New Labour

Goldsmith Saves Blair’s Neck, Gags BBC

Bloody Lawyers, Cash for honours, Corruption, New Labour
Published on 1 Comment on Goldsmith Saves Blair’s Neck, Gags BBC

The BBC’s reporting that recently-admitted adulterer and Blair-appointed Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has slapped a hastily-appiled-for injunctionon the BBC that prohibits it from reporting a significant development in the Cash for Honours investigation. The BBC website is reported to have earlier illustrated its report with a photo of Ruth Turner, that’s since been taken down, and Guido and the other Tory blogs are all atwitter.

Aside from the sheer conflict of interest displayed by the government’s senior law officer intervening to directly protect his political patrons from exposure it’s just plain dumb – there’s no doubt that the story’ll be out all over the world by morning.

My money’s on Ruth Turner when Education Secretary having emailed something very indiscreet to Lord Levy and to Tony Blair. Either that or Blair himself has been arrested under caution; but at this point we don’t actually know.

C’mon Beeb, cry havoc and let slip the story to the foreign press or blogs! Has none of you any post-Hutton balls?

New Labour must be feeling it though: Ruth Turner Kelly was openly jeered on Radio 4 this evening when she suggested on Any Questions that everyone respects Tony Blair, while Ken Loach replied, to tumultuous applause, that Blair and all his government should be tried at Den Haag for war crimes.

Then there’s this ultimate humiliation:

Tony Blair’s Old Band Record Anti-War Song

Published Thursday, 1st March, 2007

Ugly Rumours – that’s the band Tony Blair once belonged to – have now reformed and have their sights on the charts with an anti-war song directed straight at the Prime Minister.

The original members have come together (complete with a Tony Blair lookalike it seems) to record a cover version of the Edwin Starr song, War (What Is It Good For?). The band have also started a new website which explains their decision to release the track.

Anyone wanting to show their support can buy the track for just £1.50 by texting the word PEACE1 to 78789 or by this online link. All profits raised are going to support the work the Stop The War Coalition do.

According to their site, Ugly Rumours only need 5000 sales to break into the charts.

I think the country is trying to tell them something.

This has got to be the end this time.

Hasn’t it?

UPDATE: Bleh, shouldn’t post on the fly late at night – have corrected the more sloppy errors.

Latest from early morning news is that Goldsmith has put out a statement saying that he sought the injunction in the public interest at the behest of the Metropolitan police.

Whatever.

The effect is the same, a closed circle deciding that we ordinary mugs are not fit to know what criminality is happening at the upper reaches of the gpvernment we pay for. “They’re all just covering up for each other” – that’s the message the electorate will take from this latest Goldsmith manoeuvre, not prosecutorial fairhandedness. At this point even otherwise perfectly legally valid considerations of whether news reports might wreck a pending prosecution or skew any subsequent hearing seem rather irrelevant to us voters as the tide rises around Blair and his sofa government’s necks. We know he and they’re corrupt, we want them gone and we just wish the media would just do their bloody job and defy the injunction.

DOUBLE UPDATE: The BBC have banned the Ugly Rumours single. Way to go, beeb.

“Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.”

Corruption, Culture, Life under Capitalism, New Labour, Sport, UK politics
Published on 1 Comment on “Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.”

Simon Jenkins in The Grauniad this morning proves once again why they were so right to hire him, as he puts the boot elegant brogue into Britain’s Olympic organisers, demolishing their spiralling demands for more and more public money with cold, angry logic. But he reserves his particular ire for the unelected and unaccountable members of the IOC:

[…]

These people are like pre-Reformation cardinals. Since the Olympic pope graciously allowed Britain to sponsor his latest crusade, he has heard nothing but complaints from the peasantry over the cost. It is giving his “brand” a bad name. Why cannot the British behave like the Chinese, who are coughing up $30bn for his ritual in decent silence? How dare they question gilded taps in the Olympic village or teakwood lining to executive boxes, or swansdown seats on the loos? Where is the Olympic ship, promised to carry pilgrim children (I kid you not) from Peking to London? And what of legacy? The IOC likes a legacy or two to gladden its press releases.

