History's verdict? 7/10 I reckon - strong on stability, modernisation and getting rid of tyrants, but far too many stupid wheezes like faith schools and cash-for-honours to entirely avoid disgrace.
1. Your Blair-rating, pls. 2. Suggestions for next PM?
PF 1. See above... 2. Gor Don Brow - which is just as well, really, given it's a one-horse race. I reckon a dour, obsessive Scot is exactly what our over-fluffied culture needs... think we've had quite sufficient of emoting after 10 years of it.
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1. 6/10 - started well - but the whole Bush and God thing undid him - hoping for a mental strong finish, saying what he really thinks, telling the shadow cabinet what a bunch of dicks they are, shouting things like "I have nothing but contempt for this court!" in a dramatic voice in the commons during question time, blaming blacks for stuff, etc 2. Gordon Brown, all substance, no style. I like the old school ministerness of him - like some Victorian old sod.
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I couldn't give a fuck who the Prime Minister is now and I couldn't give a fuck who's going to be Prime Minister next. I don't know if it's because I've got other more pressing things in my life at the moment but I couldn't give a toss about any of that stuff. I'm pretty firm on my stance that everyone involved in politics is a despicable, nest-feathering shit.
posted
I pretty much agree with Ben's verdict - I think he's done OK, despite the Have Your Sayers who would carp on about how Britain is literally in the worst condition it's ever been and is now a third world country etc etc. Mummy - I mean, Octavia - was reading me bits of a history book in bed the other day (can't read myself) and the gist of it was that all this stuff about a vicious underclass nand Britain going downhill and all the rest of it was just as much of a relentless scaremongering campaign in Edwardian times as it is now, reported in precisely the same terms in The Daily Mail. It would have been funny, if it didn't reveal the depressing stupidity of everyone, ever.
Next PM is obviously going to be Brown, but I reckon he'll hand over to Cameron quite quickly, and that you probably won't notice much difference in the transition.
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Interestingly I was watching some show theother day, maybe yesterday, possibly on the history channel, which pointed out that the UK (England in particular) has always had a problem with immigrants, violence and poor health. In fact, when you really look at it, we're better off now than we have been at several notable points in history.
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quote:Originally posted by Ringo: In fact, when you really look at it, we're better off now than we have been at several notable points in history.
Eh? Surely we're better off now than at any other point in history, ever?
Which era are we supposed to be yearning for- the tuberculous, nuclear holocaust-fearing, contraceptionless golden 1950s, when you never had to lock your doors as all people owned were a family bible and a few in season vegetables, the idyllic flea-ridden, mud-grubbing Middle Ages, or the glorious 1980s- the last, imperious heyday of once Great Britannia?
I think Blair did ok, considering.
Good: N Ireland minimum wage heavily subsidised museums
Naughty: Iraq ID cards tuition fees
What exactly was the alternative, anyway?
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The BBC4 Edwardian stuff has been great for this sort of thing - the intelligent elite basically calling for the mass execution of hoi poloi was a great programme. But yeah, history is littered with groups being blamed for shortcomings - normally Jews, Christians and Gays
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As long as they replace Blair with someone whom the US government has full control over, I guess it really doesn't make much difference to me personally.
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I think it’s a fairly unique opportunity in modern times, to see what happens when the country is run by a grassroots politician, not someone obsessed with image and spin. Let’s face it, Brown just isn’t a charismatic enough person to have ever won an election by himself. It’s a sad reflection of the state of the nation perhaps, but it’s something which has been caused by the media. In the past, it didn’t really matter if you were unattractive, not a brilliant public speaker, or even a bit sleazy, so long as you did all the important Prime Ministery stuff well enough. I think Brown could be just what this country needs.
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The whole War on Terror thing is such a pity because in almost every other way he's been a quite miraculous Prime Minister and Labour have done a lot of really impressive things (though I do wonder whether stuff like Northern Ireland and new technology and giving interest rates to the Bank of England would've just sort of happened anyway).
