Tag Archives: Blair

President Blair… Christ alive…

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Allow Tony Blair to become the EU’s first permanent president and I’m very likely to turn anti-EU again.

My feelings have already been succinctly summed up by Ari – a Finn, lest anyone get the idea this is yet another disillusioned Brit:

“Admittedly a lot of people in a lot of different countries know Tony Blair, which can’t be said for most possible candidates. Alas, he’s known for making a disastrous mistake and then not owning up to it, i.e. for showing bad judgment and not being particularly trustworthy. That sort of fame isn’t really a desirable quality in a candidate.”

Plus, of course, despite being supposedly very pro-EU, during his ten years in power Blair repeatedly failed to do anything to convince the country that being pro-EU is sensible – spending most of his time continuing John Major’s “wait and see” approach, despite being in a significantly stronger position than Major ever was throughout his time as PM. Had Blair wanted to he could, with his huge Commons majority and the inexplicable love the country had for him during his first term or so, have used his extraordinarily strong position to have pushed the EU on the UK, or at the very least to try and convince the country that closer engagement is a good plan. Instead, he did nothing.

This lack of action continued even on the continent. During the UK’s last (rotating) presidency of the EU, Blair was so invisible and uninvolved that one MEP even put out a jokey “Missing: The President of the European Union” press release. In fact, Blair’s only real engagement with Brussels during his time in office was to try to use the EU to bypass Westminster and force laws upon us that he never would have been able to get past his own MPs.

On top of that, of course, so hated is Blair in the UK that to have him as the EU’s official figurehead for (most likely) five years is merely going to further entrench British anti-EU feeling. Though he’d have been a good spokesman for the EU ten years ago, now he’d be like using Gary Glitter to advertise a primary school.

Not that the only other “name” candidate is much better. Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker is so rabidly, blindly pro-EU that he makes me feel decidedly uncomfortable, still advocating the kind of total political integration that most people gave up on back in the 70s, still advocating a “United States of Europe”. It’s hard to think of anyone with views more likely to drive British europhobes into a foaming rage, or to finally convince moderate eurosceptics that there really is no hope for the EU.

So who else is there? Well, what about Romano Prodi? He’ll most likely be available soon, judging by how his luck’s been failing him in Italy. As a former president of the European Commission he’s got the experience of running things at the top of the EU (during which period he oversaw the introduction of the Euro and expansion from 15 to 25 member states). As a two-time Prime Minister of Italy he has plenty of experience of juggling the multiple interests of tenuous coalitions, essential for anyone trying to keep all 27 EU member states happy while simultaneously trying to get agreements with non-EU powers.

Blair’s experience of diplomacy, in comparison, consists largely of two options: agree entirely with everything George Bush says, or launch an invasion. Jean-Claude Juncker’s, coming as he does from a principality only slightly larger than Greater London with a population less than that of Bristol, is non-existent. And yet these are the two front-runners for a position created largely to help in the EU’s diplomatic relations? Christ…

Blair has lost it – official

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Check out this interview. Watch the video. The transcript doesn’t do it justice – you miss the long silences, the ums, the ers, the panicked look in his eyes whenever he’s asked a question, be it about Iraq, the honours inquiry, the Saudi arms deal, his legacy, the infighting within the Labour party, anything. A representative response:

“Yeah but you know, I think most people would accept that at least you know, there’s got to be some process of transition, if you’re saying, cos the whole context in which I was saying that was…”

This is a man so totally out of his depth, so confused, and so mired in a swirl of half-truths and little distortions that he has no possibility of maintaining any kind of control over his own inconsistencies and self-contradictions any more. His only resort when challenged is prevarication, meaningless half-sentences and, ultimately, the unjustified, not remotely backed up with argument or evidence to support it as viaible, statement: “Well I don’t accept that for a moment”.

Like watching a particularly slow and meaningless train wreck. Brilliant.

Blair must fall

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Oh yes – this.
“This is a formal call for an ammunition check. What have we got that we haven’t used? What have we got that can be used again? Count it, check it, and get ready to use it. Blair must fall.”

