Huzzah for elections

[andrewducker]

In flagrant breach of copyright laws I'm reprinting this from Warren Ellis' mailing list Bad Signal, on the upcoming UK election:

Here in Merrie Olde Englande, we're a month away from Vote For Scum Day.  And we're faced with a choice worse than the Americans were last year.

No-one with two brain cells to rub together has any trust left in Tony Blair.  The economy's overheated, there's been no attempt to recover the public services from the mess the Tories left them in, and he's got George Bush's hand up his arse. That's a list that goes on, but I've only been awake an hour and a half.

(For those who don't follow Brit politics: the Blair govt. is the Labour Party.  "Tory" is the term for the Conservative Party)

However, the party of opposition is the Tories, as run by Michael Howard, who as Home Secretary in the last Tory govt was a criminal prick denounced as a moral mutant by his own colleagues.  His grinning, glass-eyed presence is nothing short of Satanic.  His campaign so far has been nothing short of loathesome, playing to the lowest instincts in the worst of us.  If he gets into power Britain is going to make America look like classical Greece.

The third party are the Liberal Democrats, currently fronted by Charlie Kennedy, an amiable Scots bloke who likes a drink.  He used to be deputy to Paddy Ashdown, under whom LibDem iterated their only coherent soundbite of a policy. "A penny in the pound for education." 1% tax rise that would pay for schools.  Great idea, simply put.  So simply put, in fact, that everyone heard nothing but "tax rise" and told them to fuck off.  Paddy Ashdown was great.  Ex-SAS.  The only political leader in living memory who could kill you with his thumbs. Prime Minister's Question Time would have been must-watch TV. Prime Minister Ashdown plunking his machine gun down on the box and saying, "the Prime Minister would like you all on your knees now."

Charlie Kennedy's wife just had their first baby.  They've called the poor little sod Donald.  Charlie Kennedy's going to be listening to crowd renditions of "Donald Where's Your Troosers" for the next month.

He comes off as a nice guy.  No gravitas at all.  He was great as the friendly, funny deputy to stern, grizzled, Paddy Ashdown.  With no-one to play off, he kind of looks like a kid shuffling around in daddy's shoes now.

And then there's the Green Party. Whose political statement of today was "we're not going to get into power."  Which might be refreshing in its realism, but doesn't quite stir
the masses to action.  It's a shame, because their basic planks -- cut the Labour plan for new roads dead and re-route that committed budget into the national health service --
are easy to grasp and ring with some plausibility.  Which isn't the same thing as BEING plausible, but this is politics.

On a local level, I vote Green -- Southend's in a nightmarish state, local services are collapsing, the crack scene has ballooned over the last three years, and the whole
place reeks of death.  One of the local Tory members of parliament, David Amess, is vulnerable -- he stands on a familyvalues lawnorder platform, but his son has recently been imprisoned for slashing someone to bits with a broken bottle.

The problem with unseating Tories in this area is that it's Old People's Home Central.  Throw a stick in any direction and you'll hit five wrinkly ranches.  And they all get mobilised
at elections.  Most of them still think Churchill's in power.  They all vote Tory.  We pray for good hard winters to thin the fuckers out.

So there are the choices: the scum, the thing worse than scum, Donald Where's Your Troosers and a bunch of hippies who appear afraid to be in charge of anything.

See, Bush/Kerry was SIMPLE...

Comments

[dougs.livejournal.com]

I've just come down from the Isle of Skye,
Im no very big and I'm awful shy,
And the lassies shout when I go by,
"Donald wheres your troosers."

Of course, Kennedy's constituency includes the Isle of Skye.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

:-)

That was brilliant :-)

I still trust Tony though, does that make me a buffoon?

[andrewducker]

In what way do you trust him?

I mean, I trust him to do what _he_ thinks is right.

But I don't trust him to treat me like an adult and to tell me the truth.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

I trust him to do what he thinks is right even if that will cost him his job or be unpopular...

I'm not entirely sure about whether he has lied to me (I would expect him to withhold things, they have to do that).

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Blair misled Parliament and the British people over the issue of Iraq's WMD. The only question is whether he did that deliberately (which makes him a liar) or unintentionally (which makes him an idiot).

[robhu.livejournal.com]

As I remember things lots of people threw that mud, there were various investigations, and yet the mud didn't stick.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Because some very clever spin was put on it, and Alastair Campbell quickly shifted the terms of the debate. The accusation that the government had 'sexed up' the intelligence on WMD was treated as if this meant that they had told demonstrable lies, rather than that they had arranged facts in such a way as to create a false impression.

If you take 'sexed up' as meaning the latter (and I think this is the way most people would initially), then it's clear that Andrew Gilligan's supposedly-discredited report was entirely on the button. The claim that Iraq could deploy WMD in 45 minutes was divorced from the context that this related to battlefield weapons, not long-range strategic missiles, which is what people think of when they hear the term WMD. So when Blair repeated the claim in Parliament, it was assumed that this meant that Saddam could be dropping missiles with chemical warheads on Kuwait, Riyadh, or even Cyprus, in less than an hour. To my mind, that means Parliament and the British people were misled, as the intelligence supported no such conclusion.

