New Labour – Page 25

What Lies Beneath

Published on July 27, 2007

No this isn’t about the horrible floods, except as they’re being used by the Brown government to bury things they really don’t want us to notice.

How very convenient that the papers’re full of strong-jawed resolute Gordon overseeing natural disaster and that the usual attack-dogs, Paxman, Humphreys et al, are all off in Tuscany or Cornwall or fly-fishing in Iceland till the end of August.

Take the Guardian, for example, which couldn’t be giving Brown an easier ride; here’s Jonathan Freedland:

It’s been an intense initiation, but people are listening to Labour again

Brown’s first month, and his carefully signalled priorities, look like a success, despite the unexpectedly tough start

More…

Gordon is sitting pretty with the media right now, which means the Brown regime can get away with being equally as politically corrupt as Blair ever was, but with hardly anyone noticing.

Item one: Brown took a leaf out of the Karl Rove playbook this week and did an info dump the day before Parliament recessed; quite a lot of important announcements were made all at once, not least the least interesting of which is that the chair of the Guardian media group has been appointed to his fourth government post. (Why don’t they just rename it the Brown Guardian and have done?)

None of these announcements can be questioned in parliament because it’s not sitting and as mentioned the parliamentary reporters are away on holiday so by the time parliament returns events will have overtaken any questions anyway.

Nod, nod, wink wink, say no more.

Item two: Leader of the House and Secretary of State Harriet Harman also tried the same trick in the Commons, waiting until the very last moment to try and ourageously push through the appointment of the odious Keith Vaz as chair of the Home Affairs Select committee, the supposedly independent, cross-party parliamentary body which oversees all executive actvity in prisons, terrorism, policing, community cohesion and so on.

It’s hard to overestimate the potential power that the Chair of a truly independent Home Affairs select committe could have to hold a rampant executive to account – so of course Brown seeks to decapitate it by disregarding the constitution and getting one cabinet puppet to interfere in another branch of government and appoint another puppet as committee chair. Simon Carr in the Independent:

{…]

…may we express some post-honeymoon scepticism about the PM’s assertions on the value of an independent Commons as well. He doesn’t believe anything of the sort.

As a result, Harriet Harman had great lumps torn out of her on the floor of the House. There was that, at least.

She had suspended Standing Orders in order to appoint Keith Vaz as the new member of the Home Affairs Select Committee (and, under the whips’ instructions, to be the next chair of it).

It’s fairly clear Harriet knew Vaz was the replacement last Monday, when the appointments committee was due to sit. But as Sir George Young said, and as its chair, Rosemary McKenna, confirmed “there was no government business to conduct so the meeting was cancelled”.

Harriet then springs her surprise motion the day before the House rises for the recess.

Richard Shepherd: “To the casual viewer, this looks like the Government choosing who shall be chairman of the Home Affairs Committee… This looks like executive control over the choices of the Chamber and bypassing the very function of the Committee of Selection. It is outrageous!”

Also, “great discredit” (Simon Hughes), “withdraw the motion” (George Young), “I suppose we have to accept [it] at face value” (Nicholas Winterton), “Will the Leader of the House give way?” (Douglas Hogg, George Young, Richard Shepherd, John Bercow.) “I’m an idiot” (Harriet Harman).

Yes, all right, you’re so pernickety. It’s true that one of those quotations has been fabricated

It was just a matter of timing, she said. She wasn’t in a position to put forward his name on Monday, she said.

She’s not a real QC, you know.

Under Vaz’s leadership, we can speculate that the committee will now come out in favour of 58-day detention without charge and that the body of the acting chairman, David Winnick, will be found swinging under Blackfriars Bridge. This is for the future.

More…

Not only Gordon Brown is trying to put the government in charge of oversight of itself he’s rubbing salt in the wound by appointing the sleazy Keith Vaz, a man with several alleged stains on his character.

In February 2000 the Parliamentary standards watchdog Elizabeth Filkin was requested to investigate allegations of undisclosed payments to Vaz from businessmen in his constituency.[1] The following year, 2001, members of the opposition began to question what role Vaz may have played in helping the billionaire Indian Hinduja brothers – linked with a corruption probe in India – to secure UK passports.

