An email from Alastair
In time for the Budget speech beginning, an email from Alastair Campbell arrives. He asks us to ‘watch Alistair Darling’s Budget speech in full if possible (even if I can’t do so live because of a prior mental health charity event).’ He does a lot of work for charity does, Alastair. He doesn’t like to talk about it, though. No, he likes to bangs ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON about it.
Alastair also reminds us that ‘Harold Wilson famously said “the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing”‘. No doubt for reasons of time (he has a charity gig to go to, after all), the producer of Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation fails to explain what the fuck went wrong with that noble sentiment.
Posted on April 22nd, 2009 at 1:07pm under New Labour
| Related posts... • Reg Keys’ election night speech • All that glisters • Alastair Campbell’s mental rehabilitation |
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• 12 Comments |
Who ever wrote it could at least of kept writing in either 1st or 3rd person style: “Tomorrow Alistair will show you…”
There was nothing noble about the original Crusades unless you consider rape, pillage and mass murder noble.
Wilson’s invocation meant ’shut up and do what the Pope tells you’ with himself donning the Papal Mitre.
The appeal to moral superiority comes after all other claims to superiority have failed.
Well, I was being slightly ironic with the ‘noble’. We are after all talking about a Prime Minister who, when asked what he was proud of after his time in power, could only answer, ‘the Open University’.
He also perpetrated the awful lie about the devaluation of Sterling not making anyone in Britain any worse off. Will we see that one dusted off and re-used?
Wilson’s invocation meant ’shut up and do what the Pope tells you’ with himself donning the Papal Mitre.
No it didn’t. It meant that unless Labour tries to eliminate social evils because they’re wrong, Labour means nothing.
There are plenty of reasons to be cynical in some measure about old Harold, but there’s no real reason to doubt that he meant what he said.
Alistair Campbell, by contrast, is probably long past the point where he knows whether or not he’s actually telling the truth.
Looking at In Place of Strife, Minister Barbara Castle’s proposed restrictions of the unions in 1969, Wilson’s Labour government regarded the Labour movement itself as one of the social evils that needed remedying.
In Place of Strife isn’t the only thing Harold Wilson ever did (or tried to).
The sheer monumental hypocrisy is staggering. Look at the email – practically every sentence can be refuted with the words “You’re lying, dead-eyed sleazebag with the morals of a hyena!” New Labour is the party that drove this country into becoming a war criminal state, with the blood of hundreds of thousands on our collective hands. But to read Campbell’s wittering, you’d think that all happened in a parallel universe and that the Labour party has progressive values and decent people and going forward and difficult times and….
I don’t want the death penalty for the man – 10 years in the stocks would suit me fine.
To be fair to Wilson, he didn’t pony up troops to Vietnam.
Campbell: his infrastructure of spin, deception and intimidation. I’m sure that it will make a good book.
That post made me laugh, in a good way at a bad thing.
heh
[...] the work he does for charity. Always up for having a reputation-polishing photo taken and then letting us know about it. He says, ‘Most people don’t think about me. I’m not on their radar’ and [...]