The Ron Aldridge loan should bring Blair down

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(Updated: Yes, I know his name’s Rod. My bad. More updates at the foot of this post…)

It won’t, because we have a largely supine press when it comes to this government. The tabloids can bring people down via sex scandals – but it takes the broadsheets to hammer governments on political issues. At the moment, the broadsheets aren’t prepared to do it. The left-leaning ones don’t trust Brown, the right-leaning ones don’t trust Cameron. There’s no potential saviour for them to laud, so they’re going to let this particular major political scandal slip under most people’s radar.

I really hope I’m proved wrong on this, but hell, even BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson on tonight’s 10 o’clock news, though flagging the scandal of Capita’s chairman being one of the people behind these morally highly suspect undeclared loans, failed to explain quite the extent of Aldridge’s company’s involvement in public life. Perhaps because it’s the company that administers the BBC’s License fee…

Do a Google search for Capita +”government contract” you currently get 30,800 results. Just from the excerpts on the first page of Google’s listings, you get figures of �55 million, �400 million, �40 million. Go to Capita’s own website you’ll see government contract figures of �177.5m, �250m, �500m.

As readers of Private Eye will know, that’s not all – Capita have secured an obscene number of government contracts since 1997 – the company’s turnover (by its own estimates) growing from �112 million in 1996 to �687 million last year.

It’s also not for nothing that the Eye has dubbed the company “Crapita” – its track record in outsourced public service delivery (everything from County Council payrolls and the Metropolitan Police’s pension scheme to London’s Congestion Charge scheme to running IT systems for the Criminal Records Bureau) is shoddy at best, downright negligent at worst. (They are also the most likely company to secure the contract to run the National Identity Register and ID Cards scheme.)

Hell, the company’s failures have even been flagged by Parliament on several occasions, and Capita itself has been known to admit responsibility for major failures (though they often make excuses) yet STILL they gain lucrative contracts. Here, from the Education and Skills Select Committee’s report into the failure of the Individual Learning Accounts:

“Mr Paddy Doyle of Capita said: ‘looking back on it now, looking closely at the sequence of events, as we have done in our investigations, I believe we should have shouted louder and harder at that time about things that we were identifying’. He assured us that although ‘there was an element in the contract which was volume-based’ there was no incentive for Capita to ignore fraud and abuse of the system… Mr Doyle told us that Capita ‘share our part of the blame in that the scheme has gone wrong’.”

Yet do a Google search for “Rod Aldridge” + “Labour donor” and you currently get a grand total of 3 results – two Guardian Education articles (1, 2) and a transcript of the second Guardian article at the website of the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance. That first Guardian article notes that

“The executive chairman of Capita, Rod Aldridge, is not a major Labour donor, but has attended Labour fundraising events and has advised the government on outsourcing.”

At the time, even that was enough to raise suspicions about the company’s receipt of a �177m public education contract (which, if you note the second article, discussing the potential contract eight months earlier, was estimated at *just* �40 million).

Today it was revealed that Ron Aldridge “loaned” Labour �1 million. Naturally enough, this was “in a private capacity”. But come on… The chairman of a company whose entire success relies on big government contracts (funded by the taxpayer, lest we forget) bungs the government a million quid out of his own pocket (a million quid earned thanks to the big government contracts funded by the taxpayer and other, private sector contracts earned in part thanks to its high-profile government links) and there’s nothing dodgy going on?

Either Aldridge was trying to bribe Downing Street or Downing Street was extorting money out of him. The only vaguely innocent option is that both Aldridge and Blair are too bloody stupid to realise how insanely bad such a situation could look.

No matter which option is the right one, the Labour party Treasurer has publicly denied all knowledge and Blair has publicly accepted responsibility. No matter which option is the right one, this means Blair should go – either for being bribed, for extorting money, or for being incompetent.

In an ideal world, after Blair is forced out in disgrace there would be an in-depth independent enquiry into every government contract Capita has recieved over the last nine years with the option to force the buggers to pay the country back for every failed delivery – of which there are many, many examples.

Remember – “Loans for honours” is not the real scandal. That’s small fry and a long-accepted part of British politics (which is why the Tories can’t use this against the government). The Aldridge/Capita loan is the real story – and one the government have hoped to bury by releasing his name in amongst those of several others.

Look forward to the next issue of Private Eye. And in the meantime, hope the rest of the press grows some bollocks, actually USES this, and proves my pessimism wrong.

