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Worth watching a couple of times.
Oh so the Crewe by-election, well if a 17.6% swing to the Tories from us doesn’t deserve a re-shuffle - what will?
Brown and his staff need to decide whether they want to stand for something and then stand for it. We are all waiting for a whole bunch of juicy policy announcements, please, please, please give them to us!
It’s the pop political issue of the moment and everyone has a view. It’s hard to find many political people out there who don’t want it changed somehow. Whether it’s fixed terms, PR, STV, Lords reform, or even looking at local government with much debate going on about unitary authorities over city and county councils, everyone wants something changed. As all the recent posts on LabourHome indicate.
The Review that has come out today from the Ministry of Justice does seem to be an odd one in that all that it does is compare all the systems currently used in the UK. This seems odd to me because it seems more like a exercise for a first year university class than a government department.
Of course a major part of government is analysis and evaluation but it is an issue that everyone in politics knows something about and has a view on unlike different road tax systems, or trade describes act reform, or the role housing companies when it comes to emotional support for their service users.
So it saddens me that on the one issue that you can guarantee to find a view, the government continues to fail to put forward any proposals. When election reform to central government has been ignored by Prime Minister after Prime Minister, Brown has an opportunity to make a lasting legacy around constitutional reform – that is if he actually suggests something.
I’m a member of the Labour Party, the Fabian Society and a Co-operative member, I care about the world, I take notice of the current affairs domestically and internationally that happen and thus aware of happenings and changes that happen around me. And I also believe that my political mind can work out the rationale behind most of the political decisions that are made in the UK though of course, more often than not I disagree with them.
But for a long time I have really struggled to understand the relationship that Blair had with Bush, that is to say why the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had such a good relationship with the President of the United States. To all extent and purposes, Blair’s policies were centre of the road for us in the UK and Bush’s policies leaned to the far right in the US political spectrum. If Bush’s views were the manifesto of a UK political party, I have no doubt in my mind that we would be talking about a Religiously Fanatic UKIP style organisation.
Of course their relationship did appear to be more than professional, which is strange enough, but also personal. Now one aspect of Blair’s personality was that he wasn’t always merely political and so a life outside of politics for Blair, even as PM, always looked likely. But Bush and Blair appear to also be opposite ends of the intellectual ladder.
Now this relationship has never helped Blair domestically, even to the extent that he seemed like Bush’s lap dog by following the US into Iraq - regardless of the reality. And internationally this relationship must be the subject of many in-jokes between other world leaders and thus hurt us internationally.
And let’s also look on the other side of the coin, if Brown wanted to lock up the next election here and now, all he would have to do is come out and say that Bush is a dick and internationally we would gain so much influence, as most of the world hates Bush too and would have huge respect for us for coming out of the closet and saying this too.
Of course, there is at least one common factor that binds both New Labour and the Bush Presidency together. On election night 2000, the FOX network stole the election from Gore by calling it for Bush even though other networks had already called it for Gore. And in the UK, without the support that we received from Murdoch’s Papers, Labour would not have even won the 2001 election let alone the 2005 election.
So the question I put to Sunder Katwala, the Fabian Society’s General Secretary, was this: Why on earth did Blair have this relationship with Bush and why doesn’t Brown now run a hundred miles in the opposite direction?
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