Local Elections

[corneilius]

Blair et al

Blair will not step down, the agenda he is pursuing in alliance with Corporate Power and the bogus 'war on terror' is deeply embedded into his 'vision', and into the current structures of power .... furthermore the only protection he has from impeachment is staying in control long enough to craft laws to get himself and the others off the hook ....

As for Cameron, he's scarily like the Blair 'presented' to the world prior to 1997 - young, articulate, a charsimatic speaker witha winning smile. I saw him speak at the Power Inquiry Conference .... *shivers* at how people warmed to him.

I saw Menzies Campbell speak too, and Helena Kennedy, Ferdinand Mount, Ed Milliband, Peter Thatchell, Ed Boles and Saira Khan.

I managed to give Menzies Campbell a piece of my mind, (not just to him, but to all politicians) full flowing, during his Q&A session. I quoted Einstein "We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them" and then forcebly expressed the reality the old paradigm of the rulers telling us what to do is what is causing so much of the problems and that WE, the people, are the power, we fund them and they should listen to us. He did not like it.

The assembled conference did not know what to make of my 'attack', and the audience response was muted - though later on a number of people approached me and offered encouraging words.... many people there that I spoke to are much, much angrier than 'convention' and 'deference' allow. That is good news.


I will report back to you all, in detail, on monday, as I am busy gigging.

laters.

 

[gek-opel]

Cornelius: The problem is that to achieve such a renaissance would surely require a vastly more ideologically inspired political class than are now in occupation of our seats of power... At present the very lack of any actual idea, or quest, underpinning the political activities of our politicians is utterly shocking and appalling. Its like watching a series of middle managers argue over tiny details, utterly irrelevant and dreadful in its complete banality. How do you propose to bridge the gap between passionate ideas about the very nature of political involvement and people who appear to think the future of politics is in arguing with "conviction" about tiny marginal differences...? I agree that the Power report (which I have seen quoted elsewhere) is a good start, excellent as evidence that people are not merely lazy, but actively choosing not to vote... what are the next steps?

 

[Padraig]

2stepfan: Can't believe how Jack Straw got stabbed in the back after covering for him throughout Iraq.

Matt b: his less than hawk like stance over iran has been touched on

David Clarke: For the sake of clarity, let me be clear that I don’t think George Bush called up Tony Blair and instructed him to sack Cook or Straw. He didn’t have to. Blair has been clear enough in his view that closeness to Washington is his top foreign policy priority. It follows that any Foreign Secretary who gets on the wrong side of the White House is asking for trouble. I think I provided pretty clear evidence both that Bush’s people were uncomfortable with the idea of working with Cook and that this troubled Downing Street. Certainly, none of the other reasons offered for Cook’s removal make a lot of sense. His difficulties in the job occurred early in the first term when Blair was happy to keep him in post. The same can be said of Straw. We know that the White House was irritated by his positioning on Iran and none of the other reasons for his removal are particularly convincing – Straw’s closeness to Brown and his mischief making on the European Constitution were both well known when Blair reappointed him last summer. In terms of Blair’s priorities, there is nothing illogical about his decision in the case of either Cook or Straw. What I object to is his decision to subordinate Britain’s interests to America’s.

A decision that was made long, long before the arrival of Blair ... [When has the British Establishment ever not subordinated its "interests" to those of the US in, say, the last half-century?] ...

The neocons strike again

The treatment of Jack Straw throws new and alarming light on the dismissal of Robin Cook

David Clark
Monday May 8, 2006
The Guardian

It wouldn't be the first time that the Bush administration has played an important role in persuading Tony Blair to sack his foreign secretary. It was little discussed at the time, but Robin Cook's demotion in 2001 also followed hostile representations from Washington and private expressions of doubt in Downing Street about his ability to work with a Republican administration. Again, there may have been other factors, but of those suggested at the time, none seems convincing. Last week's reshuffle helps to put the episode in a new, revealing context.

The first signs of what lay ahead came in the run-up to the 2000 presidential elections, when telegrams from the British embassy in Washington started to report an attitude of suspicion towards the Blair government on the part of those likely to fill senior positions in an incoming Bush administration. People such as Dick Cheney and Richard Perle were expressing scepticism about Labour's reliability, citing the presence at senior level of ministers who had supported nuclear disarmament and criticised US foreign policy in the cold war.

There was little reason to suppose these telegrams had made any impact until a relatively small incident at Labour's annual conference. Like all cabinet ministers, Cook was commissioned to write a "pre-manifesto" paper, setting out Labour's provisional second-term agenda and illustrating how the government intended to build on its achievements. One proposal was to appoint a special envoy to campaign for global abolition of the death penalty. Switching Britain's position to support abolitionism was one of Cook's early foreign-policy decisions, and he thought that a special envoy would be an uncontroversial, but useful, way of promoting the government's policy.

Blair had other ideas. On the day the proposal become public, Jonathan Powell and other Downing Street officials warned Cook that it was unacceptable and must never be mentioned again. The reason? The only one given was that a special envoy would inevitably indulge in "finger wagging" at America, one of the biggest users of capital punishment, and therefore strain diplomatic relations with Washington. Under no circumstances would the prime minister countenance this, especially under a Republican administration. The Foreign Office could continue to support abolition of the death penalty, but not in any particularly active sense.

Cook was aware of his vulnerability, especially after the Florida chads ended up hanging in the wrong direction. He sought to replicate the strong relationship he had enjoyed with Madeleine Albright by cultivating her successor, Colin Powell. Indeed, the two men established a relationship of mutual respect even before Bush was sworn in. But in a foretaste of Powell's own marginalisation, this cut little ice. As Cook revealed in his diaries, the neoconservatives never dropped their hostility to him and eventually got their wish.

The treatment of Straw seems uncannily reminiscent, but the issue of Iran is of a different order of seriousness to anything Cook was grappling with five years ago. There is a pressing need for Blair to tell Bush what Attlee had the guts to tell Truman in the Korean war: that a decision to breach the nuclear threshold would encourage proliferation and make America an outcast from the community of civilised nations. He may think it clever strategy to put pressure on Tehran by keeping all options open, but the Iranians are not the only ones who need deterring.

Once again, Blair seems willing to put the wishes of the US government before those of the British people. That should be reason enough for wanting him out of office as soon as possible.

Note: · David Clark was special adviser to Robin Cook from 1997 to 2001.


Yes, and it's here again worth re-quoting [ keeping in mind gek-opel's equally pertinent, open-ended "What are the next steps?" amid - disavowed - hostility to all change] Corneilius' strictly relevant Einstein quote above: "We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them" ...

ON YER BIKE!