Unfortunately, the Iraq blunder is one of the biggest mistakes ever made by a British Prime Minister and will impact on all of our lives for decades to come. It completely eclipses all of his other achievements. And it was driven solidly by Blair personally - as he is the first to admit, whenever anyone asks. Such a shame.
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quote:Originally posted by Nathan Bleak: a relentless scaremongering campaign in Edwardian times as it is now, reported in precisely the same terms in The Daily Mail.
The thing I loved about the recent French election was that the Daily Mail saw fit to lecture the French on how they had to become more like the British (ie. by voting Sarkozy). This, of course, the same Daily Mail that depicts everyday life in Britain as more or less equivalent to being boiled alive in your own shit.
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Have Your Say displays its usual flair for fuckheaded ignorance.
quote: As the worst prime minister of the worst government that Britain has ever had. Under Labour, the police and the courts have become a joke,Britain has become the dustbin of the world, we are being taxed to the hilt, personal freedom has been attacked as never before, crime has gone through the roof, electoral fraud has become commonplace in Labour councils, and it is difficult to find a minister who is not a complete buffoon. I only wish he would take his whole sleazy party with him when he goes
Barry, Peterborough
I'm going to be best man at the wedding of this chick who is partially responsible for the tide of effluence Have Your Say beaches on our collective unconscious. I wish there were some way I could get revenge on her. I was thinking of doing a Have Your Say on her wedding, but I've no idea how that would work.
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That was a rubbish HYS response- he didn't mention immigrants once, or call him Bliar.
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
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6/10 if I am being mean, 7 if I'm being generous. I can't decide, so I'll go for six and a half.
Good NHS Wage Parity Building schools Building hospitals General regeneration stuff Intervention in Kosovo
Bad Civil liberties erosion Nanny state rubbish The god and George Bush thing Being a handwringing martyr
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quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poetess: That was a rubbish HYS response- he didn't mention immigrants once, or call him Bliar.
OK, try this post of double-parked cretinology...
quote: Tony Blair's legacy will be, that he alone, has made Great Britain a much more dangerous place in which to live.
Chris, Richmond
Indeed he did, but for not the reasons that you would like to pretend. Uncontrolled immigration, multiculturalism and the appeasement of radical Muslims are the things that have made Britain a more dangerous place, not foreign policy.
Anthony Karas
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
And Bad list added to:
Inner City Academies Refusing to implement the Tomlinson report.
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
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I thought you didn't care?
quote:Blair has been an absolute diamond. Better than Churchill or Thatcher. I say, he's leaving too soon! You whingers will miss him when he's gone.
Country has bobbed along okay. Reading things like the Unicef Child Poverty there is grey ground of things that are more to with our changing lifestyles, perceptions and attitudes and things we should directly hold government to account for. The decline in social mobility has got to be the biggest failure of the Blair years. Reading that the wealth of those on the Sunday Times rich list has trebled in 10 years under Labour government doesn't seem right to my (outmoded?) ideas.
quote:Originally posted by Ringo: Let’s face it, Brown just isn’t a charismatic enough person to have ever won an election by himself. It’s a sad reflection of the state of the nation perhaps, but it’s something which has been caused by the media.
This is true but I like the fact that Brown will get his chance. You simply wouldn't see that sort of thing happening in America, where the presidential candidates better be damn good at putting on a show or they don't stand a chance. I think its fantastic that the Brits will elect a boring politician who will get on and do the job.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: The whole War on Terror thing is such a pity
The whole War on Terror? The largest single loss of British lives in a terrorist attack was 9/11 (67 killed). An attack that happened way before the Iraq War, indeed the planning of which commenced during the touchy-feely, feel-your-painy Clinton era.
Ought we to have left the Taliban in power, leaving Bin Laden and his associates with secure bases and a substantial organisational infrastructure (including training camps through which tens of thousands of jihadis passed)?
