Speaker: So farewell then, Tony Blair
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I wouldn't normally reply to stuff like this - it's too time consuming, but you've really got me rarked up (which I expect was the point).
Sadly, I think you're right, Rich. If it's any consolation, you've done a pretty good demolition job.
My sincere apologies if there are personal circumstances which have made it impossible for the guest Speaker to be online at all since the original post, but if that is not the case, I think it's pretty disappointing that there has been no response to the many valid points in this thread. That's, like, a debate, man.
Still, judging by the tone of the original post, I suppose arguments to the contrary are simply not worth a response. We object, ergo, we are fools.
My own fault, I guess. I'll try and ignore such laughably ill-informed nonsense in future.
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1) The NHS/Health System
2) Public transport - the railways and the tube
3) SchoolsI don't think the public gives too much thought to public transport (I wish they did).
But as for investment in schools and hospitals...there's been shit loads. I have seen huge differences.
I can't say I agree with the way the money has always been spent or all the policies but to say there has been no change is churlish.
Juha, I read an article in Haaratz suggesting that Israel should try and collar Blair for the PMs spot :-) Not sure how that would play out with most of the PA audience.
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I don't think the public gives too much thought to public transport (I wish they did).
We're talking about Britain here. A lot of voters virtually live on public transport. It's a long way from work to the nearest affordable house.
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simon g - you are confusing London with Britain. Easy mistake but they are not the same. For example, only in London would George Galloway get elected :-)
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I don't think the public gives too much thought to public transport (I wish they did).
One thing Labour did do was get rid of failing operator Connex South Eastern, who were subsequently hired by.....NZ government to run Auckland Metropolitan rail services.
I wrote to the Herald 'can this be the same operator that recently had its franchise removed? .. Not published, no reply...
Nice post Rich ' + 10 on all of that'.
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Actually the Economist chimed in last week on a related issue, in their Bagehot column. Their view was that generally things are a lot better now than they were 10 years ago, so why is everyone upset?*
*Allowances made for Iraq, petty corruption and the like.
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In the 1987 election, Galloway won Glasgow Hillhead from Roy Jenkins with a majority of 3,251. Re-elected in 1992.
In the 1997 and 2001 elections Galloway was the Labour candidate for the seat of Glasgow Kelvin, winning with majorities of over 16,000 and 12,000 respectively.
Um, so Glasgow is a suburb of London?
You might not want to say that too loudly at Celtic Park. The Bhoys might not see the funny side... -
simon g - you are confusing London with Britain. Easy mistake but they are not the same. For example, only in London would George Galloway get elected :-)
Sorry Don to be so snippy: But the difference between concerns in London and in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield etc. is that "up North" they are sat in cars on Motorway links in Bolton, Doncaster and elsewhere, wondering whether it was a good idea to tear up all that track and sell off all those stations. The concern though fundamentally different is non the less a concern.
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So making Tony a Kiwi citizen and asking him to run for PM here isn't an option?
He can come and try. However, he stay at your place in the meantime 'cos I don't want him near me.
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I must get O’Farrell's book. The bit about Thatcher was well observed and very funny -
“Why did she have to go to war with a fascist dictatorship? Why couldn’t we have a straightforward goodies and baddies war, where Thatcher was the baddie and the People’s Socialist Republic of Narnia were the goodies?”
Sadly Blair has come in for the the same sort of bloodimindedness.
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only in London would George Galloway get elected
What, the former member for Glasgow Hillhead?
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My sincere apologies if there are personal circumstances which have made it impossible for the guest Speaker to be online at all since the original post, but if that is not the case, I think it's pretty disappointing that there has been no response to the many valid points in this thread. That's, like, a debate, man.
I don't know him personally, but he sometimes re-publishes these rants in Critic, the Otago student newspaper. He used to have a column in there called 'Tailgunner Joe', which was largely just a troll attacking lefties, minorities etc (a while ago, so not online as far as I know). I suspect getting strong reactions is something he enjoys, whether or not he ever sits down to debate things properly... dunno.
