Tony Blair, Gordon Brown And The New Labour Project

March 22, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · Comment 

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 Britain: A Saudi Satellite Slave State

February 16, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · 2 Comments 

Strange that politicians love to talk tough when the going is good, but become incapable, gibbering idiots as soon as there is any sign of trouble.

Is it because they are spineless cowards by their nature or are they just so slippery that they cannot stick to anything to prevent them from slithering from the moral high ground to the gutter to the sewer?

If their brave talk is to be believed, we shall soon have every real and imagined criminal rotting their lives away in Titan Prisons and every real or, more probably, very unreal and imagined terrorist on a CIA extraordinary rendition flight to Guantanamo Bay, as New Britain and wheezy old America rid the world of anyone who does not share their grotesquely intertwined views and The War on Terror is won to universal cheers of “Hurrah!” and only small and local explosions, causing minor collateral damage to non-believers.

Unless, of course, somebody with a lot of money tells the government of New Britain to jump, in which case, our brave leaders will shout in unison: “Yes, your Lord Highness-ship, and how high may we entertain Your Most Excellent Majesty by jumping today, Your Wonderful-ship?”

When Saudi Arabia decided it did not like the idea of any tin-pot New British government looking too closely into bribery and corruption surrounding a massive arms deal, there was no attempt whatsoever to employ brinkmanship, but immediate, utter, humiliating and grovelling capitulation.

Just like Gordon Brown and Darling of the Treasury abasing themselves before the barked orders of the rich in the non-dom tax evasion scandal, Tony Blair ran with brown trousers and bicycle-clips to anyone in authority, telling them they had to be nice to his masters: the rich and the truly powerful.

The mother of Parliaments had become a common prostitute to service the lusts of the rich.

The Guardian describes how low the former nation of New Britain had sunk as it declared itself a banana republic to be bought and sold like a harlot:

The British government was powerless to resist the Saudi threats that forced it to close down the BAE corruption investigation, its lawyers insisted in the high court yesterday.

[...]

Philip Sales, QC for the crown, said the government could not “magic away” the threats from the Saudi ruling clan.

But the judge said: “Every time a hostage is taken or a ransom demanded, the answer by the government is: ‘We do not yield to threats’.”

The high court has heard unchallenged allegations that it was Prince Bandar, the alleged beneficiary of £1bn in secret payments from the arms giant BAE, who threatened to cut off intelligence on terrorists if the investigation into him and his family was not stopped.

[...]

Moses said: “What you are saying is that the law is powerless to protect our own sovereignty - the law cannot be deployed as a weapon to protect the sovereignty of this country.”

The judge said: “Your answer is, yes, it is powerless. No lawyer or court can protect one of the essential features of sovereignty, which is control over one’s own domestic criminal law system.”

Asked if that meant nothing could be done to resist this kind of threat “from a powerful foreign state”, Sales replied: “Correct - we cannot compel Saudi Arabia to adopt a different stance.”

So, if you are a criminal or a terrorist or the dictator of a foreign power and you want to test the mettle, the iron resolve of a New British prime minster, just shout “Boo!” and watch them collapse into a heap of uncontrollable tears and slimy entanglements of snot, like a toddler who has had their dummy taken away.

Oh, Brave New Britain!

Blair To Brown: Spin To Spinelessness

February 15, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · Comment 

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.

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