Somewhat closer to home, there's an ongoing threat from individuals - like the bunch convicted the week before last - for whom, Iraq or no Iraq, their fellow British citizens are 'slags' and 'kufr' deserving of nothing less than bloody death. I don't agree with some of the fronts on which the campaign against non-state terror is being waged (ID cards, for example), but to pretend that there isn't an active and potentially murderous adversary out there is crazy.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: Unfortunately, the Iraq blunder is one of the biggest mistakes ever made by a British Prime Minister and will impact on all of our lives for decades to come.
Where does the blunder lie, exactly? In the fact that Iraq was attacked at all, or in the botched handling of the transition from failed state to fledgling democracy? Had the invasion of Iraq led to a brief, properly-secured and stable occupation and then on to democracy, would it still have been as much of a scandal and a blunder in your eyes?
The descent into bloody mayhem seems like a no-brainer now, but this wasn't the case at all in the weeks immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Major errors resulted from the sidelining of the State Department (which had prepared a 900-page plan on governing post-invasion Iraq) in favour of the Rumsfeld-Cheney axis: the disbanding of the Iraqi army, the non-payment of state employees, the failure to secure Iraq's borders and the failure to impose law and order were all manifestations of this. Had any or all of these been handled differently, the outcome could have been very different.
Blair, I believe, trusted that Colin Powell and his people had the intelligence, insight and resources to effect a swift and orderly transition from invasion to occupation to handover - as indeed they probably did, but ended up being muscled out by the Pentagon (esp. Rumsfeld) which was ferociously opposed to 'nation-building' of any kind for ideological reasons.
Clearly Blair misread the way the internal dynamics of the Bush executive were heading, but the identification of the 'wrong path' is always a lot easier in hindsight.
Saddam had spent the better part of a decade running rings aroung the international community and, specifically, the weapons inspectors - if he didn't in the end posess WMD, he certainly behaved as though he did. A 'failure to imagine' the worst was one of the key reasons the 9/11 plot wasn't stopped - in trying to overcompensate for this, it seems the willingness to imagine the worst somewhat ran away with the Bush and Blair administrations. Blair's nightmare scenario - that state-manufactured WMD might ultimately get into the hands of Islamist terror groups - might seem laughable now, but had anything of that kind actually happened would anyone have been romotely sympathetic to protestations of "we couldn't be sure"? Intelligence, by its nature is never especially hard and fast and a judgement call, at some point, has to be made.
Weighing on the one side the possibility that Saddam might not be a murderous dictator willing to use proxies to deliver lethal attacks on his old enemies against, on the other side, the Iraqi dictator's real-world record over 30 years, I guess Blair made a judgement call that led to a terrible outcome.
Whether a decision the other way might have led to a 'better' result isn't necessarily easy to say - the two biggest psychological boosts to the jihadist cause prior to 9/11 were when the US peacekeepers pulled out of the Lebanon following the car-bombing of the marines in Beirut - and then in Somalia, when US troops performing a 'mission of mercy' were driven out by bloodthirsty Islamist warlords... a retreat for which Bin Laden subsequently attempted to claim credit.
The lesson of these two instances? "Just leaving them alone" - in other words, retreating in the face of casualties - tends to embolden extremist groups rather than placate them. US and UK troops being driven out of Iraq with their tails between their legs might give many in The West momentary satisfaction - but on previous form, I'd reckon the trouble this would store up for the future would be incalculable.
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The mistakes in Iraq are down to hubris from both the UK and the US (sadly, more so the US) - the biggest issue was that we sided with a country that steamed in without the UN approval. The UN is a useless beast at times, but this didn't help matters one bit. I think that we would have been terrorist targets, much like the US was for Sept 11th, before Iraq anyway, and any attempt to blame the july tube and bus bombings on Iraq ring very empty indeed.
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quote:Originally posted by ben: Clearly Blair misread the way the internal dynamics of the Bush executive were heading, but the identification of the 'wrong path' is always a lot easier in hindsight.
