Apparently some of the Blairite right of New Labour are in talks with Paddy Pantsdown over the possibility of defecting to the Lib Dems. As the Blairite right is well to the right of Thatcher, drove the most determined attack on civil liberties since 1818, launched a devastating illegal war on the basis of lies, and reintroduced torture as public policy, one would hope the Lib Dems would tell them where to get off.
The point of immediate dispute – the introduction of a 50p income tax rate on marginal income above £150,000 – is probably the only sensible thing Brown has done.
We have been here before. Remember Dr Death. Dr David Owen is now comfortably ensconsed in the huge Mayfair office of Uzbek billionaire gangster and convicted blackmailer Alisher Usmanov, whose extremely highly paid PR catamite Owen now is.
What has the UK has come to, when its former Foreign Secretary is the paid lapdog of the most criminal of all the Russian oligarchs!
If you were very shortsighted and in a bad light, it was possible not to realise what kind of creature Owen was before he abandoned Labour for the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance. (Although it is often forgotten now that support for Trident missiles was the shameful cause of that realignment). There can be no excuse now for the Lib Dems to ally with the Blairites.
If there are any real Liberals left in the Left Dems, as opposed to nastly little careerists, they should be in revolt over even the mention of the admission of just one Blairite. John Stuart Mill must be spinning in his grave.
Owen and the Wapping crew were always shits.
And dont forget that Polly Toynbee was an enthusiastic SDP member. Says it all. She’s distancing herself from Brown as fast as her keyboard can type now…
I fear however that politics being what it is the LDs will welcome any Labour defectors.
It may or may not have been misguided, but it wasn’t a war crime to topple Saddam Hussein. And for the record I ain’t no Blairite.
It may or may not have been misguided, but it wasn’t a war crime to topple Saddam Hussein. And for the record I ain’t no Blairite.
Frank,
The war was in itself a war crime – an illegal war of aggression.
There you have it, the extent of the insensitivity towards the supreme crime against humanity the crime of waging aggressive war, as per eloquent Justice Jackson in Nuremberg Trials, reduces the misanthropist to the level of cheering hairless baboons, whose reasoning, hovers around the erroneous; Saddam was a dictator, excuse.
Never mind the dictator, count the millions of dead, millions of incarcerated, and millions of refugees running away with just their clothes on their back, just to keep alive in one of the many neighbouring countries.
Alas, the careerist, given ascendancy by the arrangements set in place, will prevail and the scoundrels, war pimps, and expense scroungers will move onto the LibDems, all in an effort to keep their seats, for these know fine well, that in the coming elections these expense scroungers will be tossed out on their ears.
Fact is the ballot box stuffing, selection process nobbling, nepotist bunch of sharp operators having ran out of tricks, find changing party gives them another chance to put in another expense claim another day, all the while creating waves of death, destruction, and misery from our shores, and debt, fear, and despondency from with in our shores.
Love the smell of democracy in the morning, don’t you?
We had a nice little discussion about whether it was technically a war crime or a crime against peace over on Brian Barder’s blog a while back:
http://www.barder.com/ephems/1269
My feeling is that “war crime” is a useful shorthand for casual conversation but “crime against peace” is more accurate, at least in the sense in which the terms were used at Nuremberg.
@ Frank
Regime change is barred by Article 2(4) the UN charter which prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml
Picked this up on comments in the Postman Patel blog “An hiatus”…
http://tinyurl.com/d7qhbd
Craig,
You should celebrate a really successful week. You did all you could – and did it really well.
Get yourself down your local pub and see a live band.
If you turn up at mine – the drinks are on me.
Can you dance?
Tony
Its only according to the Telegraph that its ‘Blairites’ talking to the LibDems, that could just be code for people who aren’t raving state socialists but still don’t like Brown (which would include some of the war criminals, but also others).
I’ll wait to see who these people are if it gets that far before making a judgement.
I’d wondered what had happened to that calamitous careerist Owen, and am not surprised that he’s ended up as the mouthpiece of yet another criminal.
I’ve always thought that Blair was that arrogant buffoon’s last curse on British politics, and has led us to a situation where our formal politics is like that of the US or Ireland, i.e. where the two main parties are merely different cheeks of the same lardy, porcine arse.
I don’t understand why Blairites would jump to the LibDems. Surely they’re closer to the Tories – and Cameron is the Heir to Blair – and the Tories are a more likely route to self-aggrandisement?
Fancy Dr Acula and Usmanov being a double act! Well I never.
That must be the unspeakable and the uneatable.
http://img.metro.co.uk/i/pix/2007/08/sport/usmanovAFP_175x125.jpg
Any active member who has waited this long to leave the Labour Party has already lost my respect.
The party is clearly corrupt at every level that counts and unable to correct itself. It may still be able to win elections — though the next one looks pretty unlikely and it seems everyone knows it as they’re not really trying anymore — but it doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of righteousness.
