From the Google cache.
Blairites: We are Thatcherites (not Labourites) Linking: 3 Comments: 3
Date: 4/25/05 at 3:47PM
Mood: Thinking Playing: Madam Medusa, by UB40
From Sky News (United Kingdom):
LABOUR LOOKS TO MRS TSee also here.Labour has praised the former Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher to claim that the current Tory election manifesto for the economy would threaten the present government’s record.
Senior Ministers contrasted the current Conservative plans with those under Mrs Thatcher in an attempt to shift their campaign focus onto the economy.
So, Blair and his ilk praise one of the cruelest and vilest Prime Ministers in British history. Well to the Right of even many of her Conservative predecessors.
Thatcher, “the milk snatcher” who took away school children’s milk. Who violently broke up the miners‘ strike and other legitimate labour actions.
Who privatized the national assets to her cronies. Who waged the cruel Falklands-Malvinas war (after a record of military support for the Argentine generals). Who followed Reagan like Blair follows Bush today.
This Thatcher, not the better traditions of the Labour movement, is now apparently Blair’s role model. Not that surprising, as Blair’s father used to be a Thatcherite Tory politician.
Blair used to call Mrs Thatcher every day during the 1999 Yugoslavia war, to know what to do. I don’t know whether he still calls her now on the Iraq war, but I wouldn’t be surprised, given the bloody results day after day.
Lyrics of Madam Medusa, on Thatcher, by UB40:
Madam Medusa
From the land of shadows
Comes a dreadful sight
Lady with the marble smile
Spirit of the night
See the scourge of innocence
Swinging in her hand
Hear the silent suffering
That echoes through the land
From the tombs of ignorance
Of hate and greed and lies
Through the smoke of sacrifice
Watch her figure rise
The sick the poor the old
Basking in her radiance
Men of blood and gold
In her bloody footsteps
Speculators prance
Men of dreams are praying
For that second chance
Round her vacant features
Gilded serpents dance
Her tree of evil knowledge
Sprouts a special branch
Madam Medusa
Madam Medusa
Madam Medusa
Knock her right down
And then she bounce right back
Knock her right down
And then she bounce right back
She gone off her head
We`ve got to shoot her dead
She gone off her head
We`ve got to shoot her dead
Run for your life before she eat you alive
Run for your life before she eat you alive
Move out of the way cos`s you`re blocking out the day
Move out of the way cos`s you`re blocking out the day
Hillary Clinton and Thatcher: here.
1980s Labour leader Michael Foot: here.
News Line : Editorial
Editorial: Wedesday April 27 2005
CHANCELLOR BROWN LAUDS THATCHER
SPEAKING at a press conference on business policies on Monday, the Labour government’s chancellor, Gordon Brown, sought to parade the Thatcherite credentials of the Blair government, through presenting its admiration for Thatcher, and itself as the continuator of the Thatcher tradition.
Brown heaped praise on Thatcher, one of the most hated Tory leaders in history, and strained every nerve to show that Labour was following in her footsteps, while the Tories, led by Howard, had broken with her.
Brown declared that Thatcher would be shocked at what he claimed were the policies of the Tory Party to ‘spend more, tax less and borrow less’. He added for good measure that these policies were ‘irresponsible and reckless’ and would jeopardise the ‘stability’ that Labour policy had created and that Thatcher ‘would never have countenanced’ them.
The Trade and Industry Secretary, Hewitt, also fell over herself in her enthusiasm to praise Thatcher, saying that ‘Lady Thatcher’s Tory Party used to run the economy’ while Howard’s Tory party ‘runs away from it’.
These Labour claims will infuriate millions of trade unionists and workers, including the hundreds of thousands of workers who lost their jobs in the mining and printing industries as a result of Thatcher’s war on the trade unions.
The three million who were sacked under Thatcher, plus the millions who fought against Thatcher’s poll tax – a tax that was piloted in by Howard – will not be pleased either by Brown’s flaunting of his Thatcherite credentials.
While the Blair-Brown leadership’s admiration for Thatcher has always been well known in political circles, the decision to go public with their love affair is an expression of their conviction that there will be a low turnout of working class votes in the May 5th general election.
Blair and Brown consider that in many key constituencies it is the party that wins the right wing vote that will win the day, and they are looking to win right wing middle class votes to try to make sure that they are returned.
In fact, the first Blair government kept to the spending policies laid down by the Major government and its chancellor Kenneth Clarke.
It also took a delight in handing control over interest rates to the Bank of England, and in paying off more of the national debt than all of the previous governments since the first world war put together.
While rewarding the bankers, it drove down public expenditure as a percentage of the gross domestic product to well below the levels established by Thatcher, and it gloried in the way that it drove hundreds of thousands of unemployed off benefit.