In March 2001, the Filkin report cleared Vaz of nine of the 18 allegations of various financial wrongdoings, but Elizabeth Filkin accused Mr Vaz of blocking her investigation into eight of the allegations. He was also censured for one allegation – that he failed to register two payments worth £450 in total from Sarosh Zaiwalla, a solicitor whom he recommended for an honour several years later.

Mrs Filkin announced in the same month a new inquiry which would focus on whether or not a company connected to Vaz received a donation from a charitable foundation run by the Hinduja brothers. The results of the inquiry were published in 2002 and it was concluded that Vaz had “committed serious breaches of the Code of Conduct and a contempt of the House” and it was recommended that he be suspended from the House of Commons for one month[2].

Keith Vaz was also a director of the company General Mediterranean Holdings’ owned by the Anglo-Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, who had in the past hired British politicians Lord David Steel and Lord Norman Lamont as directors. Vaz resigned his post as director when he became Minister for Europe, but it was later discovered that he had remained in contact with Auchi and had made enquiries on his behalf over a French extradition warrant, Auchi even calling Vaz at home to ask the minister for advice.

And this is the man who should have parliamentary oversight of policing?

What lies beneath the superficial veneer of Brown’s strong-jawed manly Scottish probity is the same old corrupt New Labour. He can reverse the gambling bill, take his conspicuously low-key and self-denying holidays in an eco-friendly country cottages in Scotland, he can push his ‘son of the manse’, prudence and probity schtick as much as he likes, but that’s all it is, a veneer; underneath nothing has changed. It’s just another face on the same old Labour sleaze.

UPDATE: To further reinforce my point, I jjust came across this:

NI minimum wage ‘may be reduced’

Mr Brown is believed to be considering reducing the minimum wage in NI
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is considering plans which could see the minimum wage reduced in Northern Ireland, it is believed.

The minimum wage is set at £5.35 across the UK, however, if the plans go ahead it will be reduced in NI, Scotland, Wales and the north east of England.

[My emphasis]

That’s only 10,272 pounds annually for a 50 week, 40 hour week year- before tax. the national average after tax is 22,202.

For comparison’s sake, MP’s salaries are over 60,000 pounds annually (and are about to rise by another 2%, at least) plus allowances of around 85,000 pounds, plus special responsibility allowances and perks for ministers.

Jacqui Smith, Secretary of State For Hypocrisy

Published on July 19, 2007

In the light of the Home Secretary and six other Labour politicians’ comings out as ‘occasional’ youthful drug users – just ahead of the newspapers doing it for them (and isn’t it funny how they always ‘didn’t like it much’?) I thought I’d I’d repost this on Labour, drugs and hypocrisy from a couple of months ago.

Fucking Labour – they criminalise a whole generation for the same thing they and their childrem did and still do and then say, “Oh, but When we do it it’s just a youthful indiiscretion, a reckless mistake.” Like hell. Fucking hypocrites,

Let’s talk about Drugs For A Bit

All this past week there has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the media and leftish politics over a number of possibly drug-related shootings of young black men in South London and other working class areas around the country.

There’s been reams of analysis trying to work out the reasons why those dreadful kids act the way they do, as though these young people were some isolated tribe, completely disconnected from some mythical, largely white, largely comfortable middle England – an innercity, urban abberation, the scary Other, a phenomenon to be examined in the mode of a colonial administrator reporting the discovery of a band of previously unknown New Guinean headhunters.

The Daily Mail:

The fact is that no one in the police wants to talk about gang warfare in South London, because the last thing senior officers want is to give credibility to this breed of savage young men who are capable of horrific violence unfettered by the most basic concepts of morality.

Not once have I seen anyone in the mainstream media or politics make any connection between these murders and theirs and their friends’ own recreational drug use. No, it’s just another youthful indiscretion, if indeed if it ever stopped.

As the Telegraph’s Sam Leith pointed out, “drugs have lost their toxicity as a political issue” because the generation for whom their use is normal now fills the corridors of power. A simple test is to ask what you’d like to know about your boss. Told that prostitutes visited his home, as the News of the World alleged against the Duke of Westminster, you would be all ears. Would you be interested to learn he had taken a couple of spliffs at school? Not very, I should think.