Tuesday update: More from the Financial Times, tim Worstall, A Big Stick And A Small Carrot, Guido Fawkes (and more and again) and Bloggerheads (including a surprising transcript from The Sun)

Update 2: Ha ha ha! Take the Capita contracts quiz (right hand column):

Which of the following contracts has not been awarded to Labour donors Capita?
Criminal Records Bureau, Congestion Charge, TV license fee collection, Council tax bills, Teachers’ pensions, Housing benefit, National Insurance, Individual Learning Accounts, Literacy and Learning, BBC Human Resources

Update 3: Jarndyce notes that “Like everything else in Blairworld, the puny case for the defence is just semantics”, and links to a Sunday Telegraph article I’d missed, detailing just how personally involved Blair is in all this. This particular Prime Ministerial fox should is cornered and should now be ripped to shreds by the hounds. But as that’s been banned, I’ll settle for a few blasts from a shotgun. Time to put him out of our misery.

Update 4: Make My Vote Count with “the hastiest of rundowns of what people from all sides of the media are already failing to call Levygate.”

Update 5: Charles Clarke goes on the attack – targetting the one man who’s name’s come up in all this who seems to be entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, Labour Treasurer Jack Dromey. Apparently it’s his fault for not noticing that there was something suspect going on… (Coincidentally that’s exactly the same logic used by those people who blame the Bush administration for 9/11 and Blair and co for 7/7.)

Update 6: Missed this thanks to the Guardian not recognising a potential story when they’re handed it on a plate. Martin Bell on Comment is Free with New Labour’s Watergate, and the real question:

“what did the prime minister know and when did he know it?”

If, as seems to be the case, this little peerage scam was orchestrated with Tony’s full knowledge from the very beginning (as his granting of a peerage and then Lord Chancellorship to his old flatmate would tend to suggest he did), what did he also know about the Capita/Aldridge loan, and when did he know it?

Was Blair REALLY too stupid to see how bad it would look, or is it ACTUALLY as bad as it looks? Either way, he’s not fit to run the country.

The EU and Tony Blair, the ineffectual loser

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Another load of Blairite EU-nonsense? An attempt to make it look like we’re actually making an effort after the US farm subsides offer and ahead of the WTO meeting this week? Or is this just Prescott picking up his notes from a few months back by mistake?

Yep, he’s mentioned the whole “we’ll scrap the rebate in exchange for CAP reform” thing again – this time also swinging a few wild shots at the sacred cow that is the rebate by branding it a mistake and – effectively – Maggie Thatcher a bit of a wimp for taking the easy option back when the negotiations for the bloody thing were going on.

We can probably expect a few more vocal yet half-hearted noises about EU reform from Blair’s lot over the next couple of months. Because a couple of months is all they’ve got left of their presidency – in which, as of yet, they have achieved precisely tit all. And now, of course, they also have the possible threat of Bird Flu to distract everyone from Blair’s much-promoted “reforming agenda” that they spouted so much crap about back in the summer when we took over the presidency.

Today, Liberation has a fun article slagging off the “political inertia of the British presidency”, hot on the heels of the amusing sarcasm of Austrian MEP Othmar Karas, the vice-president of the EPP-ED Group, who last week put out a press release as follows:

“We have lost the President of the Council. From what we hear he is the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, although nobody has seen or heard of him since the summer recess ended. Useful indications concerning his whereabouts and especially his activities will be gladly received by the European citizens”

Karas also noted something that most Brits have become all too used to since 1997 – “we hear from hard work behind the scenes from his cabinet ministers, but the man himself is showing none of his promised European leadership”. Replace “European” for “domestic”, Karas could easily have been talking about Blair at home…

Liberation quotes a few other Europeans who are less than iimpressed with Blair’s “achievements”:

“You’ve got to judge the performance of this presidency by other criteria that those that usually apply… as the United Kingdom thinks that the EU already does too much, one imagines that by not doing anything they’re fulfilling their objectives perfectly!”

So, has Blair become a Eurosceptic again, as he used to be back in the early 1980s (when he was also anti-nuke, anti-US, and a pacifist)? Is he following Kilroy’s line of basically doing tit all when it comes to Europe because he can’t be arsed with it?

Blair may have made bold claims about his EU plans. He may claim to be a “passionate European”. But actions speak far, far louder than words – especially words coming from Blair or anyone in his circle. As of yet there has been no action. At all.

