Tony Blair

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

Gordon Brown, New Labour, Tony Blair, UK politics
Published on 1 Comment on New Neighbours To Blair- Get Off My Lawn, You Oik!

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:

The Connaught Square Squirrel Hunt Ball 2006, Tatler

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?

Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship

Civil liberties, New Labour, Tony Blair, UK politics
Published on 1 Comment on Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship

Via Blood and Treausre, comes this story about the ultimate New Labour policy initiative:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review.

Examples include an expectation that a local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down. Parents might also be asked to sign individually tailored contracts with a school setting out what the parents must do at home to advance their child’s publicly-funded education.

The police might also promise to achieve a specific response time in a local area, so long as an agreement is struck on the local law and disorder priorities. The aim is to build on the government’s rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking “a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes”.

Here we have everything that makes New Labour so awful in one neat package: a distrust of the people, the centralised authoritarianism, the fetishisation of business as a model to run government services, the rampant managerialism. It is the logical outcome of nine years of New Labour policies, the last cornerstone of Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship. It is impossible to be a democracy if the state can exclude citizens from the services it provides based on some nebolous criteria it has drawn up itself. Moreover, it’s just as easy to exclude the critic of the local MP from receiving benefits for “antisocial thoughts” as it is to deny a smoker a new lung.

All in the name of “people like us”, the middle classes. Even if the middle classes, if they knew what they were getting, are not stupid enough to actually want it. But then again, the way it will be sold to the public is by pretending it will only apply to welfare scroungers, overweight chavs on estates still *gasp* smoking and terrorist sympathisers. Not to people with 2.4 children living in Islington who know which course goes with which wine, no…


(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)

Home News : Blair On The Outs?

Tony Blair, UK politics
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Anyone who saw clips of Tony Blair’s performance at the Labour Party Conference could see – though Blair couldn’t, because they were behind him – senior party figures, notably John Prescott – though that might be be indigestion or natural belligerence – glaring with barely-disguised, malevolent intent after the last week’s humilating defeat by the Lib-Dems in an obscure Scotish by-election. It’s not looking good for Blair or Brown for that matter.

I’ll leave aside for the moment the vexed issue of whether Scotland, with its devolved government, should even have MP’s at Westminster, (what’s known as the ‘West Lothian Question’).

Oh, what the hell, it’s the weekend and I need a wonky digression with my croissants.

West Lothian Question

Named after Tam Dalyell, MP for West Lothian, who raised the question of the participation of MPs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the UK Parliament after devolution.

In a debate on devolution to Scotland and Wales on 14 November 1977, Mr Dalyell said: ?For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate?at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on British politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.?

It’s like this – without Labour’s Scottish MP’s votes, the government would look very sparse indeed and their majority would be cut – there are 72 Scots MPs out of a total 646 , 41 of whom are Labour members. With a majority of only 61 in the Commons, it’s no wonder Blair is quite happy to let the West Lothian question lie. He wants no abolition or diminution of the national role of Scottish MP’s, and opposes any attempt to untie this constitutional knot. Without the existence of the West Lothian question, the government and Blair’s New Labour are screwed.

Which is why Dumfermline’s massive swing to the Lib Dems, despite their recent sex scandals and upsets, was so important, When you’re that reliant on Scotland and Scotland is against you to the tune of overturning an 11,000 majority, and the turnout in a minor election is 49 per cent, higher than in any byelection in the last Parliament and higher than in all but two by-elections since 1997, well, then you’ve got trouble.

A sample of Scots opinion on Labour’s economic performance , for example:

The old divisions over the constitution, between left and right, are vanishing. The battle lines over the economy are blurring, as people begin to focus less on ideology and more on the mystery of why the Scottish economy has performed so badly for so long. The revelations in recently-released cabinet papers about how UK ministers in the 1970s conspired to conceal the extent of Scotland’s oil wealth has created a widespread sense of weary exasperation. It’s kind of what we all knew anyway ? but discovering that they were so blatant about it, really does rankle.

Add these economic woes, all the lies over Iraq, the travails of the Scottish regiments, environmental worries, and all the other toxic ingredients to the purely Scots gripes and it’s potently negative, which bodes ill for Tony’s anointed successor Gordon Brown, who seems to think he’s just going to stroll into No. 10 with no democratic input from the voters.

Brown’s seat is right next door to Dumfermline, and Brown is reputed to be a power in Scottish Labour. That he didn’t spot this defeat coming is giving even the uber-faithful severe doubts as his future leadership. It also makes his existing place in the Commons look very precarious indeed. Double-plus ungood for Gordon, and not good for Tony either, who wants to control the party from beyond the political grave, as it were ( where grave = a comfy chaimanmanship at the Carlyle Group, but that’s a whole other story) .

The government is on shaky ground as it is, with backbench rebellions looming on Blair’s ‘legacy’ education and public services reforms, and defeat over ID cards possible. Did I mention Iraq and civil liberties? Blair himself has a media-wise and telegenic opponent in David Cameron, who, whatever you think of his politics, makes Blair and Brown both look old, tired and raddled. Blair’s best shot at Cameron, the purloined from Rove ( which act speaks words in itself) ‘flip-flop’ comment, has failed to take like they hoped.

It will be poetic justice should it be Scotland that brings down New Labour, since they’ve sent so many of their young people to their illegal war. A total of 16 Scottish soldiers, out of a total 100 British deaths, have given their lives for lies since the war in Iraq started and Scots regiments served multiple tours, only to be shat on from a great height by Blair’s amalgamation of the historic Scots regiments and his cuts to actual defence, as opposed to military/ industrial, funding. Labour has taken Scotland for granted for far too long.

All of this uncertainty was reflected in Blair’s jumpy demeanour yesterday, and his desperate ad-libbing as he was greeted by silence from the party, and hostile, hungry suspicion by his colleagues was just plain embarassing. They could smell the fear coming off him, and it’s only a matter of time before they pounce. I must say I’m enjoying his discomfort hugely.

And now the PM can’t even count on Brown to carry on his New Labour project from No. 10. The remainders of the real Labour party’d better start making coalition noises at the Lib Dems.