Drug use is the big tacit unspoken in British politics and the Labour Party and its hangers-on are the biggest hypocrites of all on the subject. So Cuddly Cameron smoked a spliff at Eton aged 15? Well, woop-de-doo-bloody-doo.

Of more concern to me is how the spliff got to him, and who was hurt or banged up as collateral damage for his teenage half hour of posh herbal euphoria.

The same goes for New Labour: you should’ve seen some of the Labour party notables I’ve seen toking up in the eighties and nineties, thinking they were in safe company, or the local councillors loved up on ecstasy and lemon Hooch on a girls’ night out. That’s not to mention drink, cocaine and legally prescribed medication; I strongly suspect that at least half the government, national and local, is chemically affected in some way or another at any given time.

And what about those nice, middle-class journos and civil servants and bank workers with their weekend hits of charlie or whizz, or the poppers that spice up their nice middle-class sex lives? My own son has been approached at clubs (because he is black, duh) by a probation officer (and now former friend of mine) and several criminal lawyers of my acquaintance looking to buy dope. That tells you what you need to know about the integrity of the justice system.

Do these people ever give a thought as to where their little indulgences come from as they buy their teenth or a tab from their friendly local hipster round the corner? I doubt that very much. In fact the very next day they’ll be in committee or on telly or in the House or in the columns of the Grauniad or The Times, pontificating about the dreadful moral laxity of the young.

Being such hypocrites on the subject of their own drug use it ill behoves them to be so draconian on youth, drugs and crime policy.

In partaking of American War On Drugs and Zero Tolerance rhetoric and practice the Blair government, with typically blustering incompetence, has driven the youth prison population up, criminalised a generation, and pushed drug criminality and violence down the age scale, as what were tweenie runners trying to supplement their (often addicted themselves)parents’ measly unemployment benefit with the crumbs from the only local growth industry now find the field clear for the expression of their wildest, pubescent, PS2 and MTV-fuelled fantasies of gangsterdom and Respect.

All the government current policy has done is to temporarily take out a layer of competition in dealers : it’s done nothing about the growing demand for recreational drugs. Those hooked on crack or heroin (or now, crystal meth) are hardly going to say “Oh damn, you took the big boys out of circulation, I’d better give up drugs then”. Where the demand is comes the supply.

The teenagers shooting each other in South London for market share are just, as they’ve been taught by ten years of neoliberal economics and music videos, practicing capitalism in its purest form. But they are being framed by the media and government as savage, feral, a race apart.

The profit from trade in drugs, like that in arms or torture equipment is a major driver of the UK’s intangible economy. Wherever the money comes from and no matter how tainted, one whizz around the City of London carousel or a churn in the property market and it’s squeaky clean again and ready to be invested elsewhere. But at the bottom, no matter how squeaky clean the money is, no matter how smart the suits or politically connected the players at the top are, are violence and greed and poverty and despair and mothers mourning dead children.

With the obsolescence and collapse of its manufacturing base Britain is increasingly reliant on crucial invisible earnings, the skim off the top of that immense money market in the City of London. Gordon Brown’s economic plans are dependent on it; ever larger swathes of the country’s population make their livings servicing the financial machinery that keeps those earnings flowing, and those who are not so fortunate as to have their livelihoods dependent on the whim of an overpaid, overbonused city whizzkid are, of course, just lazy ingrates who should show a little entrepreneurial spirit. So they do, emulating their ‘betters’ in the most immediate and most lucrative way possible.

You’d think a government that admires the naked aggression of invading Iraq to cut out the middleman supplying their own addiction would admire the naked opportunism and entrepreneurship that the teenagers of South London demonstrate, wouldn’t you? New Labour has been in power for ten years now and they’re just doing it the New Labour way, See a market – take it, with guns if necessary.

I doubt there’s a family in the country that hasn’t been affected in some way by drugs and the toxic criminality and poverty that accompanies it. Young people from a working-class background, especially young black people, who manage to escape that life seem to be in a dwindling minority. It’s like watching a whole generation slide down the drain and no-one giving a damn.

Figures released by the charity today, based on statistics compiled by the Council of Europe, show that England and Wales has the highest number of young adults in prison in western Europe.

They’re just chavs, after all. Who cares? The reductionist conservative view would be that it is Darwinism in action. But every drug casualty, every life nipped in the bud, has a parents, siblings, friends, – all are affected and the ripples spread far and wide.

