The Guardian reports that Blair hits out over ‘absurd’ EU rules. Our great leader has decreed that the compensation culture has created an aversion to risk in the public sector. I thought it might be interesting to read the PMs speech while thinking about only one of our great leaders proposals. I decided to go for the National Identity Register and ID Card Bill. Please do try to play along at home. Do you have the bill in your mind? You do? Then we are ready to read selected highlights of: Tony Blair’s speech on compensation culture.

read the rest…

Take the “respect agenda”, currently engorging huge amounts of Whitehall time. This is essentially a hobbyhorse of the prime minister’s, bundling together lots of different issues - a vague description of unease that reminds some of us of John Major’s back to basics. In private, it makes some ministers tear out their hair: how long before every act of street yobbery or classroom misbehaviour is used to mock Labour for its latest failure? But what Tony wants, Tony gets. “He’s digging in, you know,” say the ministers.

read the rest…

I once wanted to know what the average rainfall in Mogadishu is. So I screamed at my four year-old daughter 18 times to tell me, until we were both crying. And you know something, after all that she still couldn’t tell me what the answer was. The slippery little get.

Let’s face it, “The Paxman Interviews” are pretty redundant exercises. The only thing that seems to have come out of them so far is that our leaders don’t have total recall or every scrap of information on the tip of the tongue.

It was always going to be unlikely that Paxman would get any real gravy out of any of them. As if Blair was going to suddenly put his face in his hands and wail: “You’re right! All those women and children and for what? A lie!” Instead, particularly from Blair, we got all the well-rehearsed lines on Iraq, Brown, etc, that he now can probably murmur backwards in his sleep.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the Independent’s Steve Richards getting the same slick platitudes as he wearily rakes over the same old coals once more. Iraq? “The only thing I would ask people to do is understand that it was a very difficult decision.” Brown? “It is important that the two of us work together and closely.” Everything present and correct.

At least with Blair, Paxman spared us the histrionics and tried softly, softly instead. Didn’t get him anywhere though and he (and we) wasted everybody’s time thinking he might.

BBC News: MPs rap UN over Darfur death toll

A House of Commons committee said the number of dead could reach 300,000 - more than four times the World Health Organization’s figure of 70,000.

The International Development Committee also said the world’s response had been “scandalously ineffective”.

That figure of 300,000 seems very familiar. Where have we heard it before? Oh yes:

When giving evidence to the Select Committee on Liaison in July 2003, Tony Blair had this to say:

Q170 Mr Beith: Were you aware when you were at Camp David of the strain of thinking in the US administration, represented by the Deputy Defence Secretary, for example, that the weapons of mass destruction argument was not the most important argument? Indeed, I think he described it as a bureaucratic argument, almost one got up for the benefit of the wider world but not the real motivation.

Mr Blair: I actually had the advantage of reading in detail his words and, in actual fact, he did not quite say that. What he said was that there were three reasons for acting, of which one was weapons of mass destruction, and he did not actually call it a bureaucratic device. What he said was, obviously, the legal base was weapons of mass destruction, and I think that is right. The nature of the regime is relevant because in the hands of a regime like that weapons of mass destruction are all the more dangerous. Again, I simply say that it is important to remind people that this was the only regime in the world that had used chemical weapons against its own people, killing thousands of them. I should say already that in the mass graves that we have discovered we believe that there are the remains of perhaps as many as 300,000 people. If you saw the words of Sergio de Mello, the UN representative now out in Baghdad, he was saying the other day that he thinks it is possible that as many as 300,000 people have been located in mass graves already, so when we contemplate the nature of this regime it is probably beyond our previous estimation of just how evil it was.

The following year, in a widely trailed speech where he sought to justify the Iraq war, Blair said this:

BBC News, March 5 2004: Blair terror speech in full

It may well be that under international law as presently constituted, a regime can systematically brutalise and oppress its people and there is nothing anyone can do, when dialogue, diplomacy and even sanctions fail, unless it comes within the definition of a humanitarian catastrophe (though the 300,000 remains in mass graves already found in Iraq might be thought by some to be something of a catastrophe).

