I just received this email from Greg Palast. Obviously a lot of basic errors in his reporting, but I am interested if any Brits reading this agree with Palast’s assessment of how Blair is viewed by the people. I haven’t lived in the UK for 10 years and am obviously out of touch.
Thought I’d have a go at correcting some of his factual mistakes (and undoubtedly make some of my own as I try to summarise some quite complex points
) and I thought I’d have a go at this political commentators windbaggery – it looks fun, forget facts and logical consistency.
TONY BLAIR CAN'T WIN
Wednesday, May 4, 2005
By Greg Palast
Mark my words: Tony Blair won't be re-elected on Thursday. However, he will remain in office.
That's because Brits don't vote for their Prime Minister. They've got a "parliamentary" system there in the Mother Country. And the difference between democracy and parliamentary rule makes all the difference. It is the only reason why Blair will keep his job -- at least for a few months.
We have a constitutional monarchy with a representative parliamentary democracy I’ll have you know.
His point here is no more relevant then when USA Members here come back with “The USA is not a democracy†if someone says the USA is a democracy. The UK is a democracy it just happens to have a parliamentary system of democracy.
Let me explain. The British vote only for their local Member of Parliament. The MPs, in turn, pick the PM. If a carpenter in Nottingham doesn't like Prime Minister Blair (not all dislike him, some detest him), the only darn thing they can do about it is vote against their local MP, in this case, the lovely Alan Simpson, a Labour Party stalwart who himself would rather kiss a toad than cuddle with Tony.
Yes we do vote only for our own MP (we actually don’t vote for a party at all) but it is not correct to say it is the MPs that pick the PM, it is the political party that chooses a leader and if the Queen agrees and the party gains an overall majority that leader can expect to become the next Prime Minister. (And the Queen does still have the power to decide who should be the next Prime Minister – one reason the monarchy should go.) However practically it is the current leader of the political party your MP represents that will become the next Prime Minister if the party gains a majority of seats in the House of Commons. This can result in some strange occurrences, such as when Thatcher lost the leadership of the Conservative party and John Major became Prime Minister without the country going to the polls.
Therefore, the majority of the Queen's subjects -- deathly afraid of the return of Margaret Thatcher's vampirical Tory spawn -- holds their noses, vote for their local Labour MP and pray that an act of God will save their happy isle. A recent poll showed the British evenly divided: forty percent want Blair to encounter a speeding double-decker bus and forty percent want him stretched, scalded and quartered in the Tower of London (within a sampling margin of four percent).
Hmm.. I haven’t quite got this impression. I think the major issue with Tony Blair is that mud sticks and people are now
disappointed with him. Plus we seem to have this curious selective blindness in our opinions. For example several opinion polls on issue of say the NHS have revealed that 80% of people think their local NHS has got better but the NHS hasn’t! (Can’t find a link if I do I’ll post it.) Or that only 40% of people who haven’t recently used the NHS think it has got better whilst 80% of people who have used it recently think it has got better.
The major issue that has hurt Blair has been the decision (by Parliament) to go to war with Iraq. Strangely what many people seem to forget is that it was
Parliament that voted for the war (the Liberals voted against and the Conservatives with the government) . The accusations have been that Tony Blair lied – which still has not been proven – and this has stuck.
Why? Well, to begin with, Blair lies. A secret memo from inside Blair's coven discovered this week made clear that Britain's Prime Minister knew damn well, eight months before we invaded Iraq, that George Bush was cooking the intelligence info on "WDM," but Blair agreed to tag along with his master.
I’ve not seen this memo, it certainly isn’t the one leaked in the last week!
The Prime Minister's coterie sold his nation on the re-conquest of their old colony, Iraq, by making up this cockamamie story about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction that could take out London in 45 minutes. But Brits knew that was 'bollocks' (no translation available) long before this week's shock-horror memo story.
Oh dear… facts not in evidence.
A greater blight on the Prime Minister's reputation: Blair likes American presidents. While his habit of keeping his nose snug against Bill Clinton's derriere was a bit off-putting, his application to George Bush's behind makes Blair's countrymen retch.
Yet this was never seen a problem with Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher, their romance was legendary or with Blair and Clinton. What this reflects is that the British don’t like Bush!