Having had close experience with the horrible effects of addiction and drug violence in my own close family I’m no naive idealist, but I seriously believe that the only possible way to stop this poisonous stew of hypocrisy, class and race prejudice cascading even further down the generations is to decriminalise and regulate the supply of drugs entirely. Human history has shown that if there’s a mind-altering substance available to them mammals will try it. Even cats and elephants enjoy getting high so why not just acknowledge that?

The Blair government’s is a hypocritical, evangelical Christian-driven drugs policy that emphasises punishing individual ‘sin’ whilst at the same time practicing that very ‘sin’ in private and encouraging profiteering from it.

It and the British media fail to acknowledge the central role that they themselves play in the drugs trade. Every time you smoke a spliff in Britain, if it’s not home-griown then you have contributed to the degradation of a generation too. Hyperbolic yes, but until we all acknowledge that its our own personal roles in the international movement of drugs and capital that’s fueling these teenage bedroom executions we can’t have any hope of a sensible treatment-based drugs and crime policy that could pull this generation back from the brink. It’s way past time for a bit of honesty from everyone involved.

Comment of The DayWeek

Published on July 19, 2007

Well, it’s comment of the week, really, because it feeds into a topic that’s greatly in the news this week, lone parents and benefit cuts. It’s been announced that in the UK women with children as young as 7 will be forced into low-paid jobs or face benefit cuts, emphasis on the women (I don’t see any mention of men). The blame culture strikes again, setting ‘good’ women against ‘bad’.

So this, from kactus, who’s been guest-blogging at Feministe, was sytartlingly apropios:

kactus Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

I was going to ask the same question as anonplease. You’re literate, well-spoken-I can only assume it’s bias against your colour and disability.

Actually, I’m white, JPlum. I do have a mixed-race daughter, whose picture I plaster all over my blog, and I live in a mostly-black community, but no, actually being white has helped me navigate the welfare system much more than my sisters in poverty who are struggling against the racism in the system.

Look, being well-spoken and educated is no fail-safe protection against poverty. Neither is being white. Although those things help, they are not a guarantee of a middle-class life. I was raised working class, which used to mean something. Now it means almost nothing, except that you still have illusions about what used to be called upward mobility.

I have a quote on my blog from Johnnie Tillmon, a great early welfare rights activist. She says that welfare is like a traffic accident: it can happen to anybody. But especially it happens to women, which is why welfare is a women’s issue.

Women go from middle class comfort to unpredictable poverty all the time, just from something so simple as losing their partners, either to death or divorce or other calamity. As long as the wage gap between women and men is so huge this will continue to be an issue. Women raise children alone all the time, without the benefit of child support. Women often end up working low-wage, dead-end jobs. Women lose jobs because of their children.

Poverty is absolutely a women’s issue. That is why it is a feminist issue, and a human rights issue. And in the end it really doesn’t matter why somebody is poor, or what brought them there. What matters is that it could happen to every single one of us. One slip and bam–we’re in that traffic accident called welfare.

I’m literate and well-spoken too and I’ve been on welfare too: intelligence is no predictor of misfortune and being well-spoken does not negate the effects of institutional misogynism – in fact if you are well-spoken and literate you are considered to be all the more culpable for your own poverty by the ‘caring’ agencies.

This overt equation of poverty with moral failure in the US is becoming more obvious in the UK too as Labour’s neoliberal economic policies create an ever-widening poverty gap by giving tax breaks to the richest and making life ever harder for the poorest.

It made me livid yesterday to listen to the posh voices of the bourgeois ‘left-wing’ think tank wonks on Radio 4 , talking about Labour’s swingeing, unfair cuts to lone parent benefits as taking a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to ‘recalcitrant’ mothers, as though women raising small children alone were lazy, shiftless animals.

Why is it that motherhood is a worthy full-time job for them, the smug middle-class Yummy Mummy marrieds, with their 4X4 baby buggies, Tumble Tots and their insatiable Daily Mail-fed terror of the icky urban poor – but not for mothers bringing up children alone?

Aren’t less well-off children entitled to the same quality of parenting as those born to the luckily well-off? Why does addition of a man to the equation make their children more worthy of a decent upbringing?