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Fantastic piece of writing.
A few thoughts: I too loved the John O'Farrell book (I reckoned the best way to read it was with Billy Bragg and the Smiths on the stereo) but to me his conclusion meant that what subsequently happened was not surprising.
He wrote as an old Labour supporter who was ecstatic when Blair got elected, despite Blair repudiating everything O'Donnell (and Blair, for that matter) had held dear in the 1980s.
The point was, for O'Farrell, and no doubt for many other Labour supporters in 1997, his team had finally won. Never mind the substance of the policies. What mattered was "they" were out and "we" were in.
The point aobut governments don't promulgate philosphies, they run governments is oen I'd agree with, but with a slight qualificaiton.
Government's often pretend to run philosphies but they're never as coherent as that. They can't be. The business of government is too messy for that. What they do is generate a mood around their policies. Thatcherism is probably the most relevant example. Nowhere near as consistent as she pretended to be.
The other comment I'd make is that I remember watching Blair perform over the Princess Di death and thinking 'This guy is a charlatan'. It was just too stagey and affected to be real.
One final comment - and I used this analogy a month ago in a column: Blair, not really of his party, but with the gift of engaging with the public: Brown, more of his party, running the finances, brooding, with a sense of entitlement for the top job....Key and English, of course. Key though doesn't have Blair's missionary aspect though, thank God. That should keep him more honest (the first people missionaries fool is themselves)
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So Key is actually some way to the left of Matt McCarten and has infiltrated the National party by way of Merrill Lynch, along with a caotories of like minded lefties?
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"coterie", that was..
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What, the former member for Glasgow Hillhead?
In one electorate he was a fire breathing left winger. In another the Saddam stooge. London elected him on the basis and clear knowledge of the latter aspects of his career.
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WH,
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the Saddam stooge. London elected him on the basis and clear knowledge of the latter aspects of his career.
But I note that Senator Levin has yet to take him up on his offer of a day in court over the US Senate's claims of Galloway's Oil benefits, which, when one considers the evidence presented was such an amateurish forgery, is not surprising.
For all his faults, Galloway was fantastic that day in the senate...what an opening line.
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Weston: what's the point of polls that ask a different question from:
"if the General Election was held tomorrow, which party's candidate would you vote for"? -
WH,
Rich,
This poll attempts to separate support for individual leaders from support for their political parties. This poll indicates that more than half of the people that like the Labour Party also like Tony Blair. (This is also to say that a lot of the people that don't like Tony Blair are conservative voters.)
That said, total Labour support has dropped significantly since Blair took office (ie, the numbers are not truly independent), but this is also true of the New Zealand Labour Party.
Some may have surmised Blair's relative popularity from the fact that he won three elections and served as Labour Prime Minister for a decade...
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Simon, because I have bias against Galloway, to be fair here he is:
and
Love him or hate him, he sticks to his guns.
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That Senate one you posted is very cut down..the better one is here in all its glory.
His second sentence (and you need to see it to get the full impact) was:
Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.
It was fantastic. Like him or hate him, he served it well that day.
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"I don't think the public gives too much thought to public transport (I wish they did)."
For those that don't know, London transport is divided up into six roughly circular concentric zones - zone 1 is Central London, the boundary of zone 6 goes out as far as Essex and Kent in places. Last figure I read put the population of 'Greater London' at between 9 and 11 million. For the purposes of my argument, I'll assume that that is everyone within the boundary of zone 6. 10 million people is 1/6 of the total UK population. Not an insignificant figure.
Lok at a map of the UK. Divide it into four roughly equal portions with a vertical line and horizontal line. The lower-right (south-east) corner is effectively 100% paved over. That is how the UK population is distributed.
