Will the New Labour nightmare never end?

I’ve been away for two weeks in Rome. Working. Yes it was nice but it was nice to get home and on Saturday afternoon I ate breakfast at a café in Trafalgar street. While I waited I read a Daily Mirror and on page 4 I was flabbergasted to see that two of the headlines implied that the New Labour nightmare may continue for some time to come. The first said “Blair Up for President of Europe.” And the second “Mandy for PM?”

Has the world gone mad?

blair to be president

Perhaps while I was away the whole country has been brain washed and we have forgotten that the the three stooges of Blair, Brown and Mandelson ran down British industry in favour of a speculative bubble while Brown promised “an end to boom and bust”.

As there had been so much publicity over Brown’s disastrous interview with Sky TV I watched it on Youtube. Amazing. He seemed to think that he had avoided global financial meltdown single headedly yet completely ignored his own part in causing the crisis. And let’s get this straight, the crisis may have been world wide but the ideological underpinning behind the speculative bubble can be traced to the disconnect between UK/US spin and the real economy. Blair and Brown believed that if they just spent money and told lies then the lies would come true.

In the interview Brown whinges that the interviewer wants to talk about personalities while Brown wants to talk about policies. This is rich. Just last week Brown had to get his wife to speak up for him at The Labour Conference in Brighton telling us what a good man he is. For God’s sake! Why not get his mum there too?  The problem is that the wife’s opinion is merely that Brown’s heart is in the right place. Well great, so he meant well while he made a cock up of the British economy. That’s nice.

The point is not whether he meant well, the point is that he is arrogant and incompetent. A mixture that I personally find particularly unforgivable.

And Blair as president of Europe! Well, I guess the Europeans have not had to suffer the smug, grinning, amoral, imbecile the way the British have. Recall that this man was the peace envoy to the Middle East that couldn’t even bring himself to call for a ceasefire while the Israelis bombed the crap out of Lebanon. Then he went silent when the Israelis bombed the crap out of Gaza. If the only requirement for becoming the peace envoy to the Middle East is keeping your mouth shut then Blair is obviously the man for the job.

Mandy for PM

And Mandelson for PM? Has nobody noticed the reinjection of deception which has accompanied the return of Mandelson?

I guess we should not really be surprised that New Labour care more for media manipulation than they do for action. It’s all they understand. It seems that most of them have a background in public relations or the media. Just today I heard that Brown’s wife worked for a “brand consultancy”.

There seems to be a school of thought that, as bad as New Labour have been, people must vote Labour to stop the Tories getting in.

Why?

In what way have New Labour been better than the Tories? Firstly I suggest that New Labour have got away with more market orientated, hyper capitalist idiocy than the Tories ever could and secondly I ask what is the point of voting for a party whose policies are at odds with your wishes merely because it used to be left wing in the old days?

If Labour were kicked out at the next election and the Tories elected then at least Labour would be forced into a rethink of their media centric approach to politics and might start spending less time on presentation and more time on achievement.

Let us hope that The Daily Mirror is Talking Bollocks.

Brighton Peace Walk for Gaza

A Peace Walk for Gaza was held in Brighton on Sunday 18th January 2008. Due to start at 1pm from the town hall we eventually got started at 1:30pm after waiting for some people to arrive from out of town.

To begin with it looked like very few people had turned up but by the time the speeches were over and we’d got started there were a good number. Previous walks have been swamped with police but, thankfully, this time the police kept a relatively low profile.

Brighton Peace Walk foir Gaza

Speakers included a Jewish man with relatives who had died in The Holocaust, a representative of the local MP, a representative from Amnesty International and a Palestinian. Sadly I did not record their names. We walked up North Street and along Western Road finishing up at Norfolk Square. A mad old man with an extraordinary beard and a stick provided balance by ranting that Palestinains were all shits, he knew one and every time he met him he ended up rowing with the guy.

In the past when I’ve attended these type of things there have not been enough Muslims. I am frustrated that British Muslims complain about Israel yet do not seem to get active in protests. This time there were a fair number of people who appeared to be Arabs and possibly Palestinians. They got involved in ”free Palestine” chanting and this included “From the river to the sea” which could be construed as a call for the abolition of Israel. I thought the event organiser apeared uneasy that the chanting might cross the line into anti-Semitism but perhaps that was me. In the end the event went off well and stayed focused on helping Palestinians.

Brighton Peace Walk for Gaza

Palestine – Blaming the victims

The Israelis have now killed over 1,000 people during the current round of fighting in Gaza. Israel argues that they are responding to continued rocket attacks upon their citizens.

This sounds like a valid reason but Israel continues to expand settlements on Palestinians territory and operates racist policies to carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jerusalem. It is difficult to argue that Palestinians should passively accept this.
In exchanges I have had with the Israeli embassy in London they are argue that Palestinian attacks would continue whether they carried out settlement activity or not. Perhaps but there is no way of knowing since Israel never stops expanding the settlements.

To my mind the root of the problem is that Israel considers itself as home to Jews and not to Palestinians. Palestinians, therefore, are considered second class citizens. Consider the use of live ammunition to control Palestinians during the first intifada and contrast this with the extreme care taken not to harm illegal Jewish settlers being removed from Gaza.

I am not claiming that Jews are somehow bad and Palestinians good but that if a society is constructed so that one group of people has all the power then they will abuse that power.

The Israelis consider Israel to be land given to them by God and they consider the Palestinians presence to be a problem. Thus they continue to steal land from The Palestinians while simultaneously blaming them for the conflict.

Now we hear that Israel is insisting that the isolation of Gaza be increased to prevent Hamas rearming as a condition for a ceasefire.

But will Israel also refrain from rearming during a ceasefire?