And the mud has stuck more than you might think. Not enough for Blair to feel that he has to resign, but many voters now assume that Blair is a liar, where before they always thought he was sincere. Trust in Blair has been seriously damaged, perhaps even fatally for Labour's chances of re-election.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Perhaps - I'm still not convinced by your account of things though.

Also I supported the war in Iraq on humanitarian grounds - although they didn't plan for and therefore screwed up what would happen when Saddam had gone.

What prevents me from siding with the liberals on the war issue is that they are so focussed on rubbishing the war that they have given no viable alternatives. It's all very well saying the war was 'wrong', but what would they have done? Sat around and done nothing... sanctions? That wouldn't have stopped Saddam, and his people would never have been able to overthrow him. Things have gone badly I would agree, but in the medium to long term this is much better for the people of Iraq.

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

So which bit aren't you convinced by? Do you think Iraq did have long-range WMD? (They didn't.) Do you think that the raw intelligence reports claimed this? (They didn't, as the head of the JIC stated to the Butler inquiry) Do you think that Tony Blair believed this was what the intelligence said? (Perhaps, but do you trust a man who misreads intelligence like that?) Or do you think that the British public knew that the 45-minute claim did not relate to long-range WMD? (I certainly didn't.)

The trouble with the humanitarian argument is that there are a lot of people in Iraq who are now dead, who would not have been had the Coalition not invaded. People are continuing to die. How do you know a combination of sanctions and diplomatic engagement wouldn't have resulted in a change of the Ba'athist regime? Or let's take the 'do nothing' strategy - Saddam wasn't going to live forever, and this sort of dictatorship rarely gets dynastic. So had a policy of containment been followed, what might well have happened was a revolution on Saddam's death, which would have had a lower casualty figure than this war.

Besides, if it was right to go into Iraq on humanitarian grounds, doesn't that make Blair a hypocrite for not advocating military intervention in Zimbabwe?

I'm by no means a universal peacenik. I continue to believe that, once Saddam had invaded Kuwait in 1990, a military response was the correct one. But one should be wary of those who leave to war as a quick response to problems they otherwise can't work out how to solve. It's simplistic, and it rarely works out for the best.

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

well there you go, you want a demonstrable falsehood.

Before:
This is not about regime change, we are happy for Saddam to remain in charge if he is in compliance with UN weapons regulations.

After:
Fair enough, no WMDs, but look, we've effected regime change. We couldn't. in good conscience leave Saddam in charge.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Sources, context?

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

all Blair talked about on television before the war was that it was about weapons not regime change. Cue the complete absence of weapons and suddenly it was all about the moral need for regime change.

[robhu.livejournal.com]

OK, but you'll forgive me if I don't consider him to have lied based upon your remembered paraphrase of what he said before and after.

Also - I think it's only fair to take what he said collectively in that time period based on the questions that were asked at the time, and allow a certain degree of wiggle room in what he said anyway. This is only fair - we're not all robots that always state mathematically exactly what we mean.

I am still of the opinion that at his core Blair is a honest good man who did was he thought was right, and I think that's a lot better than most politicians.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

It was so insultingly obvious.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

The last line is exactly the reason I will not be voting labour. There's no way in hell they'll get my vote after the war.

Quite exactly who I'll be voting for, I don't know at this point. [It won't be Tory either, obviously].

[andrewducker]

Take the quiz!

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about his use of 'classical Greece' as any sort of 'ideal state'. For one thing, I think he means Classical Athens, as there wasn't a uniform culture across the whole of Greece, and for another, this was a society with slavery, very limited rights for women, and institutionalized pederasty. Hmm.

Charles Kennedy

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

Charles Kennedy may or may not have gravitas, but Howard and Blair dont either. It seems a small price to pay for a Prime Minister who seems like a decent bloke, and who isnt a proven liar.

Give him a shot is my opinion, he couldnt possibly be worse than the alternatives

Re: Charles Kennedy

[johnbobshaun.livejournal.com]

In an ideal world full of gumdrop skies and chocolate milk rivers we wouldn't put so much emphasis on the personality of the party leader and would consider party policy a leeestle bit more closely. And of course there are herds of doddering old folks who will vote the way they and their family have voted their entire lives. The following conversation happened last time I was in Newcastle:

INT Aunt Fionas House
ME: So who are you going to vote for in the election, Gran?
GRAN: Labour.
ME: Why?
GRAN: We've always voted Labour.
ME: But did you agree on the war in Iraq? Abolition of tuition fees? What policies of theirs do you support?
GRAN: Um, I don't know. I've just always voted Labour.
ME: So if Labour put a monkey in a suit, pinned a red badge on him and made him the candidate for Sunderland standing on a "free bananas for all" policy would you still vote Labour?
GRAN: (Carefully considers this) Yes.

Re: Charles Kennedy

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

My parents are much the same way.

The utter apathy towards the war or any real issue. Ugh.

Re: Charles Kennedy

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've thought that. I think sticking a "New" on the front and then fazing the "New" out entirely was a nasty trick. Because this "Labour" is not the party your Gran thinks she is voting for. They are just a bunch of greedy lying capitalists who have stolen the name.