Blah Blah Flowers

Tony Blair demonstrates exactly why Alistair Campbell once told a reporter 'we don't do God'.

Now that we know that Tony Blair really is quite religious indeed I wonder whether this would have had much of an effect on the last five or six years if he'd been open about it? The rantings of deranged Islamists aside, would the public have been even more against a war that could be shown to be a new Crusade? Would Labour have done any worse in the last election?

Labels: Fundamentalists- Christian, religion, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

LOLBLAIR. [via Bloggerheads]

Labels: humour, Tony Blair

Rob Liddle: God’s role in politics is not to underwrite bad ideas.
Hell, you think to yourself, even Jesus Christ admitted to the occasional mistake. But not [Tony Blair].

Labels: Christianity, religion, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Approve and encourage installation of Mahtma Gandhi's Statue in Parliament Square.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Recognise that Brian Hoare is a national hero and to honour him as such.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Refuse to recommend that Tony Blair be awarded a Knighthood or Peerage.

Labels: petitions, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

David Cameron in big time freakout. We're a few months into the Gordon Brown premiership and not only has the country not ground to a halt but he's also managed to come out of crises looking pretty good. Which probably explains why Cameron has decided that the new Tory policy is to ditch all the Green, Youtube, Blairite stuff and headback to old school Tory values, you know, the things that helped them to those three General Election defeats. So John Redwood is let out of the cupboard under the stairs where they keep the crazy unpopular members of the party and now we have more of that stuff that always feels like it should be prefaced with the words "I'm not a racist but..."

The whistling sound you can hear is from Gordon Brown's advisors as they exhale in relief, realising that David Cameron has handed them the next election, whenever Brown decides to call it. The grinding noise is Tony Blair's teeth when he realises that his old enemy is going to win a general election, based on his own negligable popularity and not dragged down by the memory of Blair, whom he followed into every unpopular policy. At least David can stop riding that bicycle to work now, his 'green' credentials aren't going to whitewash the brown slurry coming from Tory Central Office (do you see what I did there?).

Related: How did David Cameron lose his nerve and his bearings in just one month? Martin Bright looks at the disarray that has engulfed the Conservatives since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour, politics, Tony Blair

Sherrif Paxman lays down the law about television, 'trust' and why Tony Blair is an arse and an idiot. I may not like Paxman as an interviewer but he has some good points here. Unsurprisingly the Daily Mail has decided to interpret this as a blistering attack on Auntie, but then as they've spent the last few weeks obsessed by newsreaders legs I think anything they have to say about the Beeb can be safely ignored.

Labels: BBC, Daily Mail, Jeremy Paxman, Tony Blair

Labels: Alastair Campbell, books, Labour, Tony Blair

Unhinged? Deranged? Who is behind The Tony Blair blog? All about Tony Blair in one blog!

Labels: Tony Blair

At least someone is upset by Tony Blair's departure...

Labels: Gordon Brown, Labour, Tony Blair, YouTube

Clare Short is thinking of rejoining the Labour Party now that Tony Blair has gone. Can anyone give me odds on Short deciding that maybe she won't leave Parliament at the next election after all.

Labels: Labour, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

Up is down, left is right, and the world's political leaders are considering giving a warmonger the job of bringing peace to the Middle-East.

Labels: Iraq, Labour, Middle East, Tony Blair

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Apologise to the Independent Newspaper, it's editor and staff, for his ill-judged comments.

Labels: newspapers, petitions, Tony Blair

Cabinet ministers are putting in £80 each. You only have to spend a tenner.

According to morning newspaper reports cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell is organising a whip round for the departing Tony Blair and John Prescott.

It begs the inevitable question:

What would you buy the soon-to-be former prime minister?

Labels: Labour, Tony Blair

Headed towards the delightful Swiss Cottage yesterday in order to find an afternoon showing of Taking Liberties. Described by lazy people as 'a British Fahrenheit 9-11' it took us through the steps the British Government has taken, mainly since the 11th of September 2001 to create not exactly a fascist state, but a state in which anyone, including fascists, will find it gratifyingly easy to shut down any form of dissent or disobedience. We are taken through the UN human rights declaration and shown how Tony Blair, David Blunkett and John Reid have been ever so busy chiselling away the rights we were given, taking away the right to demonstrate while telling us we lived in a free country characterised by... our right to demonstrate. Mark Thomas and the Mass Lone Demos got a look-in, as did Rachel and the 7/7 bomb survivors. The demonstrations in Brighton against EDO showed the malevolence of the police, as did the War Against Terror attacking Asians in Forest Gate or Guantanamo.

This film is not a hysterical lefty polemic against authority. It's a calm, measured and sometimes bleakly funny reminder of what we have lost, taken by those that would claim that in doing so they are saving us from fanatics. Check the website, if you can find a showing you can attend it's well worth a few hours from your life to watch this film and let it anger up the blood. It also suggests some easy, low-impact ways you can start to help the fight back, some of which I intend to follow myself.

I'm currently reading We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, which I'm finding a rather annoying read. Pitched somewhere between Frankenstein and The Omen a middle-aged woman reminisces in letters to her estranged and, I suspect, possibly dead ex-husband about her life and the upbringing of her son, Kevin. From the moment of conception he's been a little bastard causing misery and pain to all around him and somehow his mother puts up with him long enough for him to reach his teenage years and shoot up a classroom of kids at his school.