This may be the law, but should it be?

In attempting to muddy the waters on the reasons for war, Blair used the 300,000 figure on several occasions. In November 2003 the number had leapt to 400,000, as quoted in USAID’s Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves:

“We’ve already discovered just so far the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves,” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair on November 20 in London.

But in July 2004, those numbers were heading south:

The Observer: PM admits graves claim ‘untrue’

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

Before continuing I need to make the obligatory proviso. That said, I wonder that if Blair finally got around to a nebulous figure of 300,000 dead Iraqis as a reason for war - and by nebulous I don’t mean that 300,000 people weren’t killed, the final figure may very well reach that terrible height, it’s just that Blair was happy to bandy that number and higher around for his own ends without any proof - why his silence on a similar projection of deaths in Darfur?

And according to the CIA Factbook, Sudan’s export commodities include “oil and petroleum products”.

Not that Iraq was about oil. No, it was about weapons of mass destruction. Or was humanitarian intervention to rid a country of a government and its leaders that had brought death and destruction to their country? To the tune of 300,000(ish) deaths. So, isn’t sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander?

This isn’t to advocate an invasion of Sudan. On the eve of the Iraq war, the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland gave a round-up of what I thought were some very thoughtful and humane - but not perfect - solutions to the human right abuses in Iraq that didn’t gain traction in the wider debate. God knows the anti-war left were short on ideas of what to do with Saddam if we weren’t to invade. As a then active member of the Stop The War movement, I soon realised that the status quo advocated by the movement’s Communist/Muslim fundamentalist coalition leadership was going to help nobody and allowed the likes of Blair, and most vocally, Nick Cohen to paint us as at best naive fools and at worst appeasers of torturers, rapists and murderers.

Freedland does a similar thing in today’s Guardian. Stating that military interventions, at least with a British contingent, are for now a busted flush (with only Blair to blame) he gives voice to this:

Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, suggests not some grand invasion but help - in the form of equipment and expertise - for the tiny, “totally inadequate” African Union force already on the ground.

Proper surveillance, including planes flying overhead, “works wonders”, says Smith, spooking those who would otherwise feel free to murder. He and others also reckon the threat of a war crimes prosecution at the international criminal court, currently blocked by the US, would stay the hand of Darfur’s murderers.

All the plan would need is a wild-eyed idealist, with one eye on the ballot box and the other on the history books. A man with legendary powers of persuasion, a moral collossus at his best when bestriding the world stage, who can play fast and loose when it’s required. A consensus-builder who feels the world’s pain, for who Africa is a scar on the world’s conscience.

Do we know anybody like that?

I see Alan Shearer is just nine goals away from breaking Jackie Milburn’s all-time goals record at Newcastle.

Will Tony be in the stand to see the record broken?

Whatever else you can say about Tony, he’s not afraid of the easy questions.

Number 10 Press Briefing: 11am Monday 28 February 2005:

Put to the PMOS that the Prime Minister had said in a “Woman’s Hour” interview that there were “several hundred people plotting” a terrorist attack, and did that therefore mean there would be several hundred house arrests imposed, the PMOS replied: no. The Prime Minister had used the same phraseology last week in PMQs, and he made clear that with regards to the extreme end of the control orders, we envisaged that it would only be used against a very few people.

The Guardian:

No 10 also made light of the prime minister’s remark. But talk of “several hundred” active plotters - made on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour - is far in excess of what intelligence officials estimate.

The Times:

A Downing Street official said Mr Blair’s claim was based on the few hundred people being monitored by the security services, some of whom would be subject to the new control orders. However, one senior security source told The Times that the figures were based on numbers from MI6 of people who travelled to training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, prior to September 11.

Of that group of 200 or so, only 40 to 50 were regarded as a “moderate�? or “serious�? threat, and of that group up to 15 had disappeared from Britain altogether. That left around 25 or 30 who are known to be in Britain, with some of those in prison in Belmarsh.