The second Labour government concentrated on speeding up the privatisation of the NHS and education, as well as deciding to sack 100,000 civil servants and to end the final salary pensions of 1.5 million public sector workers.
Yes, Brown is right; these were thoroughly Thatcherite governments, and a third Labour term will step up the pace of implementation of Thatcherite policies.
Comment by Administrator — January 1, 2007 @ 9:58 pm
NEWS LINE [Britain] lead article: Monday March 14 2005
‘WE DON’T TRUST YOU’ – women’s group tells Blair
An all-woman TV audience yesterday told prime minister Blair that they could no longer trust him.
This was especially so over the Iraq war.
Speaking on the Jonathan Dimbleby programme on ITV, Catherine said: ‘Clearly you can’t change the world overnight but there are key criteria for me where you have fallen down.
‘And you are consistently failing to meet the criteria you set yourself in 1997.
‘Iraq is the classic example – the decisions around that.’
Blair said he knew a lot of people disagreed with him but he had decided that ‘in the end that it would be safer for us in this country if Saddam was removed from power’.
Another woman chipped in: ‘Why didn’t you say that when you went into Iraq that that was the reason?
‘Why was it all about weapons of mass destruction?’
Blair claimed, ‘That was the basis on which we went in.’
He attempted to ‘explain’ that after September 11, ‘We had to take a different attitude to the enforcement of all United Nations resolutions against countries that were developing WMD.’
Another woman, Romy, refuted this argument: ‘But the decision was based on flawed intelligence.
‘We’ve lost trust in you because basically it was flawed, we should never have gone and you have never ever apologised for the fact that we did go to war.
‘It should never have happened.’
Blair replied: ‘I have apologised for the intelligence being flawed, although I honestly represented the intelligence to people that we had at the time.’
He admitted that the latest inspectors’ report revealed that Saddam Hussein ‘did not have readily deployable weapons at the time of the invasion. He’s either destroyed or removed them.’
But Blair continued: ‘However, he did retain the scientists and the laboratories with the determination to restart this process once the UN inspectors had left.’
Romy interjected: ‘But he wasn’t an imminent threat.
‘We were told that within 45 minutes the world would come to an end. This is virtually what you were saying.
‘It wasn’t true – it was flawed, absolutely flawed.
‘Thousands of people have died, hundreds of troops, I think fifteen hundred American troops, to say nothing of all the British people who have died, over there.
‘I just don’t know how you can sit there and say that you did all this when it was absolutely blatantly flawed.’
Blair responded to this: ‘The intelligence we gave people was the intelligence we had.’
He added: ‘In my view this world is a better and safer place without Saddam Hussein.’
Another woman said: ‘I fully supported the war against terrorism. I’ve lived through terrorism. I’ve been to Ireland and I’ve seen what terrorism has done in Ireland.
‘However, I feel so let down by you, and by Mr Bush, because of what has come out as being just something that wasn’t true.’
Later, another woman put to Blair: ‘You mentioned the legal basis for war on Iraq. Are you willing to publish the legal advice in full, because as yet we still haven’t seen entirely what there is?
‘We’re basing this on a single parliamentary answer that was apparently drafted by people in your office and not by a legal team.’
Blair refused, saying ‘We won’t publish the full advice because governments never do. It’s confidential legal advice between government and law officers.’
Comment by Administrator — January 2, 2007 @ 10:47 am
Ex-MP joins fight to screen controversial war film
FORMER Linlithgow MP Tam Dalyell has backed a campaign to force the BBC to screen the controversial war film Tumbledown.
He believes that the 1989 war drama should be reshown ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War.
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And he believes that the screening would have particular resonance in Edinburgh, where many of the frontline Scots Guards were from. The campaign was started last week by former soldier Robert Lawrence, on whom the film is based. Starring Colin Firth in the lead role as Lawrence, it featured gruesome scenes of hand-to-hand fighting.
When Tumbledown was first shown, just seven years after the real Battle of Tumbledown, the BBC was accused of left-wing bias and the film’s director, Sir Richard Eyre, of being a Communist. Mr Dalyell, an honorary member of the Officers of the Scots Dragoon Guards, said: “It should be shown to bring home the horrors of war.
“Most of the younger generation have no notion of what war is actually like. They see it on celluloid but those of us of an age have some inkling, having had to do national service, as to what war is actually like. The nastiness of it all should be brought home to people. Young people might be rather more demanding of politicians if they saw this.
“When I saw [the film] it had the ring of truthfulness about it. I think it would be likely to move people now. People don’t appreciate the realities of war. The horror of what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq has not sunk in.”
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=382&id=189572007
Comment by Administrator — February 17, 2007 @ 12:57 pm