Reg Keys’ election night speech
Backing Blair have got a video of Reg Keys’ speech at the Sedgefield count on election night.
Watching the speech has been like reading Catch-22. Like the first time I read the book, I saw only the humour in it. I hooted at Blair’s discomfort, at the inherent comedic value of watching the country’s leader humiliated on national television.
Then, like the second reading of the book, the subsequent viewings of the speech give way to something else. The laugh’s aren’t there, only the horror and the futility, all the pain and the grief that Blair has it in him to ignore.
As returning readers will know I’m in no way a militarist or a fan of who Bill Hicks described as “hired killers”. When Blair was exposed as being ignorant of the number of British casualties in Iraq, I just chalked it up to his contempt and contemptibility - his moral Usher Syndrome, if you like. But listening to Keys you really get a taste of what a slap in the face Blair’s dismissal of their deaths must have been.
Eighty-eight men died prosecuting his war and he didn’t know the number. It’s a not a difficult number to remember - two fat ladies. It’s not as if he was asked to remember a truly mindblowing number like the number of civilians killed.
And he hasn’t visited a single injured soldier in hospital. Maybe, like the dead (and traditional Labour voters), he hopes they’ll go away if he ignores them. In January this year, the MOD announced 790 British personnel had been injured during the Iraq campaign. Maybe he hasn’t visited them because they were unlikely to vote for him - injured servicemen weren’t going to readily hop down from their sick beds to cajole, emotionally blackmail and insult voters into electing a political party responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands.
But think of the number of morally-compromised activists who allowed Blair to shake their hand during the election campaign and went on to do just that. I bet it was more than 790. Imagine shaking the hand that had signed the paper authorising the deaths of so many. I bet many joked that they’d never wash their hand again when they should have been scrubbing like Lady Macbeth.
Surely it wouldn’t take too long a time, shaking 790 hands and spending a few minutes offering whatever comfort allowed by a moral compass that would make Dorian Gray blush? 790 people at two minutes per person works out at just over 26 hours - he could do it in two days and still get his sleep of the just.
After all, isn’t this the moral paragon who invaded Iraq for long- and deeply-held humanitarian reasons? Can’t he bring a similar succour to our boys?
As an added incentive you could tell him Gordon Brown is running the country until he’s spoken to each and every one.
Posted on May 11th, 2005 at 11:26 am
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I bet many joked that they’d never wash their hand again when they should have been scrubbing like Lady Macbeth.
I think you may be over your bloggers’ block. Nice.
Great words Justin.
What a gush, what a geyser, what a torrent of sentimental tosh! You are writing of professional soldiers, men who volunteered to take the Queen’s shilling in the full knowledge that they might well be sent to fight wars against whomsoever the democratically, repeat, democratically elected (and subsequently, re-elected) government of Britain chooses to fight.
They are trained to fight and kill, and they know perfectly well that they in turn will risk being killed. From my experience, most of them couldn’t care less what any particular war is about, just so long as they get a piece of it!
Mr. Keys is a private man with a private grief, and he would have done much better to have remained private. In any event, Mr. Blair should be under no compulsion to take the slightest heed of what he says, he has higher responsibilites. He’s running the country, not the Oprah Winfrey show.
Point taken, David. I’ll be the first to admit that until I have my seed shot away in some desert I really won’t know what goes on inside an injured soldier’s head.
Having said that, God forbid that Blair should pay the slightest attention to the people who gave him his job, pay his wages and have elevated him to the point that he could tell his bank that he’s going to earn £20m in the five years after he retires so they would give him a fat mortgage, eh? What was I thinking? An elected official (on a 22% mandate I might add), listening to the electors? You’re right. I’m clearly batshit.
Like I said though, the Army are hired killers - mercenaries. Kill or be killed. Triple threat alert six or whatever. However, there are an increasing number of soldiers (and probably more since a swathe of them were disenfrachised during the election) who agree with me when I say that a leader who is going to send men to fight should have the backbone to be at least honest about the reasons for doing so. If you’re going to gamble with other people’s chips, then at least have the balls to be straight about it. Even a professional soldier like Michael Boyce said a couple of weeks ago that if he ends up in the Hague, he’ll make sure Blair will be sharing the cell.
But we’ve been through this before, David. We’re unlikely to agree this time either. You seem comfortable on walking by on the other side on this matter. I, in my petty, small, sentimental way, am not.