I've had words with you before about this "hindsight" thing, Ben. Just because you yourself were completely unable to foresee the blatantly obvious outcome of the invasion of Iraq does not mean that millions of others didn't.
Afghanistan is a complete waste of time and lives too. It is a different situation, in that there is a visible enemy to fight and there are UN troops from many countries involved, but the Afghans have been fighting in that terrain for hundreds of years and no one has yet subdued them. Most of them have got sod all to do with terrorism or the nebulous al-Qaeda (an "organisation" which is about as vague as "the anarchists"), but are simply ready to fight anyone that fancies their chances.
Yes, the blunder in Iraq does lie squarely with the original invasion. Of course it does. It was entirely without justification. Saddam was a murdering scum, but what has happened (all of which was clearly predicted by many people long before the invasion began) eclipses his crimes many times over. It may not be the Americans or the British who are doing the killing (most the time), but we created the battleground and we continue to fan the flames.
It will take decades to recover from this. 9/11 was one of those events, like Omagh for example, which made so many supporters of terrorism step back and ask if there was a better way to sort out our differences. Bush completely ignored that opportunity. He had the world at his command for a while there, and he blew it totally, and Blair was right behind him. For America and Britain to have both had leaders like that at a moment like that is a fucking tragedy, and that is the way history will see it, however much you want to ridicule me for saying it now.
I'm not saying that we should ignore terrorists. We have to protect ourselves. That's something we're very, very good at in this country as it happens. We've had enough experience of it, that's for sure. And intelligence successes like the foiled Bluewater plot are very encouraging. But I'm absolutely certain there would have been a lot less fledgling terrorists to worry about if we hadn't steamed in to Iraq and Afghanistan and had instead clearly shown our desire to talk and to negotiate.
Since Thatcher we seem to have had this fixed official policy that we don't ever negotiate with terrorists, as if that's going to make them think twice or something. The terrorists themselves may be complete nutters, but the support for them comes from desperation and frustration and a feeling of complete injustice among the people they claim to represent. If we can address those problems and basically not rise to the taunting of these psychopaths, just keep dealing with the people and their recognised leaders (even if those leaders come out in vocal support of terrorism) then, in time, the support for terrorism will fade and support for civilised negotiation will rise.
We need to break this ridiculous circle of aggression and reaction, even if it means backing down quite a long way. The problem is that people see that as "cowardice" and "losing face". Quite the opposite. It would take real guts to do that, but it would work. It would allow the Bin Ladens to wave their AKs around for a bit, but it would also remove their targets.
We're never going to agree on all this though and, for some unfathomable reason, it's still your lot that hold the reins and decide what we actually do, so all I end up doing is posting on here about once every six months, presumably looking like an idiot to most people. And still the killing goes on and on, day after day, and you and doc d go on and on thinking it's all worthwhile.
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quote:Tony Blair has dramatically withdrawn his decision to resign this morning, explaining that he had woken up feeling that he’d made a terrible mistake, and realizing that he would quite like to stay on for another ten years after all.
posted
I'm not going to add anything to this thread, partly because I've nothing to say that others haven't said and partly because, like BM, I'm not into politics enough to make a worthwhile contribution, but thought you'd like to see this:
quote:Originally posted by ben: Clearly Blair misread the way the internal dynamics of the Bush executive were heading, but the identification of the 'wrong path' is always a lot easier in hindsight.
I've had words with you before about this "hindsight" thing, Ben. Just because you yourself were completely unable to foresee the blatantly obvious outcome of the invasion of Iraq does not mean that millions of others didn't.
Hold up there, old man. The point about hindsight is specifically with reference to where the true locus of power lay in the Bush administration. Very little of what happens on the world stage is inevitable - had the full weight of the US military been brought to bear on securing post-invasion Iraq it's not unrealistic that a more orderly transition of power could have taken place.
