New Labour – Page 36

Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship

Published on November 27, 20061 Comment

Via Blood and Treausre, comes this story about the ultimate New Labour policy initiative:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review.

Examples include an expectation that a local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down. Parents might also be asked to sign individually tailored contracts with a school setting out what the parents must do at home to advance their child’s publicly-funded education.

The police might also promise to achieve a specific response time in a local area, so long as an agreement is struck on the local law and disorder priorities. The aim is to build on the government’s rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking “a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes”.

Here we have everything that makes New Labour so awful in one neat package: a distrust of the people, the centralised authoritarianism, the fetishisation of business as a model to run government services, the rampant managerialism. It is the logical outcome of nine years of New Labour policies, the last cornerstone of Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship. It is impossible to be a democracy if the state can exclude citizens from the services it provides based on some nebolous criteria it has drawn up itself. Moreover, it’s just as easy to exclude the critic of the local MP from receiving benefits for “antisocial thoughts” as it is to deny a smoker a new lung.

All in the name of “people like us”, the middle classes. Even if the middle classes, if they knew what they were getting, are not stupid enough to actually want it. But then again, the way it will be sold to the public is by pretending it will only apply to welfare scroungers, overweight chavs on estates still *gasp* smoking and terrorist sympathisers. Not to people with 2.4 children living in Islington who know which course goes with which wine, no…

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)

Idiocy and Genius

Published on June 30, 2006

It’s a goodish day today, if you leave aside the issue of Gaza which seems to be developing with a distinct lack of outcry from the West. This could turn very nasty indeed very quickly. There’s no going back from this invasion.

However, there were far-reaching and excellent legal decisions in the High Court and the US Supreme Court which for once bode well for democracy , it’s a gorgeous day, the garden’s looking lovely and I’m feeling physically not bad at all, considering.

So I’m sittting here doing my usual early-morning routine; drinking tea, smoking and swearing at Labour’s poison dwarf, Hazel Blears, who’s bleating on about how yesterday’s loss of the Blaenau Gwent seat is really a victory and all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Lord, I loathe Blears – she’s what happens when you elevate a particularly smug and bovine borough council housing benefit clerk to undeserved national office. I can’t begin to describe the bathetic shallows of the woman, she’s everything you ever hated bout the lower-middle class in one evil little ginger package.

Simon Hoggart would know what to say about her.

I’ve always loved Hoggart – cerebrally, obviously, not in some sleazy Kimberly Fortierian way – and I and millions of others were very sad to hear he’s no longer to host Radio 4’s News Quiz something I’ve always looked forward to on Fridays. It’s not the weekend until the theme tune plays at 6.30.

Although the hilarious Sandi Toksvig promises to be a worthy successor, she doesn’t have the same parliamentary background that makes Hoggart such a cynical, amused radio presence. On the other hand, to have an out lesbian fronting over BBC radio’s flagship satire programme is pretty good too and she is bloody funny – “in February 2006 she joked that, as a result of being Danish and having studied Muslim law, in the light of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, she had never been so sought-after. ”

Toksvig also has a monthly column in Good Housekeeping, which is about as jam and Jerusalem as a women’s magazine gets. I buy it for the recipes, of course.

But we still have Hoggart’s parliamentary sketches in the Guardian to enjoy, and his is the first column I turn to every morning, before spending the next half-hour spitting and cursing it’s ‘hold on to nurse for fear of something worse’ editorials.

I need a good pun to start the day and today Hoggart excelled himself:

“Robert Flello, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, had a question about drug use among young people. I listened tensely. Would the question or answer make possible an unspeakably bad pun? Mr Flello wanted more money spending on drug rehab work in Stoke. The minister, Parmjit Dhanda, praised his concern for his constituents, but said flatly that there would be no more money.

That was it! Thank heavens! It was, at last, a case of freeze a jolly good Flello.”

Ack, ack ack. I’m going to be wincing at that one all day.

Right, off for a stroll to the shop to enjoy this gorgeous blue and gold morning and get some milk – otherwise I can’t have coffee, and I need serious coffee to get stuck into reading the US blogs. It’s just not possible to read about the wingnuts’ latest depravities without a good head of caffeine to buffer the outrage.

Oh yes, and since it’s Friday, while I’m away, here, have a cute kitten. I’m too good to you people.

Awwwww.

Enlist Euan Blair

Published on January 31, 2006

Which is the soldier and which the overprivileged oik? You choose.

!

Tony Blair finally made his century, then. He must be so proud.

31 January 2006 11:00

The 100th British soldier to die in Iraq is a Scot. The latest incident came in Um Quasr this morning. Just yesterday another Scot was killed when his patrol came under attack in the south of the country.

At about half past six UK time this morning an explosion took place in Um Quasr near Basra. One soldier, a Scot was killed in the incident. Three others were injured, one of them seriously. The soldiers’ names and regiment will not be released until next of kin have been informed.

This takes to 100 the number of UK troops to die on operations in Iraq since the start of hostilities almost exactly three years ago

Yet another family has lost a child for a lie: isn’t it time the Blairs made an equal sacrifice, since this is a cause Tony truly believes in? Dulce est decorum est and all that should be graven on his admittedly dicky heart, public schoolboy that he is.

Time to draft the Blair children, starting with Euan.

Tony and Cherie have four children. The eldest, Euan, born in 1984, has proved a bit of a yob, ending up in court for being “drunk and incapable” – sounds ideal for the Army – this incident notwithstanding, he’s used Daddy’s contacts very well indeed :

Educated at The London Oratory School in West London, Blair graduated with a BA in Ancient History from Bristol University in 2005. It has been reported that after graduation Blair will spend three months as an unpaid intern with Republican David Dreier and Republican Party staff on the Rules Committee of the United States House of Representatives. He will then cross the aisle and work for three months in the office of Democrat Jane Harman (a Blue Dog Democrat).

Second son Nicky was born in 1986:

Nicholas Blair (born January 6, 1985) is the second son of British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. As of 2005 he is a second-year Modern History student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. He is Secretary of Oxford University Labour Club.

Get that boy into OTC, ASAP.

Blair daughter Kathryn was born in 1988 – perfect cannon-fodder age, and as there’s no front line in Iraq I’m sure she’d see some combat and wqouldn’t be bored

Little Leo can be kept busy selling fluffy toys to pay for his siblings’ equipment, since they won’t get anything decent from the MOD.

Now I wouldn’t usually agree with attacking a politician through their children, but as Blair is letting voter’s children be killed on a regular basis for a lie, and if even the overprivileged Windsors can send a child to war, why can’t Blair, who started the bloody war in the first place?

Make Tony Blair pay for his own mistakes – why should others have had to?

Enlist The Blair Children Now!

UPDATE: King Robert Speaks finds Spinwatch, which has this from Private Eye, which makes it that much more imperative to enlist the little fucker:

Private Eye

February 6, 2006, Issue 1150

“WHAT a surprise that Tony Blair?s son Euan has found a work experience placement with the City spin doctors, Finsbury. Roland Rudd, the Finsbury founder and friend of Peter Mandelson, has been cosying up to “new” Labour for many years. In 2001 Finsbury?s party guests also included the present Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and Education Ministers (and peer) Andrew Adonis, as well as the then Labour party boss, also since ennobled, Lord Triesman.

Finsbury previously hired the former private secretary of the Dear Leader?s close pal, the Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer. Such contacts and support for Labour events at conference time perhaps helped merit the 2002 contract to advise then Transport Secretary Stephen “Liar” Byers over the Railtrack collapse.

So look out for the pay-off… most likely to come for such a selfless act as explaining to Blair the Younger the dark arts of being paid to lie… “