Telegraph:

Tony Blair said the police and security services were keeping watch on “several hundred” people they believed were engaged in or plotting or trying to commit terrorist acts.

Restrictions on their liberty would be used “only in the most limited circumstances”, he said.

The Home Secretary later denied that the Government was planning to impose control orders on that number of suspects, suggesting that Mr Blair was referring to many cases in which action had already been taken.

Ha ha. This “hundreds” tosh was only ever going to have a shelf-life of a matter of hours even with those bovine enough to take the Prime Minister at his word.

No doubt this will just fade away. Maybe we’ll get a “so sorry, we were given the wrong figures” later on if someone can be bothered to query Blair on yet another queasy instance of his serial mendacity. In the meantime let’s hope at the least it’s made one or two more voters realise just in what kind of contempt they are held.

So while Tony Blair didn’t go as far as to ask Women’s Hour to play Armageddon Days (Are Here Again) by The The in his quest to shit the nation right up this morning, he definitely came a close second.

(Good to see the London Evening Standard going for it hook, line and sinker again like they did with the “45 Minutes From Doom” lark:

The full scale of the terrorist threat confronting Britain was laid bare by the Prime Minister today.

In a chilling warning, he said “several hundred” active terrorists were already inside Britain and plotting atrocities.

The separation of news and editorial like Charles and Camilla, it seems, is a distant memory. It’ll be interesting to see how Blair backs away from this later - no doubt the intelligence services will have ballsed up again.)

It’s fortunate he had the platform to warn us liberals that we’re preventing him from saving our worthless lives, but then, it’s been a day for strange coincidences.

First the launch of the Met’s anti-terror campaign and then the arrival in court of Saajid Badat who miraculously/mysteriously changed his plea to not guilty at the last moment. This, of course, lifted all reporting restrictions on the case so all the frightening details could go out on the nightly news bulletins and make juicy headlines tomorrow.

All, again, while the Home Secretary tries to revoke Magna Carta in record time. (You have to admit, he moves with impressive speed for a man of his bulk.) Look out for the tomorrow’s newspaper headlines - they’re unlikely to be about tonight’s debate or 100 dead in Iraq.

Just how the sorry tale of Badat, the suicide bomber who found the will to live, fits with the putative anti-terror legislation isn’t clear. It was Badat getting cold feet that prevented the atrocity, not the security services - if he hadn’t he might have blown a plane up and no amount of “control orders” would have prevented it. It was sheer luck that shoebomber and Badat associate Richard Reid failed, was arrested and evidence on him (phone cards) led to Badat.

What is clear though is that Badat was nicked, charged and prosecuted under the current system.

UPDATE: John B says much the same over at Shot By Both Sides. Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous, anybody?

“Tipping point” is a phrase used frequently in connection with this cynical, morally bankrupt government.

Hutton, Butler, Tuition Fees, Iraq. It seems Tony Blair reaches a “tipping point” every few months. By tipping point they mean: “Has he finally reached the point where he’ll be tipped out on his arse?”

So, let’s hope he’s reached another one today. It seems the story about the Attorney General’s lukewarm advice about the dubious legality of the war in Iraq might be finally snowballing - earlier in the week I feared it wasn’t going to gain traction.

Blair’s dealing with the issue at his monthly press conference showed a slippery evasion we’ve come to expect from someone Roy Jenkins described as having a “second class mind”. But he also showed an intellectual degeneracy that was breathtaking even for him. The exchange between him and Gary Gibbons of Channel 4 news can be read here, although you really need to see the footage of Blair hissing his answers coldly through gritted teeth to get the full effect. Unlike other animals, Blair doesn’t have the fibre to fight when cornered. Instead, to change metaphors, he instead dodges, weaves and tells half truths like the naughty boy with crumbs round his mouth who denies he’s been at the biscuits. His lack of moral fibre and intellectual courage are two of his shortcomings that infuriate the most. You could at least respect a man who takes an argument head on.