These are not sportsmen but Vegas-style businessmen for whom Blairite ministers have an extraordinary weakness. They move in a world of stadium designers, equipment suppliers, architects, promoters and agents. They are unaccountable to any electorate. The one thing they sell each four years is chauvinist glory, the “right” to hold the Olympic franchise for 16 days. They have already spawned an office block of 700 staff in Canary Wharf, consultants, architects, engineers and project managers. They have even brought in an outside company, CLM, to defend their costs at a reputed fee of £400m, money not for sport but to go straight into someone’s back pocket. If anyone accuses me of being a killjoy, I say too right. Somehow or other we are paying for this.

The truth is that Jowell and Coe are not up to dealing with this bunch – with Coe actually thinking the games will “make money as an investment”. Neither has passed the whelk-stall test, yet they find themselves negotiating with people who travel first class, stay at five-star hotels and expect chauffeurs to pick up bills for less than a million. Leaving Coe and Jowell in charge of this project was like sending Constable Dogberry to sort out Enron.

[…]

I sense Mr Jenkins is a little annoyed.

Has there ever been a government so in thrall to slick salesmen? At least the Tories, being sleazy salesmen themelves, knew when they were being snowed. The luminaries of New Labour not only fall for every hustle going they seem infatuated with the hustlers too (and quite often they marry them, as in the case of Ms. Jowell). You could paint this as the idealistic working class having been corrupted by contact with big money, but let’s face it, a preponderance of Labour MP’s and cabinet members are lower-middle-class, not working-class, and came up through net-curtain-land and secure jobs in local government. They are those people who that sourpuss Belloc derided as ‘the people in between’:

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75 Grand? That’s Almost Enough To Buy A Title

Cash for honours, New Labour
Published on

Thisislondon:

Cash for peerages’ suspects will walk away with £75,000 payoffs25.02.07

The Downing Street ‘suspects’ at the heart of the police inquiry into cash-for-honours will walk away with pay-offs worth up to £75,000 when Tony Blair steps down.

The Prime Minister’s inner circle of aides – including chief of staff Jonathan Powell and director of government relations Ruth Turner – are entitled to a share in the expected £1.2million ‘golden goodbyes’ which will be handed out to officials in the coming months.

Around 40 Blairite spin doctors and fixers will leave their government posts when Gordon Brown moves into Number Ten.

The Chancellor is expected to bring in his own team of advisers if he wins the Labour leadership and will want to ‘cull’ aides who he regards as Blair loyalists.

But under civil service rules, the aides will be entitled to up to six months salary.

One Whitehall official told the Mail on Sunday: “These special advisers have known for some time they will be without a job. Most have lined up others, but are waiting for their redundancy cheques.”

Mr Powell, who has been quizzed by police investigating claims that Labour ‘sold’ honours to wealthy businessmen in return for loans, is believed to earn £150,000 a year and is expected to pocket around £75,000 before tax.

Miss Turner, arrested by police on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, will also be eligible for a generous cheque. Mr Blair’s political secretary John McTernan is also likely to get a pay-off.

Angus MacNeil, the Scottish nationalist MP who sparked the police probe, last night critics the hand outs. He said: “They are grotesque. There seems to be one rule for Number Ten and another for ordinary workers.”

Sound Familiar?

Blogs, New Labour, UK politics
Published on

BBC:

The UK and US have held high level talks on the possibility of putting a “Son of Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile defence system on British soil.

An article in The Economist claims Prime Minister Tony Blair has lobbied President George Bush for the system.

If only...

Full as he is of himself and full as his rhetoric is of high-minded platitudes, what he really wants to do is to is, well, what he wants to do. He sees a public statement of principles as a definition of a kind of a boundary: “aha, this tells me how far I can go, and hence anything I do up until that point is fair play!” Now, me, I see a statement of principles as an aspiration and a guide for behavior, and not as grounds for endless, twisty, knotty ethical negotiation and compromise. The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth — sign a pact with Tac, that’s what you get.

Thers, actually referring to wingnut and arch civility hypocrite Josh Trevino. But it fits.