I’d be surprised if the Lib Dems are any better but they’ll probably get my vote, if for no other reason than to encourage the growth of a three-party system. People talk about it like it’s a wasted vote but I don’t really care which of Labour or Conservative win so, in that respect, it’s wasted whatever happens.
If voting for parties that can’t win means that in 30 years time things look different and there’s more than a choice between two very similar parties, then that’s a far bigger win to me than any Labour vs Tory win ever could be.
(Of course, the other thing that needs to happen is for people like Rupert Murdoch to stop having such obscene influence over who people vote for. That old git doesn’t even hide the fact any more an openly threatens politicians.)
(And end to the party system entirely would be nice, too. And PR. And transferable votes…)
Matt Buck’s HACK cartoon of Usmanov –
http://bp0.blogger.com/_13_xaoz0kG4/RvTxnFq2tWI/AAAAAAAAARU/06DuwaERj_Q/s400/Mr_Usmanov_lores_220907.jpg
Craig: Prosecutor, judge, jury – bollocks!
Ed. Davis: UN: genuine war criminal origanization
Anyone now trying to defect from Nu-Labour should be rebuffed with the contempt they deserve.
The only parties near to their practices (as opposed to declared principles) are the terrible twins – UKIP and the BNP.
“The point of immediate dispute – the introduction of a 50p income tax rate on marginal income above £150,000 – is probably the only sensible thing Brown has done”.
It seems rather sbsurd that “Labour” politicians should take such exception to this. I thought a progressive tax regime was one of the central planks of any left-of-centre party. Polls show the new tax rate has the support of about two thirds of the electorate. Funny how the press is so against it: anything to do with the fact that editors and top journalists earn over 150k?
Interesting to recall that even the Thatcher government had a 60% top rate for ten years or so.
I think you might have got
mary at May 2, 2009 10:52 PM and
Frank at May 2, 2009 11:02 PM
mixed up.
I think mary might be upset.
Love
Paddy Pantsdown?
Craig, first that is very old and second where’s your solidarity?
The moderately articulate comment from “Frank” typifies the mindless attitude of the herd.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people butchered and emotionally scarred for life. The torture of thousands. The mass exploitation of the wealth of the country by the governing minority.
This could be a description of the conditions under Saddam but, in tragic truth, is a statement of events following an unprovoked, criminal attack by supposed armies of ‘liberation’. The attack was based upon lies – lies perpetrated to enable such exploitation and brutality to occur with the ‘support’ of the mindless herd in America and the U.K.
To claim that the invasion was to install ‘democracy’ when the majority of opinion in both the U.S.A. and the U.K. was against such action is a monstrous hypocrisy.
The identical comments posted by Frank – apart from showing a total inability to be creative – are , ‘prima facie’, evidence of the lack of intellectual, moral and human qualities so apparent in the hormonally challenged denizens of the primordial supporters of this crime against humanity.
Don’t hang any hopes on the Lib Dems, Craig. We’ve seen that their sole function in Scotland is as a life-support system for New Labour, and it’s been clear for years that NuLab would like them to perform the same role south of the border. Think of the promises that Brown must have made to Ming the Merciless to prevent an LD/SNP coalition in Edinburgh.
The best you can hope for is (a) a hung government after the next election and (b) the LDs cannot resist pressure from their grassroots to introduce PR. Each by itself is low probability, multiply probabilities together to get chance of both occurring. Result: keep voting for Scottish separation.
The judge says ‘the two main parties are merely different cheeks of the same lardy, porcine arse’. The British political arse is well on its mutant way to having three cheeks.
I find it …. how can I put this? quaint.
Yes, that’s it, Quaint – that you should still believe there to be any substantive differences between our main political parties when it comes to the Deep State agenda and epoch-defining issues facing the country and humanity in general. Surely you must have sussed by now that our ‘for public consumption’ POLITICS is pure theatre, designed to produce a broadly accepted narrative of history, current affairs and plans for the future that are plausible (patriotic, feel-good stuff etc), but bear no resemblance whatever to reality. Vast energies are expended on the infightings of tribal political allegiance and give the appearance of healthy debate together with power and influence over events. Appearances are usually deceptive though; and so it is in this case where they provide cover for massive, systematic ‘Deep State’ deception. Our problem is that the ‘Deep State’ agenda is the product of forces outside mere party political structures and largely impervious to their influence.
I’ve just finished re-reading Orwell’s 1984 – again. It really does contain some truly remarkable insights into our current condition.
The TRUE face of the Lib Dems…
tinyurl.com/dh7d9s
“Councillors leave Aberdeenshire ruling group in protest over Trump fiasco”…
tinyurl.com/c4ftah
Tory/New Labour/Lib Dems…They are ALL in truth just one party.