Blair

Spinning towards revolution?

Jock — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:11:22 +0000

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution? read more »

Labour's laws were made for breaking...

Jock — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 02:56:16 +0000

Rumour has it that T Blair is looking for yet another lucrative job, this time with Zurich Insurance .

Didn't they create the Proceeds of Crime Act to stop this sort of thing, and when is someone please going to invoke it against the grubby little sh*t?

Meanwhile, another rumour has it that John Prescott has had to settle for getting Pauline to call the numbers at the Hull East constituency Labour party bingo evenings to keep him in doughnuts. read more »

The best reason for voting no in an EU referendum?

Jock — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:51:52 +0000

Utter madness! Bliar for Europe?

Dear God, please, no! Or rmaybe, just perhaps, France wants Britain out? Alternatively, Sarkozy recognizes that Blair failed to do anything of any use during the last British rotating presidency that the best way to hamstring the whole organization would be to put the useless, lying, egomaniacal shit in charge permanently.

Tony Blair could be EU President - Telegraph:
By Toby Helm and Bruno Waterfield in Lisbon
Last Updated: 5:47pm BST 19/10/2007

Tony Blair has been placed in the frame to become the first permanent President of the EU after France launched a campaign to install him in the powerful new Brussels job.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, touted the former Prime Minister as his preferred candidate after Gordon Brown and fellow leaders agreed the EU Reform Treaty, which establishes the new post from January 2009.

Blair's divine commission

Jock — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:22:29 +0000

Do they still have "army surplus stores"? All the ones in Oxford were priced out of the retail property market years ago. Or maybe their stock was raided to send to our boys in Iraq.

Anyway, the reason I ask is that there's this assumption going about that Bliar will this week get his commission to go sort out the middle east, and, whilst the Guardian is here talking about "popular anger" in the middle east itself, I'm afraid that to my mind such is the inappropriateness of sending the man who has colluded shoulder to shoulder with George Bush in the continuing murder of so many in the Arab world that maybe now is the time to get prepared for WWIII.

I despair for the world when the global old-boys clubs of ex-leaders think Bliar is a suitable envoy to piss on the fire he helped stoke. Actually, it makes me feel physically sick. I was only just warming to the idea of some time without his smarmy spin-wracked cynical grin peering out at me from newspapers or television screens. If Bliar wants to do some community service I'd suggest limiting him to working with President Carter and Habitat for Humanity. Though the state he's left the UK affordable housing scene in probably means he'd have to start right here anyway.

Mind you, I'd hope the new Attorney General would see sense to appeal such a light sentence. Maybe a stint as an "internally displaced person" will instill some humility in him?

Technorati Tags: tony blair, iraq, middle east envoy

How Blair are you?

Jock — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:33:52 +0000

Oh dear!

No, Blair, we haven't misunderstood

Jock — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 00:40:52 +0000

The Guardian on Thursday presages a Downing Street Press-fest at which Tony Blair will apparently claim that we've all "misunderstood me over the Middle East".

Apparently...he will "face down his critics today over his controversial handling of the Middle East crisis by insisting that he has been working throughout for a ceasefire in Lebanon and that his position has been misunderstood. He will argue at a Downing Street press conference that he wanted a ceasefire, but only if it was coupled with a clear understanding that the Hizbullah militia would be disarmed."

So that'll be a "no" then Tony, we've understood you perfectly well. You don't actually give a stuff about the real people whose lives have been cut short and homes and livelihoods torn apart by what's been happening (actually on both sides but since Israel has all the responsibilities and moral capacity of a democratic nation state they bear most of the blame).

You're happiest with your seven good buddies tucked up in some posh hotel like prep schoolers playing that great game of Diplomacy or like the crowned heads posturing in the pier ballroom on "Oh what a lovely war!". You want a ceasefire but only once 20% of a country has been displaced or left utterly destitute. Can you imagine not wanting a ceasefire until after London and the South East region had been evacuated, bulldozed and occupied? No.

The "rules of war" and human rights were established to prevent a recurrence of razing villages, treating civilian areas as battle grounds to target your artillery at. I actually have more respect for what Israel are now doing - starting on the eyeball to eyeball anti-guerilla fighting on the ground - than the softening up and remote control village clearances by artillery and bombing (now acknowledged by Israel to have been completely intentional all along as some of us predicted).

You'd rather condone human rights abuses and war crimes when they're being carried out by the lot on "our side" (apparently) than stick up for what is right - the defense of the innocents (also on both sides). Presumably your party is worried that they'll never be allowed into International Labour Organization meetings ever again having surrendered any claim to being the champions of ordinary people.

I don't believe anyone can really talk properly about what happens in the future until the guns have fallen silent. The difference between that happening two weeks ago and next week will only have been that "our ally" achieved most of its illegal and immoral military aims before you made them stop with hundreds dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. And I have no doubt Hezbullah is now stronger by a few village butchers, bankers and undertakers because nobody else was going to help them fight for their homes, lands and livelihoods.

While governments are pushing options round tables thousands of miles away, hundreds of thousands of lives are being uprooted and devastated. The poor and excluded are always the victims of war.