Sunday 18 July 2010

Blair To Blame For Brown

Quite aside from all his other disastrous decisions, mainly on foreign policy, it seems perfectly fair to me that Blair be blamed for not seeing while he was Prime Minister that Britain wasn't saddled with a successor he himself thought was unfit to govern. This is, according to Andrew Rawnsley in his extraordinarily excoriating assault on virtually the entire Labour administration, the thing for which Blair, ultimately, is most guilty. It's a heck of a read and should be disastrous for all Labour's leadership candidates, tainted as they are with the charge of cowardice, arch and chronic dishonesty and, simply put, self-interested misgovernance. Anyway, here's a taste of something which, if you haven't already read it, is well worth a look:
If Blair thought that Brown was unfit to be prime minister – and there's now lots of evidence that this is precisely what Blair thought – he had an obligation to his party and his country to do something about it. At the very least, he should have, as he could have, ensured that there was a contest for the succession in 2007 rather than allow Brown to be crowned without proper scrutiny. It was one of Blair's most selfish acts and a gross dereliction of duty to swan off to make his millions while leaving his party and country to cope with the consequences of a Brown premiership.
The implication from this is that by the time he had finally given in to the forces of hell unleashed by Brown in the form of Balls, Wheelan et al in 2006, Blair simply didn't give a toss about what happened next. A more damning indictment of the man as Prime Minister is simply inconceivable, even one involving his misleading the House of Commons, the country and the world over WMDs in Iraq. It's actually quite difficult accurately to describe a person like that, whose self-interest and vanity is only trumped by his greed and dishonesty. In some ways if one views it in the light of this unforgivable dereliction of duty, as Rawnsley rightly calls it, Blair ends up as an even worse national leader than Brown, difficult though that might be for some (like me) to swallow.

If you do accept Rawnsley's characterisation of Blair, it is, however, perfectly possible to argue that he was worse than Brown as a man and as a leader. The only difference between the two frauds being, therefore, that Blair was a far better con man than Brown ever could be, which meant that Blair was able to trick the country into believing him and then voting for him. By contrast, Brown was just Brown: paranoid, delusional, vicious, incompetent even in disguising his many falsehoods and, ultimately, a total electoral liability and a catastrophe for the nation.

The impact of these realisations on the Labour leadership campaign as I said should be massive. All the candidates are as discredited as each other for failing to make the decision Blair couldn't be ar*ed to make and stopping Brown once it was crystal clear he was utterly hopeless. As Rawnsley says, quite fairly and quite mildly in truth:
Andy Burnham was one of the nodding dogs who would declare to TV cameras that the cabinet had every confidence in Gordon Brown when the reverse was the case. Ed Balls ran the thuggish Brownite machine and the decade-long insurgency against Tony Blair to put his master in Number 10. Ed Miliband makes pious noises denouncing "factionalism" as if he is a saintly figure who never had anything to do with it. "The emissary from Planet Fuck" – as he was known among Blair's aides during the civil war – was at the heart of the Brown faction.It is a bit tricky for David Miliband. He was one of the senior members of the cabinet who knew Brown was taking them to defeat and failed to act before it was too late.
So they all should be screwed - and rightly so. For all his hypocrisy, Mandelson doesn't really matter because he's not a leadership candidate. So, assuming (and this is a big assumption) the MSM ends its own version of Labourist dishonesty and begins to treat the rest with the contempt they should have coming to them for their pathetic behaviour in propping up Brown, the only untainted candidate in the Labour leadership race is, hilariously, Diane Abbott!

Either way, and this is essentially Rawnsley's conclusion, Labour is truly, deservedly and royally buggered. And in the end, of course, they themselves are the ones who are to blame for it. After all, Blair only gave us Brown because he'd given up, and that's how history will judge him. But the Milibands, Burnham and Balls (and Mandelson) are the ones who propped the disastrous loser up. That was unforgivable - and the country isn't going to forgive them, ever.

Now, thankfully, their past seems finally to be catching up with them. Soon there'll be nowhere left for them to hide any more and no amount of continued lying will save their collective political bacon. If the PLP is stupid enough to elect one of them, (and it's almost certain that it is that stupid) then they should prepare to be out of power for decades, if not forever. Mind you, exactly the same thing will happen if they choose bonkers Abbott.

Catch 22 for the Labourist wreckers - and music to my ears!

7 comments:

  1. I agree with you on every count (except the last one, but more of that in a minute).

    They are an appalling bunch of liars and cheats who would say anything to get their red boxes and ministerial cars. They fawned over Brown, because he was the one with the power. You can be Foreign Secretary one day and a back bench MP the next, and it’s all at the whim of the PM. Perhaps, on mature reflection, this is not a good way to do business, but they all bought into it.

    Blair is a war criminal with the blood of tens of thousands of totally innocent Iraqis on his hands. I wonder how he would have felt about his half-wit friend launching “shock and awe” on the population of Baghdad had his son been there. And what for...? To win the Congressional Medal, a now totally devalued piece of junk. To have photographs on the mantelpiece of him with a mentally defective cowboy? Well, at least he may have grandchildren to show them to, unlike many Iraqis. And he calls himself a Christian (and sadly the Pope welcomes him with open arms).

