Let me remind you just how far your political “guts” have carried you. You are temporarily protected by the fact that the United Kingdom, unlike other states, has not yet incorporated the Nuremberg principles into national law. If a future government does so, you and all those who remained in the cabinet on 20 March 2003 will be at risk of prosecution for what the Nuremberg tribunal called “the supreme international crime”. This is defined as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”. Robin Cook, a man of genuine political courage, put his conscience ahead of his career and resigned. What did you do?
As the kids say, read the whole thing.
UPDATE:
Here’s Blears’ considered response to Monbiot from today’s Grauniad letters page :
Re the “open letter” by George Monbiot (10 February): George, I would like to invite you to Salford, and allow some of my young party members and myself to show you round our city. Then you will see why I’ve been voting Labour in the Commons these past 12 years.
Hazel Blears MP
Secretary of state for communities
Blears, that’s just lame.
EDIT: Shorter Hazel Blears: “Monbiot, you don’t know man, you weren’t there!”
When unswerving loyalty to the Labour party line, blank-faced botoxed arrogance and breathtaking cynicism is desperately required, who can an embattled PM call? Hazel Blears, obviously:
We need people standing for office, not carping on the sidelines These playground taunts and placard-waving add to the cynicism surrounding politics, says Hazel Blears
Perhaps public opinion is finally getting through to No 10 and the penny is beginning to drop that people aren’t exactly what you’d call happy.
“…he turns his fire on consultations (which he claims are rigged) and citizens’ juries (which he says “are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken”). Rigged consultations and faked citizens’ juries? Surely this would be the stuff of front-page exclusives, if only there was any evidence to back it up. But in the absence of evidence, we must assume this is simply prejudice dressed up as assertion. Imagine if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base.”
Oh my. “Imagine if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base.” Where to start with that one? Iraq? The dodgy dossier? ID cards?
I’ve always felt a certain sick fascination for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and it’s not just our physical resemblance; those who know me will also know that I could so easily have become her, which is a horrible thing to have to face about oneself.
There’re some women I’ve met in life that I automatically felt like taking a running punch at; usually they’ve been minor civil servants -‘computer says no’ – or bossy jobsworth admin droids; not that I’ve ever actually punched anyone, but the urge is there, as it is every time I see or hear Blears.
(Turns out Blears was yet another a local authority solicitor before being in government. There’s a surprise.)
Blears is robotically loyal, rigidly self-righteous, endlessly on message, teeth-clenchingly perky and, most of all, smug; an overpromoted local functionary, but with posher handbags, a damned sight more power and even more self regard than your usual local authority Queen Bee. But a democrat she is not, for all her carefully demotic YouTube videos and vlogs.
‘Labour is about winning elections’ says Blears. Here she is grinning away at the Fabian Society while laying out her plan for achieving New Labour’s thousand year reich, which is to throw money at southern marginal seats like South Thanet and Hove and allow a few thousand voters in unrepresentative areas decide who runs the government, entirely in order that she and her party stay in power, as she says in the video, ‘for years to come’:
Sounds pretty damned cynical to me, not to mention profoundly undemocratic .
First seeing that video and then reading Blears’ article again the depth of denial and mendacity and the sheer political corruption expressed by Blears in her attack on Monbiot leaves me almost speechless.
The paper’s commenters are well up to the task of responding though so I’ll let one do it for me:
chekhov
simonw
06 Feb 09, 1:12am (about 9 hours ago)
The reality is that people don’t get elected unless they sell their soul to a political party. Toadying to the loathsome and swallowing your principles only comes easily to the chosen few. For every Morris or Short or Cook, there’s a Mandelson, and we all now know which ones survive. Guts are not principles.
True, the ends may justify the means, but look what ends they are. The Iraq War, the 10p tax band, the routine fingerprinting of children, RIPA, collusion with torturers, the BAe scandal, ‘loans’ for peerages, the greedy, irresponsible madness of PFI (viz. Metronet), the Civil Contingencies Act, and the Met’s shoot-to-kill policy. And they’re just the highlights. Twelve years in power and just a few more foxes to show for it.
I can, oddly enough, imagine what happens if cabinet ministers voiced their opinions without any evidence base. I was in Hyde Park to demonstrate against the consequences of the dodgy dossier, along with a million or so others. We peacefully reminded you that war was wrong. You ignored us. And responded with the smokescreen of collective cabinet responsibility and the tenuous approval of your legal advisers. All very convenient. Monbiot, on the other hand, has no such smokescreen, and still people seem to want to read what he writes.