Is the government saying that married mothers are morally more worthy than unmarried? It certainly sounds like it. You’d think the Labour sisterhood’d be up in arms, wouldn’t you?

Hello….? Harriet Harman? Anyone?

Nope, didn’t think so. Labour sisterhood never was for shit, except as it furthered certain women’s political careers, as I and many other ex-Labour members can testify. That those women would now sit back, mum, while the Treasury thumps the most overtaxed, most vulnerable families in society, the people who voted for them to be where they are because they thought Labour and Labour wonen would be a voice for women and children…

I was a good lone parent. I did everything I was supposed to, even though I was sick – I went back tio University to got a degree, I went on training courses, I took low-paid jobs to get on the ladder. I’m not unique in this, it’s what a lot of women do, because we have to and we don’t like being un-self-supporting.

When I first graduated I worked 3 years for 60-70 hour weeks for nothing getting an anti-poverty campaigning and advice agency off the ground and funded, a] because I was committed to it, having seen myself what an impenetrable maze bureaucracy can be for the uninitiated b] because legal aid is hard to get and c] because I knew that doing it myself was the only way I’d ever get a legal job . I know because I tried but no-one wants someone with a patchy medical history and I can understand why. No problems with jobs as a part-time temp, yes, but that doesn’t feed children or pay the rent…

Then a man was given the paid post I raised the money for, over my head, because of local political infighting, aka the sexual appetites of prominent Labour councillor’s partner. I walked out and the organisation went tits up later when a deal was done by the very same councilllors for the land it stood on.

It knocked me right back on my heels, three year’s hard work down the tubes, but I did manage to get an antipoverty strategy put into local council policy, albeit briefly, which is something, I suppose – every decision made by the council had to be considered in the light it would have on those on low incomes. But not for long, cheers, New Labour. Once back in power they always forget who put them there. Lone mothers. Poor people, people like me ho’ve seen the injustice poverty causes.

Blaming lone mothers for their own poverty and accusing them of being leeches on society iis very useful to the government because it enables the real plight of the poor to be disregarded. But poverty can hit very quicly and few women are immune.

Say you have a husband, a house, a mortgage and two children under 5: you’ve left your job to go part-time, or you’ve had to leave to look after the children. One day your husband just ups and leaves you for someone else, shutting down all the bank accounts, taking the car and barring access to money. As happened to my sister one Christmas Eve.

How do you feed your kids while coping with the aftermath? But milk, or nappies? How do you pay the childminder to go to your part-time job? What if you have to leave your job, what then?

These are the current UK benefit rates for a lone parent on means-tested benefits:

Lone parent
under 18 35.65/46.85
18 or over 59.15

Dependent children 47.45

Family premium 16.43

Max total 170 pounds, plus housing and council benefit if in rented accommodation (nothing at all if in your own home, you’ll have to find the mortgage payment out of the 170) say, around another 100 pounds a week if not living in London, less elsewhere.

That gives a maximum weekly income of around 270 pounds a week to find everything out of – food, electric, gas, rent, travel costs, school lunches, school uniforms, books… It certainly looks generous on the face of it, but not when you consider what has to come out of it and that the national average weekly household income is 570 pounds. Lone parents must do all the parenting that two parents do on around half the income.

Lone parents are disproportionately women and for some reason people think women can cope with poverty, that we don’t need a decent income, that we’ll manage, because that’s what we do – and that our lot in life is to just shut up and take it, wait until someone deigns to hand us some charity and then we must be duly grateful and publicly so.

What is conveniently forgotten is that these meagre benefit entitlements have been paid for several times over by ours and our parents’ and grandparents’ National Insurance contributions and will be by the future contributions of our children, should they be able to get a job and not be trapped in poverty.

This attitude illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of the welfare state: the Brown government, as the Tories did before it, would like the public to think that social security is charity, and that those seeking alms from the charity can somehow be sorted into the ‘deserving’ and undeserving’. You can see how well this has worked by reading the comments to this Scotsman article onthe benefit cuts, of which this is a representative example:

I am in complete harmony with the principle that individuals should be accountable for their actions, and see no reason why I should help someone to raise a child if they are not prepared to work, even if it’s part time. The welfare system in this country was never set up to fund lifestyles, and sadly that’s basically what it does now, fund lazy eegits, criminals and slappers, and other wasters.

