Tony Blair, Gordon Brown And The New Labour Project
If you want to make your opinions known about what the New Labour Project has all been about, as well as your judgments of the key characters involved, past and present, you can start helping to write the book - and perhaps throw it - over here at wuhudo!
Don’t bite your tongue, don’t mince your words - shout, howl scream and rage, or even indulge in reasoned and structured argument.
Indulge yourself in a spot of people power and make your voice heard.
New Labour: Selling Britain Into Corporate Slavery
So, Gordon Brown has been accused of selling the children of Britain into slavery by reducing their education to nothing more than training them to have no ambition or abilities beyond abasing themselves before exploitative companies.
The only lessons children will learn in Brave New Britain are how to oil the corporate money-machines and how to become the cloned and expendable labour force of global business.
When business says jump to Gordon Brown and his jittery lackeys, the only answer they can come up with is: “How high, your Sirships?” When Darling of the Treasury was stupid enough to think that he had the power to introduce legislation to tax business, he was promptly thrown back into his toy-box by Digby Jones and the money-men.
The government of UK Plc is owned, lock, stock and barrel by business. When MPs and ministers are not begging for backhanders from business for performing dodgy backroom deals, they are simply ordered around like minor servants by the chairmen of multinationals.
Of course, this all started for New Labour under the Emperor of Servility, Tony Blair.
At least under Mrs Thatcher’s religion for the non-thinking, Greed Is Go(o)d, there had been some chance that the money which sloshes around the arms trade might find its way into the pockets of those near and dear, if not otherwise unemployable loved ones:
“What Bandar [Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar] could not secure, in the face of the Israeli lobby in Washington, was a massive contract that would transform the entire military profile of the Kingdom [Saudi Arabia]. Reagan encouraged him to go to the British, and Mrs Thatcher was able to pull off one of the largest arms deals of all time, although it was shrouded in secrecy. Even America’s leaky top table would not disclose the true value of what became known as the Al Yamama defence deal. Included in it were seventy-two Tornado fighter aircraft, endless airbase infrastructure, and much more; the eventual value was somewhere between $30 and $50 billion. It was described to me subsequently by a top Foreign Office mandarin as the most corrupt British contract in modern history.
“A few months earlier, in July 1985, unknown to us, Bandar had jetted off to Austria, interrupting a rare Thatcher holiday in Salzburg to initial the deal. When it came to secrecy about the contract and the fabulous backhanders that flowed from it, the Saudis met their match in Britain. No one was ever prosecuted, but numerous well-placed people and their relatives profited from assorted back-pocketry. All we could be sure of in Washington at the time was that there was an odour, some of it no doubt fuelled by envy, but most of it coming from the chat amongst politicians and officials about who had benefited from the usual Saudi practices. Endless pro-Israeli Congressmen would try to point us this way or that, but we were never able to identify the actual value of the deal, or of the associated bribes, or the proximity of the recipients to key British politicians in power at the time”.
Shooting History: A Personal Journey
Jon Snow
Still, Tony Blair taught the iron discipline of rapid reaction: when somebody with money tells you what to do, you do it without question and fast as lightning.
Which is why no levels of grovelling subservience with regard to quashing the SFO investigation into the Al Yamama Saudi arms deal with BAE Systems would raise one twitchy eyebrow of surprise in anyone.
The Guardian has this on the current judicial review:
The British government appears to have “rolled over” in response to Saudi pressure to drop an investigation into alleged bribery in arms deals, a senior judge said today.
Two high court judges are reviewing the decision of Robert Wardle, the director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), to drop the investigation into allegations of bribery and corruption in contracts between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia.
Dinah Rose QC, for the pressure groups Corner House Research and the Campaign Against Arms Trade, today told the court Tony Blair applied “irresistible pressure” on the SFO and the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to end the investigation while he was prime minister.
“There were repeated efforts by the UK ambassador to Saudi Arabia and personal overtures from Tony Blair. Irresistible pressure forced them to drop the prosecution,” Rose said.
The prime minister “stepped over the boundary between what is a permissible exercise and impermissible attempts to influence or dictate a decision on the investigation by expressing his view,” she said. “This is the clearest case of intervention that goes too far.”
According to The Daily Mail, Tony Blair is even more complicit in promoting and fostering terrorism than had already been thought:
“Although some companies have sought to excuse bribery on the basis that jobs would be lost if bribes were not paid, the flip side of the coin is the extent to which companies lose business either because they are unwilling to pay bribes or because they are out-bribed by competitors,” he said.
Corruption also had profound implications for national security, as acknowledged by the leaders of all G8 countries, including Mr Blair when he was Prime Minister. They recognised that “corrupt practices contribute to the spread of organised crime and terrorism, undermine public trust in government and destabilise economies”.