The three or four key mistakes that were made (insufficient occupation forces, failure to secure borders, disbandment of Iraqi army, security vaccuum leading to looting and breakdown of Iraqi state machinery) were all things that not only could have been handled differently but - maddeningly - were all things that army and State Department experts had warned against.
Had Rumsfeld listened to and acted upon the expertise that existed within other areas of the US Government, the most important precursors to the insurgency could have been avoided or neutralised.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: Afghanistan is a complete waste of time and lives too. It is a different situation, in that there is a visible enemy to fight and there are UN troops from many countries involved, but the Afghans have been fighting in that terrain for hundreds of years and no one has yet subdued them. Most of them have got sod all to do with terrorism or the nebulous al-Qaeda (an "organisation" which is about as vague as "the anarchists"), but are simply ready to fight anyone that fancies their chances.
This is crazy. Afghanistan became a terrorist haven through exactly the policy of neglect and isolation you prescribe. There's a big difference between the local warlords jostling for territory and the Saudi/Pakistan-backed groups that coalesced around Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Eradicating these groups will certainly be the work of decades (backed up by a solid reconstruction effort) but that doesn't make it any less necessary.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: It will take decades to recover from this. 9/11 was one of those events, like Omagh for example, which made so many supporters of terrorism step back and ask if there was a better way to sort out our differences.
Other than New York-based funders of Republican terrorism, I haven't heard of a single 'supporter of terrorism' who felt like this. 9/11 was about propaganda of the deed - a demonstration that the US was vulnerable to attack was an incitement to further attacks: anyone who'd wanted before 9/11 to see America burning was hardly going to have a change of heart when Bin Laden scored a home run.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: But I'm absolutely certain there would have been a lot less fledgling terrorists to worry about if we hadn't steamed in to Iraq and Afghanistan and had instead clearly shown our desire to talk and to negotiate.
Don't know if you recall the Taliban, but they weren't really the negotiating type. As for Bin Laden - is it the case that all you have to do is kill a few thousand people and suddenly you get the negotiating rights of an elected representative of a nation of millions? Bin Laden represents no country - not even a mass movement in any real sense (as you yourself pointed out) so if one were to negotiate with him exactly what would any guarantee or offer he presented be worth?
As for Saddam, while 10 years of 'negotiation' was crawling along with him, dozens more crazy palaces got built, thousands more dissidents were tortured and killed and hundreds of thousands more Iraqis (mainly children) pershed from malnutrition and preventable diseases. Maybe you forsaw some massive change of heart on his part but I can't say I recall it that way.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: The terrorists themselves may be complete nutters, but the support for them comes from desperation and frustration and a feeling of complete injustice among the people they claim to represent.
Desperation and frustration of - principally - young men living in states like Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia where privileged elites hog all the reources and social mobility is nil. For the past 30 years the security apparatus of these states has assiduously displaced the latent aggression of the violent minority against external targets: firstly the Soviets in Afghanistan, then America and the rest of 'The West'.
If you think that US imperialism is the root cause of all this, you need to look a little more closely at the countries involved.
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do i want to get into six pages of rambling, unresolvable political ping-pong with ben? if i don't, am i backing down? if i do, am i just typing the same stuff out again and again with no hope of a happy conclusion anyway?
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By the way Ben now we face the major threat posed by Irans' sponsership of terrorism in Iraq. Even the usually left wing Guardian newspaper are warning of the threat posed by Iran because of its meddling in Iraq with its supply of arms to the insurgents.
Also when we look at pre war Iraq, Saddams' regime did have strong links to international terrorism. It gave a safe haven to one of the 1993 WTC bombers, supportted PLO terrorism. Bagdad at one time even having a PLO HQ. Numerous contacts also took place between Iraqi secret service personnel and top Al Qaeda chiefs as outlinded in the Connection by Stephen F. Hayes. Saddams' Iraq also used terrorism against its own people such as the gassing of the Kurds and ariel bombing of of both Shia and Kurdish areas before the northern and southern no fly zones were imposed.
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