Delinquent fathers is another topic of irritation, and we should be relentless in finding them and forcing them to contribute to the childs up bringing expenses.
Rant over!

State benefits are not charity, they are an arrangement between the citizen and the state to provide support out of work in return for contributions from income when in work. Why? So that no more generations of children would be raised in poverty. That was why we voted Labour.

The British media would have the public believe that lone parents get more benefit than couples: not so –

Couple

both under 18 35.65/46.85/70.70
one under 18 46.85/59.15/92.80
both aged 18+ 92.80

Even though lone mothers have to do the work of two parents on less money iand less time and the cost of running a household is the same for a lone parent as it is for a couple.

Instead of enabling lone parents (and isn’t it odd how the public discourse has slipped back from ‘lone parents’ to ‘single mothers’? – talk about feminising the situation for blame purposes) to raise their children in a way which does not exclude them from participating in society – after all children do not choose the families they are born into, why should they suffer? – the less morally worthy single mothers must be made to work and work hard for their charitable handout, even if it means spending time that should be spent raising children properly in filling out constant, pointless forms and doing empty busywork preparing for jobs they won’t get anyway because there are a thousand younger, more qualified new graduates or recent economic migrants with no children or other baggage right in line before them.

The jobs that are available to lone parents don’t pay enough to cover the loss of housing benefit or are in low-paid shift work, or on-demand hours, requiring the most minutely arranged time-management, transport and hugely expensive and precarious childcare arrangements for very little reward after direct and indirect taxation are taken into account.

And where’s all the extra childcare to come from? The government is planning that schools should become child-care centres and children should attend from 7 am till 6pm, with drastically reduced vacation time. I wonder who’ll be forced to apply for the childcare jiobs at these childcare centrres? Lone parents forced out to work…

We’re building a nicely circular low-paid system of poor women looking after other women’s children while having to put their own into… paid childcare. But hey, at least they’re not scrounging.

With all this in mind it doesn’t help at all that that women who do currently, temporarily, have money and security look down on lone parents as moral failures. No – we were sick, or our partner turned out to be an asshole, or the condom broke or the pill didn’t work or we got made redundant. Some of which has happened to me at some point as it can happen to any parent. That’s the whole point of the benefit system: there but for the grace of whatever deity or randomness go you.

And don’t talk to me about relative poverty. If you can’t pay your bills you can’t pay your bills whether in pounds, dinar or Zimbabwean hyper-currency.

A family is a family, one parent or two and deserves state support. families are what makes the state – but as Gordon Brown so constantly reiterates, it’s only ‘hard-working’ families. Well, lone parents are hard-working too: they’re working hard at raising the next genration of taxpayers that will help fund the currently comfortable’s pensions.

It’s they who are the bedrock of a very unequal society, doing all the shit unpaid jobs no-one else will, for bugger all reward except the blame of the tabloids for causing all the ills of society.

But blame is useful it enables the currently comfortable to ignore real poverty, to feel smug, to have someone to despise: not only that, it sets women against one another and is yet another way of dividing and ruling.

Once A Whore…

Published on July 12, 2007

Guess who wrote this in Forum magazine before he was famous?

‘a little known aphrodisiac – the dangling pipes of Scotland…It’s all tongues and teeth, lips and gentle squeezes..As I lie on a Lisbon hotel bed next to a Portuguese person crying out for more, I thank my pipes for doing most of the chatting up.’ So nothing autobiographical going on there, except in my dreams. I do so love a slut’

… and said this to The Sun twenty-odd years ago?

On the subject of being a gigolo, Alastair apparently appeared in a 1980 article in The Sun (so it must be true) headlined ‘WANTED, Men For Hire’, in which he said, “you would talk, have dinner, make love; in return they would give you money or gifts…It’s never hard work but the women do expect a high standard of performance.

Yup, it’s the Pepys de nos jours, Alistair Campbell. And he called Carole Caplin a flake and a liability…

New Neighbours To Blair- Get Off My Lawn, You Oik!