The Foreign Office recognised that weak or failing states were frequently safe havens for terrorists.
Corruption among ruling elites in the Middle East had been cited as a factor motivating the leadership of terrorist organisations such as al Qaida, one of whose stated aims was the elimination of corrupt regimes.
Mr Hildyard said Saudi Arabia had assured the United Nations that it would comply with its duty of co-operation in anti-terrorist matters. Its willingness to co-operate with the UK was so strong that it had signed a “memorandum of understanding” to facilitate such contact.
Yet, said Ms Rose, the Saudi government had issued threats aimed at stopping the BAE inquiry and the Director of the SFO had unlawfully submitted to those threats.
So, what does this say about New Britain?
That it is a failed banana republic which will comply willingly with the wishes or orders of any dictatorship or chairman of business, as long as somebody is making squillions of money out of the deal.
It also says that New Britain is no longer a democracy, but merely a political harlot; a nation in the form of a low prostitute which will sell its people and principles to, not even necessarily the highest bidder, but anyone who flashes the cash, but possibly with no intention of paying the bills.
Gordon Brown’s New Labour Thatcher’s Britain
We all remember that one of the first things Gordon Brown did on becoming prime minister was to invite Mrs Thatcher round for a cup of tea and a chinwag.
The only thing which was surprising about this for most people was learning that Mrs Thatcher was still alive. Clearly, there was no philosophical clash between the extreme right wing of the Tory movement and the extreme right wing of the New Labour project. The two were and are the same thing.
In Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain, Nick Davies explores the lives of ordinary people under what became known as Thatcher’s Britain. It shows how a government which only has an interest in the sharp-elbowed “elite” and contempt for ordinary people allows millions of citizens to sink into poverty, while squandering the money it extorts from the poor in burdensome taxes on those who already have too much. Cosseting the rich at the expense of the poor.
No, no! This is about Thatcher’s Britain, not the New Britain of New Labour!
To quote from Nick Davies:
In a 1971 pamphlet entitled Down with the Poor, the right-wing Conservative MP Dr Rhodes Boyson attacked the very idea that the government should care for its vulnerable citizens:
The moral fibre of our people has been weakened. A state which does for its citizens what they can do for themselves is an evil state…In such an irresponsible society no one cares, no one saves, no one bothers - why should they when the state spends all its energies taking money from the energetic, successful and thrifty to give to the idlers, the failures and the feckless?
Hayek [the economist] had been arguing this same point for more than twenty years. In 1960, for example, in the Constitution of Liberty, he had suggested that government welfare spending should be limited to providing no more than ’security against severe physical deprivation’. No more welfare from cradle to grave, no more automatic protection for those in need, no more guarantee of education and health and housing for all.
In April 1979, this idea too found its way across the doorstep of Downing Street, where its implications were clearly understood. In his history of the welfare state, Nicholas Timmins recounts how the new prime minister spoke to her first secretary of state for Social Services, Patrick Jenkin.
‘I think we will have to go back to soup kitchens,’ she told him and paused. Then, noticing his reaction, she continued, ‘Take that silly smile off your face. I mean it’.
Of course, with MPs currently in the spotlight for their own feckless stealing of taxpayers’ money to fund their own reckless lifestyles, where their idler children can be paid public money to do nothing, leading to the failed political careers of the perpetrators of these crimes against society, Rhodes Boyson’s spiteful little analysis somewhat lacks credibility.
Still, that’s just the way things are in the topsy-turvey world of the Palace in Wonderland of Westminster, where things like this happen:
A minister has been accused of risking a “return to the workhouse” after saying the unemployed should have to seek work or lose their council homes.
according to The Press Association on Google.
Ms Flint said: “Council and social housing must continue to support the most vulnerable in society, but it should also be a springboard to opportunity, not just a safety net.”
Apparently, Caroline Flint is the new Housing Minister and will be making a speech to the Fabian Society in which she will say:
“The link between social housing and worklessness is stark. I am concerned about what has been called a collapse in the number of people in council housing in work over the past 25 years.
“Council housing was originally somewhere which brought together people from different social backgrounds and professions but this has declined. We need to think radically and start a national debate about whether we can reverse this trend, and have strong, diverse estates with a mix of people.
“Council and social housing must continue to support the most vulnerable in society, but it should also be a springboard to opportunity, not just a safety net.
“We all agree that social housing is about more than bricks and mortar - more than handing over the keys and leaving tenants to get on with it for the next thirty years. And it isn’t so many years ago that a council house was something to prize.
“I believe that we can recapture that sense of pride, creating a culture within social housing that promotes opportunity and social mobility, inspiring people to take control of their own lives.”
She wants tenants in social housing to sign a contract which will say: ‘If I do not get a job, I agree that you will be allowed to evict me’, so nothing fascist there at all.
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