I watched the machinery called Tony Blair up close as a Yankee in King Blair's court (first as an advisor on the inside, then as a journalist also on the inside, but with a hidden tape recorder).
And it was eerie. Because what I saw was a man who, while Britain's erstwhile leader, scorns his own country. That is, he scorns the union workers that wanted to keep filthy coal mines open;
Eh? This just doesn’t make any sense; the mines were finished long before Blair came to power.
he scorns the nostalgic blue-haired ladies who wanted to keep the Queen's snout on their nation's currency;
Scorns? Does he mean it’s wrong for Prime Minister to pursue the policies that he thinks is best for the British?
he scorns his nation of maddeningly inefficient little shops on the high street,
Hmm.. has this person walked down any high street in the last ten years? Again this all happened before the current Labour party came to power, the homogenisation of Britain’s high streets started in the eighties.
of subjects snoozy with welfare state comforts and fearful of the wonders of cheap labor available in far-off locales.
Phew – terrible isn’t it that he wants welfare for the needy not the lazy?
Blair looks longingly at America, land of the hard-charging capitalist cowboy, of entrepreneurs with big-box retail discount stores, Silicon Valley start-ups and Asian out-sourcing.
So do most people in the world… unfortunately
Blair doesn't want to be Prime Minister. He wants to be governor in London of America's 51st state.
Yawn, anyway I thought he wanted to president of the united states of Europe, I can’t keep up with the ambitions of this Blair bloke! One minute wanting to be the 51st state of the USA next wanting Brussels to run the country – wish he’d make his mind up!
Britons know this. They feel deeply that their main man doesn't like the Britain he has. And that is why the average punter in the pub longs to be led by that most English of British politicians -- who is not English at all -- Gordon Brown, the Scotland-born Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Rubbish! Sorry but that is all I can say.
And so they vote for their local Labour MP on that party's quietly whispered promise that, shortly after the election, Gordon Brown, defender of the old welfare state, union rights, and a gentleman unlikely to invade forgotten remnants of the empire, will, on a vote of his parliamentary confreres, take the reins of government in his benign and prudent hands.
On which whisper? Blair has said this will be the last time he stands as Party Leader in a General Election and that he will stand a full term, by which I’ve taken to mean into the 3rd year of the next Parliament, if Labour forms the next government of course. I also take it this journalist missed the blunt and unambiguous statements of Brown that he would have made the same decision as Blair regarding Iraq?
We don’t want Brown, people are just fed up with Blair, it’s the British disease – we don’t like winners!
As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, Tony Blair is a man of principle. So was the Ayatolla Khomeini. Both were willing to have others pay any price for their beliefs.
Right – so we compare Blair with a fundamentalist, oh well we should make sure our leaders in future have no principles I take it?
Luckily for Britain, Chancellor Brown won't let Blair put his fanatic hands on the kingdom's cash or coinage. And herein is another difference betwixt the US and UK. In America, the Treasury Secretary is little more than the President's factotum. In Britain, the Chancellor holds the nation's purse. Brown brilliantly controls Britain's spending, taxing and currency. For example, despite Tony's pleas, Brown presciently nixed England dumping the pound coin for the euro.
Hang on why Brown won’t do this is because of what --- principles? But that means he’s like the Ayatollah Khomeini!!!
Yep and this journalist has just about cottoned on to something - on matters of domestic policies because the Prime Minister is only the first amongst equals other ministers (especially the Chancellor) have a lot of say in what happens. But hang on this means that all the ills of the country may not just be down to Blair? No that cannot be true, Brown must be blameless.
And thus Brown, not Blair, has earned his nation's gratitude for the island's steady recovery from Thatcherite punishments while, across The Pond, real wages in Bush's America are falling.
And again this journalist must have missed that bit of news that showed a drop in real terms of people’s wages in this country under his beloved Brown’s management?
Blair will hold onto office - for now - due only to a sly campaign that relies on the public's accepting on faith that, sooner rather than later after the vote on Thursday, Blair will do the honorable thing and end his own political life, leaving the British-to-the-bone Brown to inherit the parliamentary throne.
Tony's political corpse can then be mailed to Texas - wrapped in an American flag.
No if he does hang onto power it will because there hasn’t been put forward to the electorate a truly credible alternative government. (Oh and the slight bias in the voting system which at the moment favours Labour of course
.)