You want practical ideas? How about a reformed House of Lords? How about funding for after-school activities? How about 3 million new houses? How about progressive taxation (and, while we’re at it, not advising town halls to rack up council tax by three times the rate of inflation while pensioners’ incomes are falling)? How about a strategic transport plan that doesn’t change when an airline chief sneezes? How about an ethical foreign policy that doesn’t involve selling weapons to bad people? How about an education system that doesn’t force children to choose their careers when they’re 12? How about a joined-up government that doesn’t both open pubs all day and try to abolish happy hour? How about running the country instead of outsourcing it to tax-haven multinationals?
I may be sceptical, but I’m not a cynic. Or not enough of a cynic to suggest the even more practical idea of buying a sack of cement and making yourself an overcoat. I’m no trade unionist, either. I don’t rely for power on a political party that relies on me for money. But I vote, I engage and I’m angry. Like millions of other voters. Who are continually told they are wrong and irrelevant and cynical.
Shame on you, Blears.!
Quite, and let’s not forget the complicity in and the condoning of torture while we’re at it.
I shudder even to consider I might’ve become like that odious woman had I stayed in the law and in the Labour party.
I’m amazed they didn’t taser him for good measure, pour encourager les autres.
But why? What could have posessed them to do such a disgusting, antidemocratic thing? Why would a New Labour prime minister rip up the constitution (such as it still is) and begin arresting the opposition, for all the world like some nascent Mugabe?
It appears that Green was treated like a terrorist simply for doing his job and exposing government wrongdoing and incompetence in the public interest. Since when has that been an offence? Exposing government wrongdoing is what an opposition MP does. That’s why the communications of MP’s are privileged; so that political police pressure like this can’t be brought to bear on the people’s representatives when they are doing their duty.
Privileged communication is the bedrock of the parliamentary system Parliament is said to be jealous of its privileges and ready to fight to the death to protect them; an MP cannot be arrested while in the precincts of the House, for instance.
Why, then, did the parliamentary authorities, the sergeants-at-arms, allow the Metropolitan Police into Green’s parliamentary offices to leaf through privileged communications at will, unless they had political clearance at a very high level – say from a Home Secreteary or PM – to do so?
Labour ministers like that lying little ratfaced sycophant, immigration minister Phil Woolas, are all over the papers, radio and tv this morning, disclaiming any political motivation for this unprecedentedly shocking act. “Ooh no, wasn’t us guv, nothing to do with us. Dictatorial, authoritarian, Stalinesque? Oh no, we don’t accept that. Blame the Met and Ian Blair, he’s retiring, he’s a a handy scapegoat. Jacqui Smith? Who she?”
Bollocks. They can deny it till they’re blue in the face but I’m in no doubt that the order to arrest an opposition MP came right from our very own Rosa Klebb the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, angry at having her own and her colleagues’ mendacity exposed.
Smith has shown herself quite happy to use the law to pursue her political priorities. Smith is perfectly prepared to use the power of the state against the individual for partisan purposes too, and freely admits it. Here she is speaking of manipulating the law and the police against the populace for purely partisan political ends:
I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.
That car of theirs – is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out
And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, “it’s all on the database.”
As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid
And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?
No stranger to dictatorship she; it comes as absolutely no surprise that Smith concentrated her political studies at Uni on East Germany.
Here she is on the BBC yet again, within the past 5 minutes, still asserting that no minister had anything to do with it and it was all David Normingtonof the Cabinet Office.
In a statement, the Metropolitan police said:
‘The investigation into the alleged leak of confidential government material followed the receipt by the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) of a complaint from the Cabinet Office.’
Yes, from Normington the highest ranking Home Office civil servant, who of course didn’t even speak to the PM or Home Secretary about something so momentous as the arrest of an MP.
Oh, sure.
But the order for Green’s arrest has to have come from Gordon Brown, if not at his instigation, then at least with his entire approval. They can deny it till doomsday; the order for Green’s arrest came direct from New Labour, no matter how much they dissemble; not only that, it came direct from the Cabinet Office and therefore direct from no 10; and most of all it came direct from our unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, unless, of course, the police are lying. And I wouldn’t put it past Mandelson to allege that either.
Headline to an article in today’s Times, by one Suzy Jagger, describing Nat Rothschild’s witness against Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, in the story of rich blokes carving up the world between themselves while swanning around on a big boat on the med that’s rapidly becoming known as 3 poofs and a Piano-gateYacht-gate Carry On Up Corfu, or at least it is by me.
A witness with impeccable Wall Street credentials.
Wahahaha. ‘Impeccable Wall St credentials.’ Ms Jagger, you slay me.
