New Labour – Page 35

The Biter Bit

Published on January 21, 2007

Just an idle thought… it’s wryly amusing to consider what actually happened at the police station after Blair toadies Lord Levy and Ruth Turner were arrested by the Met.

Were they, like so many others, compelled to have their digitalised fingerprints and DNA samples taken, to be retained for ever in the megadatabase their own boss planned ?

UPDATE: It just gets better and better…. it’s looking like Scotland Yard has used the draconioan and much protested Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, that allows unprecedented snooping by police into electronic communications, against Downing St.

The arrest of one of Tony Blair’s top aides in the cash for honours row was made after fresh information was uncovered during a search of the Number 10 computer system, according to reports.

The investigation put police at loggerheads with politicians after Ruth Turner was arrested in a dawn swoop on her home.

The News Of The World said it was informed by sources within the Crown Prosecution Service that a “mole” within Downing Street told the police about potentially incriminating emails.

An independent IT expert was then sent in by detectives, with the permission of Downing Street, to look through communications records, it claimed. But the Sunday Telegraph suggested that detectives had obtained high-level permission to “hack” into the IT system remotely.

Bwahahahahaha.

That ‘high-level permission’ thing is just a figleaf to soothe Downing St’s wounded pride. The Met don’t need no steenkin’ high-lvel permission, those authoritarian idiots in New Labour already unthinkingly gave the police the tools to use against the government.

Untitled

Published on January 11, 2007

Well, It’s Just As Likely As Anything Else

True or false? We report, you decide:

Blair Foundation has been papering over the cracks in Tony Blair?s government since 1997. Now, for the first time, you too can enjoy the same experience at home.

Worried about the size of your debts? Fallen out with your interfering neighbour? Police on your back? Explore our website and find out how Blair Foundation can help you!

How to pay

There are two great ways to pay for Blair foundation.

Option one: Buy now, get something similar but not quite what you asked for, let your children pay in 30 years’ time (1000% APR)!

Option two: Make a donation now, get as much Blair Foundation as you like in a few months’ time and get your money back as soon as we can afford it!

Although all major credit cards are accepted, we prefer wire transfers from tax havens. Postage and packing is charged separately.

Note: Blair Foundation is an exclusive product, only available from select retailers. At present these are:

Lord Levy

We reserve the right to refuse orders, especially if your name is Gordon.
?2007

I wonder what the available shades are? Blair beige, Cherie caramel?

Blair to launch ‘Blair Foundation’ cosmetics range
8 Jan 2007

Tony Blair is to launch a range of cosmetics upon leaving office, DeadBrain can reveal. The first of those, Blair Foundation, has already been developed and was discovered by our intrepid reporter during a bored afternoon searching the internet.

Future releases are understood to include a concealer, given the codename ‘WMD’, and a range of aftershave. Early versions of the latter product were found to have the side effect of sending dogs berserk after being tested by David Blunkett, who has since made a full recovery.

Mr Blair is not the first politician to use his name to cash in. Former President Bill Clinton famously lent his name to a dry-cleaning product after leaving office, while Boris Yeltsin had his own best-selling brand of vodka. Not all politicians have been as successful, however. A range of hair care products launched by Boris Johnson after his first resignation were rapidly withdrawn after Trading Standards called them a “severe fire risk”.

Downing Street declined to comment, but a policeman standing outside the door of Number 10 told DeadBrain that he had had a full head of hair until he used Mr Johnson’s shampoo.

Read more:UK Politics, Blair foundation, Snark

Why Can’t Life Imitate Art?

Published on January 10, 2007

I’d’ve posted this yesterday, but Blogger was playing silly buggers with Blogger Beta again and was completely inaccessible. (We have the blog all set up on typepad and ready to switch, but it just takes the will. Honestly we will do it. Soon.)

Anyhow I did a double-take when I saw this headline from from yesterday’s Evening Standard:

Blair in the dock for TV war crimes ‘trial’

By Alexa Baracaia, Evening Standard 09.01.07

Trials and tribulations: Robert Lindsay as Tony Blair

Channel 4 is to screen a hardhitting drama which portrays Tony Blair facing an international tribunal charged with war crimes. Robert Lindsay plays the Prime Minister, who is shown becoming increasingly unhinged.

In dramatic scenes shown at a private screening today Mr Blair hallucinates about dead Iraqi children, sees the coffin of a British soldier on his kitchen table and believes he is to be murdered by a suicide bomber.

The Prime Minister has a waking nightmare that he is found dead. In sinister echoes of Dr David Kelly’s death, he hallucinates that a newsreader announces that “it appears the former Prime Minister had gone for a walk on his own”.

The 72-minute film The Trial Of Tony Blair will be screened on Monday on digital channel More4.

