Blog:Vote For None Of The Above
From Bolton Interweb
Cary Urbagg, Political Correspondent, 31st January 2010
Mandelson, Prince of Darkness, is in Davros this week. I am not sure about spending public money on a Dalek Convention but in any case he gave a political interview to the BBC that was notable, as usual, for using lots of words to say precisely nothing. Incredibly he claimed, when pressed on Labour lagging in the opinion polls, that he did not follow every poll. If you ever had doubts about the Prince’s ability to tell bare-faced lies, this kind of ridiculous statement should put those doubts to bed. Typically it is not the Government’s fault but everyone else’s, and this is one of the major problems of our current government, denial. The Prince used two stock phrases that seem to be favourites amongst politicians at the moment. “What the people want is…” Well the opinion polls say what the people want and, Mr Mandelson, it ain’t you or Charlie Brown. So if I were you I would start to pay attention to them. The other one was “people will have a choice”. And that is crap too. We have a choice of one lot of dishonest self-serving wastrels or another set of equally dishonest self-serving wastrels. You have a choice of spending cuts and tax hikes, or spending cuts and tax hikes. You can bet those doing the cutting and hiking will not be scrimping on food and fuel bills either way. On everything else you would be hard put to notice who is in power as well.
It seems that whether you want to vote Labour or Tory, every time a representative of either opens their mouth they give you a reason not to vote for them. You could vote Lib Dem but I can’t tell how they are any different either. And this is one of the big dangers. Inevitably, the excruciatingly poor performance of our politicians will throw up a very low General Election turnout and help out some of the extremist parties such as the BNP. They can’t be any worse can they? Well, yes they can, very much worse, but the major parties only have themselves to blame. The best we can hope for is a severely hung parliament where all parties have to work together. True, this means no change to anything at all but at least we may be able to gather the talent that is so thin on the ground together in one place, and ensure that no nutcase ideas see the light of day. Ken Clarke and Vince Cable jointly running the Treasury perhaps. Alan Johnson as PM. Mandelson as Minister for Deep Mines. Charlie Brown in charge of haggis production on Skye. Cameron in charge of legislation to ban fake tans.
This may be unpopular as a view but Tony Blair’s performance on Friday at the Iraq enquiry made me long for the good old days when Teflon Tony was at the height of his powers. None of us, and I include all his critics in the Opposition and Lib Dems, were in his position as Prime Minister. He had to make a judgement and a decision and he took one that carried a huge political risk. Saddam was a risk to the stability of the Middle East, a mass murderer, with a history of contempt for the UN and weapons inspectors. Blair took no risks with our safety and even though, as it turned out, there were no weapons of mass destruction, the world is undoubtedly a better place without Saddam. Blair’s mistake was to hype up his case and give the impression he was Bush’s poodle, and for that he has paid the penalty - he is no longer PM and his place in history is leaning towards being on a par with Pol Pot. But whilst I have no doubt he regrets any loss of life that followed his decision, he had to make a choice between that and the loss of life that might follow doing nothing. I guess he thought then, and still thinks, that on balance he took the lesser of two pretty mighty evils, and hence has no remorse or regrets about that decision.
Had Saddam been allowed to remain in power, would we be seeing an enquiry into the destruction of Israel and genocide of the Kurdish and Shiite Muslim peoples, and why our Prime Minister did not act to prevent such things happening? Did we learn nothing from the appeasement of Hitler? According to the New York Times, Saddam murdered a million of his own people, tortured and maimed many more than that, and was responsible for a million or so deaths in the Iran-Iraq War. There was the little matter of having previously invaded a neighbour, Kuwait, too. Whatever the death toll since the invasion in 2003, most of that inflicted on Iraqis by insurgents, it cannot compare and so Iraq is undoubtedly a safer place today and Blair can be said to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It just doesn’t suit his critics to mention that. Frankly I am glad Blair had the guts to make the tough decisions. I just wonder whether today’s lightweights would have tried to hang Churchill, perhaps literally, in 1945 on the grounds that before we declared war on Germany there was no evidence they intended to attack Britain. At heart I am a pacifist not a militarist, but this is not a perfect world and evil psychopaths exist that cannot be negotiated with. Sometimes wars are just and moral, and Iraq was one of these times. I told you this view may be unpopular.
© Evrose, 2010