The uncertainty of the German situation, the ongoing potential exit of Blair, the likely ousting of Chirac and the hope of the booting out of Berlusconi, combined with the rousing defeat for the piss-poor constitution, spats with Turkey and ongoing disputes with the US over air travel, steel, farm subsidies and the like ensures that, at present, no one knows what the hell’s going on, and no one’s been prepared to commit to anything when they know that in a couple of years’ time the leaderships of the main EU countries could look very different indeed. Why do a deal with Blair when you might be able to get something more sensible from Brown, a man our EU cousins seem to respect rather more? Why argue with the stubborn bastard Chirac when he’s going to be out on his arse in a year or so?

This UK presidency is turning into a six month EU-wide holiday. Time for everyone to put their feet up and take stock of the situation, ponder their strategies over the next decade or so, and work out who their allies might be. In other words, Blair’s lame-duck presidency could be precisely what the EU needs. A time out, a chance to regroup – and certainly a chance for Germany to sort out who the hell it is who’s going to be speaking for them on the international stage. Because until Germany’s got a stable government again (the final line-up of Merkel’s cross-party cabinet is expected to be announced today, but it’ll still take a while to stabilise), no EU negotiations are ever going to get anywhere.

The fact that Blair and co seem genuinely to have thought that they could achieve something significant with their six months as the nominal head of Europe, that they would actually make some progress on so many issues, simply makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable.

But what Blair and co failed to realise, having won three General Elections with no effort, and having had an immense parliamentary majority to ensure every piece of legislation always goes through without too much fuss, is that to succeed in grown-up politics you actually have to make a bit of effort. All they’ve done with this presidency is hold some press conferences, announce some initiatives, and expect everything to somehow come together. That may work in Britain – it won’t cut it on the continent.

Put Blair up against real politics, this is how he fares – inertia and withdrawal. Blair’s international policies have pretty much all been dismal failures – about the only thing he’s succeeded at is getting the Olympics for London, something which will end up costing the country billions with very little return. It doesn’t bode well for his much-vaunted post-Prime Ministerial career as some kind of world statesman – and has certainly put down any suggestions of Blair becoming the first permanent President of Europe. Which, once again, can only be a good thing. Prime Minister Blair is bad enough – President Blair, as he’s proved over the last few months, is an ineffectual loser.

Blair has waited and Blair has seen

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Well, that didn’t take long…

The Guardian: Europe’s shattered dream: Blair to challenge Chirac

Amid surprise that Paris and Berlin appear determined to press ahead with the ratification process after a 55% no vote, Mr Chirac will be asked in private whether France will be consulted again in a second poll – the only way of reviving the constitution.

… A negative response from the French president will pave the way for Britain, the Czech Republic and Poland – which are all facing tough referendums – to cancel their polls on the grounds that the constitution is dead.

…A double no from two founding members of the EU in the space of three days would deal such a blow to the constitution that all sides may agree it is dead. This would clear the way for Jack Straw to announce the cancellation of the British referendum when he addresses MPs on Monday.

The Independent: Blair prepares for ‘bruising battle’ between rival visions of Europe

Mr Blair broke a holiday in Tuscany to make it clear that he now intended to use the forthcoming British presidency to lead a bruising battle between “old Europe” and “new Europe” over the reform of the EU economies. The French vote has placed the EU at the crossroads of a historic dispute over the future direction of the European Union.

And thus Blair’s plans for his third term become clear. There’s been speculation for ages that he had his heart set on becoming the first proper President of the European Union, but it seems to be more than that – it looks rather like he wants to reshape the EU in his own image.

Brilliant. A time of manufactured crisis, and who steps into the breach but one of the most mediocre minds in European politics… If Blair gets his way, be prepared for an EU that is even more style over substance than the current model.

Alternatively, Chirac could simply ignore the views of his electorate and ratify the treaty, making the EU look even less interested in democracy than it already appears.

Note to our political overlords – this constitution really isn’t great enough to risk wrecking the whole bloody thing over. The easiest way out is not to have Blair spouting off, or for more referendums ratifying something which, without France, cannot be ratified.

The easiest way out is to throw up your arms and admit defeat, and try to come up with something more acceptable instead. And to come up with something more acceptable you want Blair as far away from any decision-making process as you possibly can…