    If he is a Christian I guess he will know what’s coming to him. I bet he’s not looking forward to death.

    I only disagree with your last statement because I truly believe that we need opposition. All governments do, although god knows we’ve had none in either Westminster or Edinburgh for a very long time.

    As the Liberals have now sold all their principles for a few cabinet seats and a referendum that they will lose on a PR system that isn’t a PR system and are now doomed completely (I’d be surprised if there were many more that 10 of them at the next election), I think that we need to have a strong and effective Labour Party in opposition and ready to take over in at absolute most 10 years.

    Parties (as we have seen) become stale after 2 terms of government, and senior politicians begin to believe the shit that they spin about themselves, no matter how obscenely untrue it usually is.

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  2. Fair comment all round. It is something with Blair, isn't it, that his first Mephestophelean pact, made with whoever was wielding the necessary clout at the time to get him elected leader of first the Labour party (Mandelson) and then the country (Murdoch et al), was followed by two or even three more such pacts? There's the one with Gordon Brown (expensive for us, that one), then the one with George Bush Jr (Iraq) and finally the one with whoever it is that's made him a millionaire many times over (who knows?).

    He's quite a piece of work this Blair character: Faust only had the one go! No wonder Blair (apparently) fears for his eternal soul and has gone to what he thinks is the most heavyweight version of Christianity - expecting salvation, no doubt - as a result. Someone should tell him that it doesn't work like that. He has to give it all back first and face the music of his own accord. Hey, maybe they already have told him...

    As for the Labour party, well, I thoroughly agree with your point that we need a healthy opposition in this country for democracy to work properly, but that doesn't mean it has to be the Labour party (or the Lib dems for that matter). You know what I think will happen? I think the left of the Lib dems, after being spurned by the coalition government, and the many moderates of the Labour party, after a disastrous leadership election, will join together to form a new centre left party. Labour will be left as a rump of socialists and the centre right liberals will stay with the Tories. (Not sure what will happen to the right of the Tory party - they'll probably join UKIP or quit).

    Point is, I can envisage vast changes after this period of Labour implosion and delusion. People are beginning to think of them as a total joke and, unlike the Tories after '97, it's quite clear that a lot of those people come from within the party itself. That's a scale of disillusionment not even the Tories could imagine at their lowest ebb in 2001.

    Rawnsley is right, you see. There is nothing more corrosive than lies - especially when its the chief liars who keep on telling the same ones over and over and over again. As I said, I really do think Labour is facing an existential peril (just like, one hopes, Tony Blair is - moreso even than Brown!).

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  3. DT
    I worry that you are overlooking one thing, and that is the underbelly of our Society that has been brainwashed into supporting Labour.

    Despite the most appalling record in history of any Government (even previous Labour Governments) there is still a substantial bulk of the intellectually brain-dead who STILL believe that Labour is the Party they should vote for, despite the most overwhelming evidence that it is THEY who have suffered the most under Labour.

    And sadly it is that precise caste of society that is procreating with ever-increasing growth, whilst the more intelligent members of society are actually reducing the number of children, and thus weakening that particular gene-pool, whilst the uneducatable, ignorant, arrogant, beer-swilling, pot-bellied, foul-mouthed (and that is just the women !) benefit abusing, workshy yobs, continue to breed without restriction.

    The horrifying thing is that under the malign influence of the various Leftists and fantasists, who are seeking their own agrandishment and preferrment, there is every likelihood that this vast and increasing underbelly will form the greater part of the Electorate in due course.

    Unable to logically reason, Politically naive and open to persuasion by promises of unrestrained benefits by the Left and Labour, they will simply do what their fathers and mothers have done before and vote back in a Labour Government without having the intellectual capability to understand the tragedy of that.

    Democracy can only work properly when voters can make informed decisions based upon their own particular beliefs, not on the basis of some Leftist propoganda founded on lies, distortions of the truth, disingenuous statements, and the Political revision of history towards their stance.

    During Mrs Thatcher's time in office, public spending continued to rise year on year but to listen to Labour and the Left you would never believe it. Again history continues to be revised by the Left who continue to peddle the myth that Mrs Thatcher destroyed the Mining Industry - something that was an inevitable outcome of continuing reductions in the demand for coal, coupled with coal imports subsidised not only by illegally by our so called EU partners, but also by LEFT WING and Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

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  4. I fear I agree with the thrust of your eloquent complaint, Old Timer. But I would temper it with a challenge: it's up to people like you (and me, I suppose) to make sure that those who have been misled (lied to and betrayed, actually) for so long by the malcontent parasites that masquerade as intellectual socialists are led out of the darkness of state dependency and into the light of compassionate individualism which is, after all, humanity's default setting.

    All the best philosophers say so.

    But that's no mean task. Let's get on with it!

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  5. You're so eloquent denver. I so envy you your ability to nail what you want to say with all the right words...

    Makes me shiver sometimes....

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  6. You are 'avin a larf, right, tris? And at my expense, too!

    Suits me :) (I deserve it.)

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  7. Nope... actually I meant it.

    I love the way you use words.... being an English professional and being well read must help I guess... But I do like it. And it is somehow shiver making.....

    Learn to take a compliment my man! :0)

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Any thoughts?