This is, of course, yet another symptom of the hysteria that’s surrounding the run-up to the election. New Labour, like the rest of us, must surely know they’re going to romp the next election but they aren’t prepared to budge an inch just in case. No wonder Labour voters and activists are deserting in droves.

(Blair even tried to toss us liberals a bone today by announcing a rise in the minimum wage. From £4.85 to £5.05. If you can find enough nourishment on that bone - where the minimum wage remains a poverty wage and which the CBI said was “a sensible reaction to business concerns” - to return to New Labour, then you must be very famished indeed.)

And yet surely by this stage, most of the MPs who voted for war must know they’ve been had. First the caveats were removed from the intelligence on WMD and now we find the caveats were removed from the advice on the war’s legality. Like I said before, if they weren’t, the advice would be out there already.

But, as we saw when Labour’s backbenchers trotted through the division lobbies to vote for internment this week, Blair uses a culture of fear inside Parliament as well as out. He appeals not to MPs’ consciences but makes them fearful for their jobs and pensions. How else would they ratify the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children? Or PFI, tuition fees and a dozen other stakes through the heart of the Labour movement? In the final analysis, they put their jobs before people’s lives. They put their careers before their humanity. And they find, at the end, that they’ve been fucked but never loved. But still they look at their majorities and think, “there’s no way I’m rocking the boat”. It’s hard to respect a weathercock like Claire Short but she’s been one of the few Labour bods to show any balls this week and call for the release of the advice.

Maybe, like the majority of Labour backbenchers, you live in a moral twilight zone - like the crew over at Hove Labour who have got out their nosegays to do away with the stench of the bodies and are voting Labour right or wrong with fingers crossed that Blair won’t help Bush bomb Iran. “Domestic issues do not pale into insignificance,” they say. Look to the good New Labour’s done, others say.

But I’m sorry, no amount of sandalwood on the pyre ameloriates the fumes.

My eyes are still streaming.

Tony Blair being desperate for your vote doesn’t make him a democrat.

(Jim Bliss, if you could turn this into a haiku for me I’d be very grateful)

Like the six new pledges he unveiled today, Tony’s stops on his “whistle-top” tour were short and devoid of meaning to the point of abstraction. Are we supposed to believe that meaningful dialogue has taken place between Tony and the electorate as opposed to some dumb stunt like Phil Collins playing both Live Aids?

If he was going to do it right he should have announced his pledge card on an Ian Botham-style sponsored walk or, more becoming with his image, a touring passion play.

There’s an idea. How about:

The First Station (Wandsworth): Tony falls the first time
Tony, the card you have been carrying is very heavy. You are becoming weak and almost ready to faint, and you fall down. Nobody seems to want to help you. The soldiers are interested in getting home, so they yell at you and try to get you up and moving again.

The Second Station (Kettering): Tony falls the second time
This is the second time you have fallen on the road. As the card grows heavier and heavier it becomes more difficult to get up. But you continue to struggle and try until you’re up and walking again. You don’t give up.

The Third Station (Warwick): Tony meets the women of Warwick
Tony, as you carry your card you see a group of women along the road. As you pass by you see they are sad. You stop to spend a moment with them, to offer them some encouragement. Although you are have been abandoned by your friends and are in pain, you stop and try to help them.

The Fourth Station (Leeds): Tony falls a third time
Tony, your journey has been long. You fall again, beneath your card. You know your journey is coming to an end. You struggle and struggle. You get up and keep going.

The Fifth Station (Shipley): Tony’s clothes are taken away
The soldiers notice you have something of value. They remove your cloak and throw dice for it. Your wounds are torn open once again. Some of the people in the crowd make fun of you. They tease you and challenge you to perform a miracle for them to see. They’re not aware that you’ll perform the greatest miracle of all!

The Sixth Station (Gateshead): The Resurrection
We adore You O’ Tony and we praise you … Because by Your Holy Card You have redeemed the World.