Last job I had before I came over here was in West London. There were 20 people in the office. 2 drove to work, 14 took public transport from somewhere inside London (inside zone 6), and 4 lived outside London - one in Cambridge, one in Brighton, one in Luton and one somewhere else up north. These four all used public transport. This mix of journeys was (and is) not at all unusual for SE England and London.
For those living inside London/zone 6, each leg (to and from work) would take 1 to 2 hours on a good day. 1 to 2 hours there, 1 to 2 hours back. On a bad day, you could add anything up to an hour to each leg. My personal experience was that 'bad days' would generally happen 2 days out of 5 - 30-40% of the time.
Draw a circle with central London in the centre and which is big enough to encompass Luton, Brighton and Cambridge and you are talking about potentially 30 million public transport obsessives (and that is what you turn into after a month or two of relying on british public transport). That is now HALF the entire polulation of the country. I'm well aware of the difference between 'potential' and 'actual', but you ignore half the popuation of the country at your peril if you're a poll.
"But as for investment in schools and hospitals...there's been shit loads. I have seen huge differences. I can't say I agree with the way the money has always been spent or all the policies but to say there has been no change is churlish."
Maybe so. I can't comment on the schools because I have no direct or even indirect experience. No children, and no friends with children of school age.
But I have been unfortunate enough to have quite a lot of relevant UK hospital experience.
2-3 visits requiring GA surgery when I was around 18-20. Mid-late '80's-ish. Deep in Thatcher territory. It was a long time ago, but my memory of those is that there wasn't a lot wrong with the hospitals. Reasonably clean, good standard of care. Very, very rough and ready, very basic facilities, lots and lots of room for improvement, but generally good enough. Then an 18-19 year break where I didn't even go to the GP (i'm generally a healthy person). 2003-2004: Hospital visits for me, hospital visits for my immediate family, hospital visits for friends and their families.....
Oh. My. Sweet. Lord. If that is what 7 years of hyperinvestment in the health service buys, then all I can say (to use that tiredest of tired cliches) is that they must have been '3rd World' in 1997. Two words to sum up my experiences would be 'filth', and 'incompetence'.
There's no point increasing your spending on sticking plasters by 1000% when the patient is haemorraging from their femoral. You need a crash team.
"simon g - you are confusing London with Britain. Easy mistake but they are not the same. For example, only in London would George Galloway get elected :-)"
"In one electorate he was a fire breathing left winger. In another the Saddam stooge. London elected him on the basis and clear knowledge of the latter aspects of his career."
Galloway got elected for the same one reason (and one reason only) that Red Ken Livingstone did: to give Blair a bloody nose.
Galloways Labour opponent in Hackney(?) was Oona King. She is a good and well-liked poll and would have comfortably been re-elected if she hadn't unfortunately been standing againt the 'give blair a bloody nose' candidate. Livingstone got elected because he fought on a single platform - 'I will fight to the death to stop Blair privatising the tube system'.
The only reason Labour keep winning is the same reason they kept losing - for the party in power, the opposition is non-existant.
Both election turn-out and Labour party membership are in the cellar. One out of every four people voted Labour at the last election. That's hardly a rousing vote of confidence.
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Joseph, I've read your stuff before and enjoyed it, but you've north and south'd yourself (or metro'd yourself, if you prefer).
I don't buy either of these magazines any more becase I can't trust them to give me something reasonably close to the truth.
You have published a piss-poor argument which starts from a conclusion (blair is painted blacker than he actually is by a bunch of lefties/there is an asian crime wave), and then worked backwards, cherry-picking the facts that fit the conclusion, and ignoring those that don't. Then you've str-e-e-e-e-ch-ed those facts to fit the conclusion, even if the 'logic' steps don't actually follow.
Same as N&S did. If they are so far off the mark on that, who's to say they aren't just as far off on something else that I won't pick up so easily because its further outside my experience.
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WH,
You can't believe everything you read.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5920188/the_press_vs_al_gore
Laters.
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