It’s like when we discussed torture - or harsh treatment as you put it - on your website a few weeks ago. Shit happens, you said. You youself are unlikely to find yourself in a cell with the needles being pushed under your fingernails, so what the hell.
Or, like some of the soldiers Blair has ignored, losing your legs in Iraq. Or sending your children out to play and them bringing home an exploded cluster bomb because it looked like a toy. You’re either desperately misanthropic or concrete in your belief that we go to a better place when we die.
I reject both. You seem to be inured to the concept of suffering, I’m not. Sentimental, that’s me.
Life’s cheap and getting cheaper by the day but I’ll rail against that whatever you want to call me.
Trackback
Sharp Beavers
http://scottish-independence.blogspot.com/2005/05/sharp-beavers.html
excerpt: “… Nosemonkey and Chicken Yoghurt have kindly asked me to contibute the occasional post to their new group blog The Sharpener - trying to make a point. I haven’t really written anything that I consider to be sufficiently well-written, insightful, newsworthy, funny or obscure recently, and I was wondering what the heck to write about… “
and yet the people of sedgefield voted for Blair with an increased majority, despite the candidacy of Reg keys. This should suggest that, whilst the Iraq war is a tragedy, and even though many people (including reg keys, the lib dems and many contributing to these pages) decided to run the election as a referendum on the war, the british people decided that it was not sufficient to vote out Blair’s government. on balance they decided to keep a labour Government, albeit on a flawed FPTP system.
Even on a FPTP system its worth remembering that if you combine the two main pro war parties (Cons and Lab) they easily out stripped the anti war vote.
People have had a referendum - and the anti war movement lost it.
There is an old adage in politics - “The people have spoken - the Bastards”
Dan, if you’ve reached the point where you’re willing to conjure an electoral alliance between the Tories and New Labour in order to prove your point against people who thinks Blair should pay for blowing up children then I wonder how much more we have to say to each other.
“Vote for the Lab-Con Pact! It’s the only way to beat those crazy peaceniks.”
I’m sorry I put the lives of tens of thousands of men, women and children as my uppermost consideration when I voted. What a bastard, eh?
You’ll just have to forgive the eccentricities of a man who is disturbed by the psychology of a prime minister and his various acolytes that allows them to brush that kind of thing under the carpet.
You quite clearly see the deaths and maiming of thousands as secondary to “progressive politics” back home. I wish I was as far-sighted.
Justin - im not suggesting it was the right result, but that it was The result. there will be millions who share your view, and millions who do not, the latter group are sadly, from your point of view, in the majority.
In Hove we had a labour candidate who opposed the war and she won. I hope that those who opposed the war, such as celia barlow and yourself and those who supported it, will now try and work together to bring some sort of peace to the people of iraq. For many years i was a suppoter of dissident groups supporting iraqi resistance to Saddam, and fighting long ago for the stop of arm sales to him.
I am all too aware of the horrors of Saddam and the squalor of the war that continues. This is not something that warrants personal insults from you as to what you assume to be my position i.e that i am pro war, i have never said that i was, and for the record i was not pro war, but nor was I an apologist for saddam and the brutal murder of tens of thousands of iraqis (and others)
It is sad that your anger towards Blair has seemed to cloud your judgement about those who have spent many years working along side iraqis to end the Baathist regime.
Dan
Dan: Yep, it was OTT, I sincerely apologise. It wasn’t really directed at you but at others on the Left and you got caught in the blast.
The outcome of this election has made me very misanthropic indeed. It is further proof that the British public are bovine, self-serving, inward-looking and willing to sweep the deaths and suffering of thousands of people under the carpet.
You and others probably think I’m becoming monomaniacal about the deaths of people I never met but I think that it gives us a disturbing glimpse of the future. The majority of the British public clearly could not give a flying fuck about Iraqi civilians. That means they won’t give one about Iranian deaths, or Syrian ones, North Korean ones or wherever we next point our bombers.
The British seem to have a contradictory attitude towards suffering - £300m for the victims of the Tsunami but nary a penny for cluster-bombed and malnourished Iraqi children. I hope we’re as stoic when Peak Oil, global warming, bird flu, or whichever fresh hell, decides it’s our turn.
Blair says he’s “listened and learned” but there’s precious evidence of it. People say he couldn’t take us to war again but I think there’s a glint in his eye that says he could and he might. I’m of the opinion now that bringing the government and the party down over another foreign adventure (or other acts of hubris) isn’t beyond him.