***

And of course it doesn’t take a genius tell you that these pledges are so broad as to mean nothing. The pledge card will have the six platitudes and the underlying factors that shore them up can then be bent, twisted and otherwise invented - much like the backtracking and wriggling over WMDs - until Tony can stand up and say he’s fulfilled each pledge.

You could end up living in a ditch, waiting five years to see a doctor and he’d still tell you you’re better off.

PS. This graphic is a photoshopper’s dream. Tim?

Tony Blair, BBC News, May 1999: “It is no exaggeration to say what is happening in Kosovo is racial genocide. No exaggeration to brand the behaviour of Milosevic’s forces as evil.”

New Statesman, October 2004: Why does Tony fear the G-word?
“The people of Darfur have been murdered, raped, forced to leave their land and abandon their livelihoods. Yet the British government says that claims of genocide are exaggerated.”

70,000 dead in Darfur at last count. A Kosovo body count is difficult to come by but it seems it’s considerably less than 70,000.

Unlimited? “They will cause death and destruction on an unlimited scale”? Unlimited?

What? Have they got a fucking Death Star or something?

BBC News: Blair defends ‘grave’ terror plan

“They will cause death and destruction on an unlimited scale and they will and are trying to organise such terrorist activity in our own country. I just hope people get this in perspective.”

Got that? We’re all going to die. Terrorists are coming to kill us all. Horribly. They will not might cause death and destruction on an unlimited scale.

Now stop causing a fuss about civil liberties. Get things in perspective before you embarrass yourself and terrorists kill us. And we all die.

No, no, that’s alright. Don’t worry about it. Don’t be frightened.

You’re going to die.

So, Tony Blair found time to visit Toulouse to see the unveiling of the Airbus A380 but can’t fit in a flying visit to Auschwitz on January 27.

Mind you, Holocaust Memorial Day doesn’t seem to have been very high on New Labour’s to do list this year. Jack Straw’s only going because Ivor Caplin, the lickspittle defence minister, and Denis MacShane, the gobshite Europe Minister, were deemed too lowly to be the UK’s representatives after the witless antics of a certain ginger royal.

Not that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about Holocaust Memorial Day. My views on the day are very much mirrored by Nick Cohen who’s written at length about it, particularly in his book Pretty Straight Guys.

It’s just that in the past Blair’s appeared at bashes or spoken out on all manner of subjects - dead Diana, dead Sinatra, poor banged-up Deirdre Rashid off Coronation Street - when he thought he’d get his grinning fizzog on the telly, in the papers or one step closer to posterity. Just don’t mention Tsunamis.

But the reason why Blair was in Toulouse becomes clear when you study what he had to say at the Airbus unveiling:

Blair also said that some 20,000 UK workers had been directly involved in the project, over 400 companies would benefit and there would be billions of pounds of export gains.

Ah. Of course. The Prime Minister is a salesman. Quite clearly, he sees it as his job to shill these things. He’s spent, hopefully, a profitable afternoon selling lovely shiny aeroplanes. Just think of all the gravy those 400 companies’ shareholders will see.

Just how Tony’s presence in Toulouse this afternoon helps you and me I’m not quite sure. But it might have helped him. After all, he’s going to need quite a few directorships very soon to pay the mortgage on that lovely new flat.

BBC News: Blair ‘in the clear’ over holiday

“A watchdog has concluded Tony Blair did nothing wrong by failing to declare a holiday with a tobacco industry figure, Downing Street has said.”

Well, what the hell were you expecting? Calls for his resignation? The caption under the photo of Blair in this BBC piece says, “Tony Blair’s holidays are often a subject of controversy”. The use understatement was the most shocking part of the item.

But at least we can revel once more at how much class the Blairs have. Freebies from Big Tobacco, open necked Burberry shirts with a nipped-and-tucked Silvio Berlosconi, a gratis sojourn to Egypt (they’ve since been shamed into forking out like everybody else) with a blind eye turned to the country’s human rights record. Cliff Richard?