The language the mother character uses is ridiculous but thankfully calms down after a few chapters and resembles English as used by real human beings. I suspect that this book is supposed to be read by people who don't believe that children can be malevolent creatures when it suits them, it's a horror story for middle-class yummy mummys to read while their little darlings are wrapped up in bed. While Daddy is away at work all day Mummy has to put up with Kevin and his permanent malicious behaviour, Daddy minimises every single act of bad behaviour and blames Mummy for overreacting, even when Kevin starts causing injuries to other people. I've just got past the midway point in the novel and Mummy is now pregnant with baby number two. She's a lot more positive about this child and Daddy is not happy, so I expect a hundred pages of Daddy regarding the girl child as the very spawn of Satan's loins. Sadly we know already from the text that we aren't going to have both children fighting on the Golden Gate Bridge with the fate of humanity in the balance, which is the sort of level this story is going for.

I'm not anticipating the second half of this book being the part that shows me why this book won the Orange Prize several years back.

Labels: books, children, civil liberties, freedom, Fundamentalists- Islamic, movies, Muslims, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

Bob Geldof tells Blair: "You've fucked with me for the last time!"

Yes, several years after everyone else in the world, Geldof and Bono realise the G8 were taking the piss two years ago when they spoke of sorting out third world hunger, if only they'd realised that before subjecting us to unnecessary Coldplay in Hyde Park two years ago. I should point out that the linked BBC report is coy about Bob's swearing, which was especially funny.

Labels: Africa, Bob Geldof, Tony Blair

I can persuade George Bush on climate change says Blair. Yes, because Shrubya obviously holds you in high regard and is amenable to persuasion. If Bush has changed his mind it'll be because he wants to do it, not because of you 'Yo' Blair.

PC brigade ban pin-ups on RAF jets - in case they offend women and Muslims. Cue usual catcalls of 'it's political correctness gone mad', 'how do I apply to leave this country', 'I'm a woman and I don't find this offensive therefore my opinion can be taken to count for all women and Muslims in the UK' and so on. Sadly my suggestion that these pictures get banned not because they are offensive but because they are tacky and have we suddenly started employing fourteen year olds to fly planes who feel a desperate need to plaster the softest of soft-core pron over their aircraft has not made it past the Daily Mail censors. Not that, surely, is political incorrectness gone maaaaaad?

Labels: climate change, Daily Mail, George 'Shrubya' Bush, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

LOLbrarians.

LOLheroes.

Taking Liberties.

Labels: humour, Tony Blair

After meeting with Sarkozi in France, after snuggling with Shrubya in Washington, Tony Blair continues his worldwide tour with unpleasant right-wing scumbags by pimping British arms manufacturers to Colonel Gaddafi in Libya.

Mr Blair told reporters: "I find him very easy to deal with."

I'm sure Gaddafi will be putting that on the dust-jacket of his autobiography.

Now, I admit that I know very little about Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela but he seems to be getting an uncommonly easy ride while opposition media comes under attack. Admittedly he's not bombing them but Shrubya got given a much harder time when it was even suspected that he wanted to bomb Al Jazeera. Of course, mainstream media is biased, but what alternatives does Chávez have?

Labels: guns, Hugo Chávez, Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Tony Blair, Venezuela

Labour turmoil over proposed police powers. Let's not hold our breath that the Government is suddenly going to rediscover it's backbone just because there's a change at the top.

What's really scary is the language Tony Blair feels free to use now that he's leaving Government:

"We have chosen as a society to put the civil liberties of the suspect, even if a foreign national, first. I happen to believe this is misguided and wrong."

Why does Tony Blair hate the people who elected his party to govern on three occasions so much? How can restricting my freedoms in order to defeat people who want to restrict my freedoms possibly work? And how did Tony Blair manage to get away with over ten years in power without ever once being called on his bullshit?

Labels: Government, police, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair

One of the few things you could say about Tony Blair's government is that they have had a generally more enlightened view about Lesbians and Gays (don't mention the Bis, whoops!) and have implemented several measures to, if not equalise them in society, close the gap between them and the straights. So it's a shame that, after signing a petition asking his Tonyness to Overturn the National Blood Service (NBS) ban stopping Gay and Bi (G&B) Men giving Blood to be directed to this response:

The Government has a duty to ensure that any rules applied to blood donation by the National Blood Service (NBS) achieve a balance between risk reduction and security of supply. The self exclusion criterion concerning gay men has been reached through a close analysis of the epidemiology of confirmed HIV and Hepatitis B positive tests among blood samples from people donating blood at United Kingdom Blood Service sessions.

The Government has been advised that every year from the analysis of nearly three million donations collected by the United Kingdom and Irish Blood Services, about 40 donations are confirmed to be positive for HIV. Of these, a third to a half are given by men who, following further enquiries by the NBS, reveal that they are gay men. Some are donating for the first time but some have given at least once in the previous two years and tested negative on the previous occasion. These figures indicate that some gay men are still giving blood in spite of the current rules.

Although safer sex campaigns have had an impact, it is still considered that the risk of gay men being infected with HIV remains sufficiently high to include the criterion that they should not donate blood. Unfortunately, this means there will be healthy gay men who would be suitable for giving blood but who are excluded by the rule.

However, it is not practical to expect donor session staff to be able to differentiate between gay men with lower or with higher risk lifestyles, so all gay men have to be excluded.

Forty donations out of three million test positive for HIV. Somewhere between thirteen to twenty donations out of three million come from men who identify as gay, and are HIV positive. This is apparently a valid reason for why all men who identify as liking Steve instead of/as well as Eve are barred from giving blood. It ignores the fact that, based on this tally, somewhere between twenty and twenty-seven donations come from people who insist they are straight, suggesting that there is a greater danger to the public from the blood of heterosexuals rather than gay men.

Labels: AIDS, bisexual, gay, Government, homophobia, National Blood Service, queer, Tony Blair