaps who are helping you to have your voice heard with regard to whether Blair should be allowed to play any part in Europe’s forthcoming top job.
Stop Blair! is brought to you by The European Tribune and you can sign a petition if you agree with what they have to say about the grinning tea-boy who got promoted way beyond his level of abilities, which is this:
We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.
The Treaty of Lisbon provides for the new post of President of the European Council, to be elected by the Council for a mandate, renewable once only, of two and a half years. Under the terms of the Treaty: “The President of the European Council shall chair it and drive forward its work” and “shall ensure the preparation and continuity of the work of the European Council”. Further, “The President of the European Council shall, at his level and in that capacity, ensure the external representation of the Union on issues concerning its common foreign and security policy”.
The future President of the European Council will therefore have a key role in determining the policies of the European Union and its relations with the rest of the world. This first Council Presidency will also have a major symbolic weight for both citizens of the European Union and for the image of the Union in the rest of the world. In this perspective, we believe it is essential that the first president embodies the spirit and values of the European project.
For some time now, increasingly insistent news reports have made evident a wish, in some quarters, to see Tony Blair appointed the first President of the European Council. This appointment, were it to take place, would be in total contradiction with the values professed by the European project.
In violation of international law, Tony Blair committed his country to a war in Iraq that a large majority of European citizens opposed. This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims and displaced millions of refugees. It has been a major factor in today’s profound destabilisation of the Middle East, and has weakened world security. In order to lead his country into war, Mr Blair made systematic use of fabricated evidence and the manipulation of information. His role in the Iraq war would weigh heavily on the image of the Union in the world, should he in fact be named its president.
The steps taken by Tony Blair’s government, and his complicity with the Bush administration in the illegal programme of “extraordinary renditions”, have led to an unprecedented decline in civil liberties. This is in contradiction with the terms of the European Convention of Human Rights, which is an integral part of the treaty.
The European Charter of Fundamental Rights formalises the founding values of the European project and is one of the pillars of the new treaty. Tony Blair fought its inclusion in the Treaty of Lisbon, and eventually managed to secure an exemption for the UK.
Rather than move European integration forward, the former British Prime Minister set a series of so-called red lines during the Lisbon negotiations, with the intent of blocking any progress in social issues and tax harmonisation, as well as common defence and foreign policy.
Furthermore, it seems unthinkable that the first President of the European Council should be the former head of a government that kept its country out of two key elements of the construction of Europe: the Schengen area of free movement of people and the Euro zone.
At a time when one of the priorities of the European institutions is to reconnect with its citizens, we believe it is essential that the President of the European Council should be a person with whom a majority of citizens can identify, rather than one rejected by a majority. Therefore, we declare our total opposition to this nomination.
- Treaty of Lisbon, Article 1, point 16, inserting Article 9 B into the Treaty on European Union, points 5 and 6 (2007/C 306/17, 18)
- Blair sets out EU treaty demands, BBC, June 2007
- Table 6 in FT/Harris poll, June 2007
Order! Order! Order More Money For The Pig Trough!
You know the one who sits in the big high chair in the House of Commons? The one who always looks like a derelict wino or bag lady who has just been startled from her slumbers underneath a pile of old discarded blankets and who then starts shouting?
That is not a vagrant, passing the afternoon in a stupor after downing a bellyful of Special Brew, but the Speaker of the House, at the moment in the shape of Michael Martin. The office is sometimes seen as the First Commoner of the Land, which you might think makes him the chap to stand up for the rights and interests of the ordinary citizen within Parliament.
Ha! Ha! Not a bit of it, although with the current interest throughout the land in the degree to which MPs are robbing taxpayers blind, he is making the following token effort:
Mr Martin said: “In the debate [on Mr Derek Conway's suspension for being caught fiddling his taxpayer-funded allowances by paying his sons excessive wages for doing absolutely nothing under the guise of being researchers] several Members expressed deep concerns about Members’ allowances. Similar anxiety about the audit system has been relayed to me privately. We must also take fully into account the public interest in transparency.
“The subject of members’ allowances is something which the House itself must determine but it is clear that the committee must find an effective and acceptable solution as soon as is practicable.”
The problem here is whether you would trust this bunch of poachers to also act as impartial gamekeepers.
Would you trust a bunch of convicted terrorists or paedophiles not to re-offend just on their own say-so? Or would you be right to imagine that they would simply carry on with their sins, but find new ways to conceal them?
Obviously, we can be sure that the person who is going to set the ball rolling in order to make the taxpayer-funded perks of MPs more transparent is neither fiddling the books nor has any fingers in or near the till.
Oh, dear, perhaps not. The TimesOnilne has this:
Mr Martin, from Glasgow, was a sheet metal worker, became a trade union organiser and entered Parliament for Labour in 1979.
The Speaker receives £137,579 in pay, as well as a grace-and-favour appartment inside the Parliamentary Estate which Commons authorities claim has not been separately valued.
Last month The Times disclosed that his wife, Mary, had claimed £4,280.20 for taxis since May 2004, which were “entirely in connection with household expenditure that supports the Speaker’s duties”. According to the Speaker’s spokesman, she needs to take taxis to shop for food for official functions. The wife of the Speaker has never had a formal role before.
Subsequently it emerged that nearly £50,000 of taxpayers’ money had been spent on providing free air travel for Mrs Martin. She had been given permission to claim travel expenses when her husband became Speaker in 2000. Mrs Martin received £24,485 for foreign flights when accompanying her husband on ten official trips over three years from 2004.
Naturally, this is not to say that Michael Martin or any other MP has done anything illegal or in contravention of the high standards which we as citizens and taxpayers should be able to expect from our public servants.
It could be, for example, that he is provided with magnificent and luxurious apartments within the Palace (in Wonderland) of Westminster and still feels the need to claim - what? - shall we say about seventeen thousand squid a year for another place to live. That, of course, would be entirely proper and above board.
Scotland on Sunday has this:
Martin has previously employed his wife Mary as his constituency secretary. He declined to answer questions from former Independent MP Martin Bell in 2004 about how much she was paid and the exact nature of her work. And for the past nine years, he has employed his daughter, also called Mary, to work in his constituency office in Springburn.
Asked why his daughter Mary got the job, Martin’s spokesman said: “She’s trained in office administration, has been active in the constituency and has worked with the family in the constituency. In short, she makes an excellent candidate for the job.”
Martin declined to say how much his daughter was paid. He also declined to say why his housing allowance had steadily risen from £6,106 in 2004-05 to £9,551 in 2005-06 and £17,166 in 2006-07. The Speaker classifies his ‘main home’ as his grace-and-favour apartment in Westminster and the expenditure is on his home in Glasgow.
His spokesman said: “Every claim he makes is scrutinised by a very senior member of the finance department to make sure it is justified. His costs have risen, so his claims have risen and they have been approved in the proper way.”
Presumably, Michael Martin is also allowed to claim cash expenses for items up to £250 without the need for a receipt, like all MPs.
Try this one at home: Go to your boss and say you have taken £250 out of petty cash for expenses. When he asks you what it was for, just say you cannot remember and you have lost the receipt. Try doing this every day until you get the sack, which will probably happen the first time you try it.
As a member of the public who commented on the TimesOnline article said:
These people think they are more royal than the Royals but outside Parliament they’d be on benefits, fiddling them as well.
Harry Kennard, Peasmarsh , England
Quite so. The problem is, though, how else are you going to get people to enter politics if they only earn fifty times what ordinary people have to manage on.
They are, after all, the intellectual and moral cream of society and not just a bunch of hoodwinking pickpockets whose only interest is filching money from hardworking taxpayers.
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