Like I said: classy.

“Unremittingly New Labour” is certainly a phrase to chill the blood. Especially coming from a prime minister steeped in so much horror and death as Tony Blair. We can only guess at the cost of a third unremittingly New Labour government. But you can bet your last penny there won’t be an official count of the the bodies.

The fundamental problem, it seems to me, with Blair and his ilk is their disturbing ability to view humanity as an abstract concept. How many times have you heard an minister in an interview say, “well of course, I can’t comment on specific cases”? It’s almost as if they see people as well, not really people. How else to explain their sanguine attitude to the deaths of tens of thousands in Iraq? It doesn’t help that they’re aided and abetted by a complicit media. I bet you’d struggle to get mainstream publicity to raise money for the victims of the US assault on Falluja. There hasn’t been any poignant footage of the bloated corpses on the street of Iraq as there has been from Indonesia.

But the same can be said of ministers’ attitudes towards people at home. Apologist for New Labour talk about the minimum wage, the New Deal, Jobcentre Plus, Sure Start, Working Families Tax Credit et al. But this is all cosy middle class complacency.

Have these people actually spoken to somebody for who the minimum wage is still a poverty wage?

Or the people on the dole who can’t get advice at their job centre because there’s a shortage of advisers.

Or those on the New Deal, victims of a system operating for profit, overseen by undertrained and demoralised staff extolling a one size fits all approach that can’t accomodate those aspiring to a career and better life and not just a job stacking shelves.

Or those on Working Families Tax Credit who have been the victims of a poorly implemented computer system with its late payments, under payments, over payments and the only form of redress being through a network of disparate call centres again staffed by undertrained, demoralised and, in some case, disinterested staff.

But at least New Labour are doing something if only in a fuzzy abstract sense that massages middle class guilt about the proles. They can feel better about the poor getting a few extra quid a week and get back to discussing whether Germaine Greer was a sell-out for going on Big Brother.

And the people at the heart of this sausage machine are the kind of people who, if you got stuck next to them on the bus, you’d look for another seat:

Geoff Hoon, a man whose moral compass is so comprehensively knackered, once said that Iraqi victims of coalition cluster bombs might one day thank those who dropped them.

Or Jack Straw, the now Foreign Secretary who is not remembered as the most authoritarian Home Secretary in modern history only because his successor was worse.

Speaking of which. David Blunkett, a Home Secretary who boasted of his prodigious memory and grasp of the minutest details of his brief only to have these superpowers fail him when he was asked to recall the details of a grubby scandal that might have prevented him making a return to the cabinet after the general election.

And the Chancellor. A hulking sulk of man with his thwarted ambition, who sees the road to the Premiership as a right of succession and not a democratic process. A man who those on the left claim as saviour of their party and yet a man yoked to marketisation, PFI, multiple announcements and counting of the same expenditure and other post-Thatcherite sleights of hand.

The list goes on. A Culture Secretary calling those who didn’t want their towns inundated with casinos “snobs”. Whose best interest did she think building super casinos would serve? Who lobbied for these casinos? I bet it wasn’t the Child Poverty Action Group. And then there’s the Trade and Industry Secretary who wants to soften the laws on corporate bribery.

And at the centre of the web, the Prime Minister with his delusional Billy Liar stories about Jackie Milburn and stowing away on airliners (why did alarm bells not begin ringing the second these bon mots tripped from his mouth?). His love of a freebie and the thrill of the chase of a good headline. The half million pound property deal that was orchestrated by a conman and yet the Prime Minister knew nothing about. The Mittals and the Ecclestones. The bifurcated mind that can argue black is white, that can ignore the suffering of thousands in Iraq but lament the suffering of thousands in Asia and Africa, that can chair meetings about what to do with David Kelly but can deny having anything to do with the “naming strategy”. The moral hole at the heart of unremitting New Labour.

I was quite upset today to find I wasn’t the first person to realise that Tony Blair sounds like C3PO.