Published on June 26, 20071 Comment

It seems the Blairs’ new neighbours in Connaught Square are not best pleased with their pending arrival and have got up a petition against them. Here’s some of the Blairs’ neighbours in full fighting fig:

Even though the neighbours are loathsome snobbish hunt-supporting buggers (see above) – can you blame them?

I wouldn’t want the Blairs on my street either: I’d prefer not to be arrested for giving into the perfectly natural impulse to punch one of the elder Blairs in the face should we run into each other on our way to the corner shop for milk and a paper.

Neither would I be happy about my whole street becoming the No 2 world terrorist target after the White House.

But what the Blair’s posh neighbours (who include way-too-old for winsome-rich-girl yoof tv presenter, Claudia Winkelman) are bothered about isn’t annihilation by suicide bomb or anthrax letter, it’s the sheer bloody inconvenience, darling.

The Independent:

:There goes the neighbourhood: ‘The Blairs ought not to be living here…’

[…]

What has alarmed the residents of the square is the extraordinary precautions underway to ensure that the former prime minister and his wife are protected from anyone who may be contemplating revenge for the war in Iraq or over some other grievance.

If the Blairs are really that much at risk, the neighbours say, someone should tell them for their own sake that it is not a good idea to be living in a crowded part of central London. On the other hand, if the risk is low, life in Connaught Square is being disrupted for no good reason. A petition has been passed around the Square pleading for help from Westminster Council. It says: “It has been suggested that to protect the Blairs it may be necessary to prevent vehicles and unauthorised pedestrians entering the west side of the Square, run part of the Square into a gated community, policed by armed guards, prune or cut down some of our magnificent old plane trees [and] have a police helicopter hovering above the Square.”

“It has been suggested that to protect the Blairs it may be necessary to prevent vehicles and unauthorised pedestrians entering the west side of the Square, run part of the Square into a gated community, policed by armed guards, prune or cut down some of our magnificent old plane trees [and] have a police helicopter hovering above the Square.”

Oh dear. They’re going to cut down a tree. In a historic square, in central London. They didn’t want to do that…

But really at the heart of this petition is distaste and a massive amount of snobbery.

Who wants to live near to someone like the vainglorious, lying jumped-up Blair and his horrible greedy wife with their pretensions and their overweening arrogance and self-importance? And they’re just so bloody middle class, sweetie. I doubt that the pro-hunting types who attended to the Connaught Square Squirrel Hunt Ball will be popping round to Tony and Cherie’s for sherry and little cheesy things.Somehow I can’t see an invitation to this year’s event plopping onto the anti-hunting Blairs’ new doormat either.

This all raises an interesting and potentially very entertaining possibility. Once the local authority’s bureaucratic machine starts to grind into action (and you can bet it’ll grind extra-slow for the Blairs after tomorrow) this dispute could take months, years even, to resolve, especially if the planning department gets involved. The Blairs are staying at Chequers, the country house allotted to prime ministers, at some public expense until they can move in.

That was kind of Gordon Brown, though I wonder how kind he’ll be feeling when he can’t get them out again. I can see the Blairs’ll be the freeloading guests who check in but never leave; they’ve certainly had the practice:

Mr Blair has stubbornly refused to fork out for his own summer holiday, and every year that he has relied on freebies has brought trouble. First, he accepted Geoffrey Robinson’s villa, a favour which feeds the businessman’s sense of injustice at being dismissed from the Government after he placed his wealth at New Labour’s disposal. These resentments are likely to feature heavily in his autobiographical reckoning later this year. Last year, the Prime Minister lighted on Prince Girolamo Strozzi’s renaissance palace. The Prince was miffed to be banished to the stables and Mr Blair ended up fending off completely avoidable criticism.

This year, La Nazione anointed him “the scrounger”. The beach around the house has been sealed off to protect the privacy of the Blairs at play: and then sealed on again to forestall local protest at the inconvenience. Once a public figure has allowed himself to become the target of such easy carping, everything – from a local restaurant which stops serving at 6pm to feed the hungry to the Leaning Tower of Pisa having to open specially so that Mr Blair could enjoy the forgotten sensation of something leaning to the left – becomes a big deal.

It would be nothing to the Blairs, given this record of barefaced freeloading, to just stay on at Chequers on sufferance when they can’t get into Connaught Square. Won’t it be fun if Gordon Brown ends up having to call in the bailiffs to get them out?