Written by Alistair Beaton, who also wrote A Very Social Secretary about David Blunkett, it opens in 2010 with the vision of a distressed Blair, having converted to Catholicism, about to make confession for his “mortal sins””.

In Beaton’s account, the US and British forces have declared war on Iran, there has been a second terror attack in London and George Bush, deposed by Hillary Clinton, has entered rehab after being found comatose on his ranch.

Today, Beaton insisted he had no qualms about screening a film which could affect public opinion while a leader of state is still in power.

He said: That would be terrific if I’d contributed to the public perception of Blair having done something he must pay a price for.

I did set out, however, from the position of Blair as being fundamentally a man who cares but whose decisions have backfired and he is struggling to live with that.””

I really really want to see this, if only for the vicarious satisfaction of watching a fictional Blair getting his comeuppance. Bittorrenters and YouTubers, those of us without More4 are relying on you; don’t let us down.

Read more: UK, TV, Drama, Channel 4, Tony Blair, Iraq War Crimes Trial

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Published on January 1, 2007

It’s about this time of year when the financial excesses of the previous year start to catch up with us. It’s a long old stretch till the end of the month and the post brings nothing good from New Year right through until spring. The pipers must be paid.

So when you read the bad news that’s piling up for Blair one might almost not blame Tony & Cherie for doing the prime ministerial equivalent of sticking the red bills in the drawer and escaping reality by running off to sleb it up with a permatanned, flourescent-toothed aging former pop star and his occasionally lesbian druidess wife in sunny south Florida.

They should enjoy it while they can; the storm clouds are looming and looming big. Knacker of the Yard, in the person of strong-jawed, resolute and newly promoted Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police John Yates, is breathing very clsoely down Blair’s neck and it’s also being reported that one of Blair’s personal staff, Ruth Turner, is about to spill all and has engaged her own counsel rather than use a government lawyer.

Uh-oh.

The Labour Party is also dangerously close to defaulting on some party-busting loans, according to the indispensable Guido Fawkes:

Monday, December 18, 2006
Labour Due to Re-Pay 6,725,000 pound of “Commercial” Loans

This month and next month some major “commercial” loans are due to repaid:

Unity Trust Bank ?2,000,000.00 Unity rate + 2.00% 13/12/06

Co-operative Bank ?3,500,000.00 Base + 2.00% 31/12/06

Co-operative Bank ?1,225,000.00 Co-op rate + 2.00% 20/01/07

In the case of the small union controlled Unity Trust Bank the Financial Services Authority has put the bank on notice that it must report the risky Labour party loan situation monthly. If the loan is re-scheduled instead of repaid the FSA may have to take a closer look at the situation.

See here, here and here for more details.

Blairwise for 2007 I predict heavy smarm and legacy-talk from January (and the release of Bush’s Iraq ‘plan’) onwards, slipping into another PR blitz around early March and deepening to full-blown, shrieking tabloid-induced pychosis by late April as the arrests get ever closer to No. 10.

I shall enjoy every minute, not least because even if Inspector Knacker doesn’t get his man, the banks most assuredly will.

Read more: UK politics, Blair, Labour Party loans, Cash for honours,

In. Out. Shake It All About…

Published on December 19, 2006

Britain’s much-vaunted NHS, currently almost bankrupt due to New Labour’s ideologically neoliberal, market-based brand of incompetence, is nevertheless investing what is estimated to eventually be 31 billion pounds in a centralised national patient record database, known as The Spine.

Doctors, other health professionals and patients alike are opposed: given the propensity of UK government IT schemes to be shoddy, leaky, crap and easily compromised, a lot of people, including me, are not at all happy at the the thought of their confidential medical information being available to any petty bureaucrat or nosy parker, as will inevitably happen given the government’s IT project record so far.

At first there was no opt-out, then if you wanted to opt out you had to prove that you would suffer genuine mental distress if your records were put online. How the hell do you prove that before it’s happened?

The government has now given in and allowed patients to opt out without this necessity (how very nice of them) and the movement for everyone to opt out is growing apace. I’ll certainly be opting out – my notes run into several volumes and there’s no way I’m allowing access to my medical records out of my control at all.

The more that do opt out of this shabby piece of government deceit, the less viable the system becomes – if no-one’s in it, what use is it? The opt out movement is civil disobedience at its simplest, a simple ‘no’ against an unwarranted state intrusion. No-one seems to have a problem with medical records per se or that they should be held by your doctor or hospital: no, this is about who owns us, ourselves or the state as embodied by New Labour.

Whether the opt-out becomes massive and national is also a test of how strong the opposition to biometric ID cards is likely to be – if the populace rolls over supinely for this, then they’ll accept those too. Then we’ll really know where we stand.

Go here to find out more and how to opt out yourself.

Read more: UK politics, New Labour, NHS database, Opt-out