Tag Archives: tony blair

Opinion: LibDems are the natural home for Blairites

By Luke Tyson | Published 6th February 2012 - 12:24 pm

There have been some high profile (if not high level) Blairite defections to the Tories. While there are some similarities between the Blair legacy and our coalition partners, the defectees seem to have overlooked or discarded one idea – joining the Liberal Democrats.

As Jonathan Powell says in his book, The New Machiavelli, and as was evident during his time in office, Tony Blair was strongly pro-Europe. He understood, as we do, that a) the largest common market in the world is something that we should be actively engaging with and leading, and b) there are threats and issues …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged liberal democrats | 30 Comments

I agree with Tony. (Or why British PMs shouldn’t actually try and do Hugh Grant’s Love Actually PM speech.)

By Stephen Tall | Published 13th December 2011 - 2:15 pm

Perhaps it’s because it’s Christmas. Or perhaps it’s because the right-wing press is frothing with excitement at the Prime Minister sticking it to Johnny Foreigner.

Either way, the last few days’ events have put me in mind of the speech Hugh Grant delivers as a British prime minister (coincidentally called David) in the film, Love Actually. You can watch the clip I’m thinking of here.

It’s a knowingly funny pastiche of Little Englander pride in this country’s past glories, invoking cultural icons such as Shakespeare, The Beatles, …

Posted in News | Also tagged david cameron, hugh grant | 2 Comments

Opinion: Labour’s problem

By George Kendall | Published 13th October 2011 - 2:25 pm

There’s been nothing dramatic about this conference season apart from a few gaffes, but under the surface, I think the Labour conference was significant.

While I enjoyed the Lib Dem conference, I don’t think the journalists did. Whenever I passed a well-known TV presenter, they had a face like thunder. They were looking for factionalism and controversy, but all they found was Lib Dems facing up to a difficult situation with determination and loyalty. That makes dull TV, so they must have been tearing their hair out.

The Tory conference was more entertaining.

Theresa May’s remark about cats, and the more recent

Posted in Conference, Op-eds | Also tagged ed balls, ed miliband, gordon brown, ken clarke, liam fox, theresa may | 35 Comments

At his best and his worst: 5 thoughts on Tony Blair’s analysis of the UK riots

By Stephen Tall | Published 21st August 2011 - 10:23 am

It’s only been four years since Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister (somehow it seems longer) — and he’s back today with an opinion piece for The Observer on the underlying causes of the riots, ‘Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy’. Here are 5 thoughts on his article:

1) Mr Blair remains the ultimate triangularist

Witness the oxymoronic opening line: ‘Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband made excellent speeches last week and there was much to agree with in what they said.’ First, no they didn’t; neither speech rose to the occasion. Nick Clegg’s under-reported speech was a much weightier contribution than either the Tory or Labour leaders mustered. Secondly, to agree simultaneously with directly opposing arguments suggest that Mr Blair retains his crown as the past-master of intellectual flexibility.

2) Mr Blair remains at heart an authoritarian

As evidenced by his line, ‘my experience with the police is they need 100% backing’. Like all other professionals the police deserve respect and understanding for the immensely difficult job that they do.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged featured, nick clegg, peter oborne | 15 Comments

Explaining Cameron’s Coalition: politics as seen through the eyes of MORI polls

By Mark Pack | Published 3rd August 2011 - 10:24 am

Explaining Cameron’s Coalition is the latest in the series of general election analysis by MORI’s Robert Worcester and Roger Mortimore, this time joined by two other authors. The book is therefore very much the tale of the 2005-2010 Parliament and subsequent general election seen through the eyes of MORI’s opinion polling, with an often pungent analysis which certainly fits Robert Worcester’s happiness to point out when he got predictions right and others got them wrong.

Though there is a smattering of references to polling results from other firms, the great strength of the MORI data is that many of the …

Posted in Books, Polls | Also tagged david cameron, gordon brown, mark gill, paul baines, robert worcester, roger mortimore | 2 Comments

Opinion: Do we really want to risk another media mogul running the country?

By John Roffey | Published 30th July 2011 - 1:21 pm

If there is one thing that the Murdoch affair has confirmed it is that politician’s lust for power knows no bounds. The acquisition of power has been likened to a heroin rush and judging by the extent that Blair, Brown and Cameron, particularly, have been prepared to jump to Murdoch’s commands – we must believe this to be true.

Although it is likely that an attempt to clean up politics will take place over the next few years, now that it has been made so clear that a media giant can have such an impact on the government of a nation …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged david cameron, gordon brown, referendum, rupert murdoch | 27 Comments

Opinion: Liberal Democrats didn’t just avoid Murdoch, we tried to cut him down to size

By James Percival | Published 12th July 2011 - 1:53 pm

In my last post for Lib Dem Voice, I pointed out that Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems had never courted Murdoch and his cronies.

Actually, that was just the half of it.

We didn’t just avoid him. We have tried, in different ways over a number of years, to cut the media mogul down to size and clamp down on the sort of abhorrent media practices that have been exposed of late.

As far back as 1994, the year before Tony Blair chose to fly to Oz to lick Rupert Murdoch’s boots, we were calling for the OFT …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged bskyb, communications bill, competition bill, ipcc, lord mcnally, press complaints commission, rupert murdoch, the times, vince cable | 38 Comments

The Independent View: What the Chilcott Inquiry has missed – the role of oil in the Iraq war

By Greg Muttitt | Published 3rd May 2011 - 10:23 am

While change sweeps the Middle East and fighting escalates in Libya, the Chilcott Inquiry continues to consider the lessons of the Iraq war. The Inquiry has taught us more about the timing, process and legality of key decisions, but the elephant in the room remains the role oil played in those decisions.

“The oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it,” said Tony Blair in February 2003. His protestations were sufficiently effective that in media and parliamentary debates, raising the oil issue became a sure-fire route to losing credibility. And so Chilcott, who …

Posted in Op-eds, The Independent View | Also tagged chilcot inquiry, iraq | 2 Comments

Kishwer Falkner writes… Libya: our common humanity crosses frontiers to protect those we do not know

By Kishwer Falkner | Published 23rd February 2011 - 12:12 pm

As tyrannical regimes go, Libya is right there at the top and ranks alongside North Korea for the unpredictability of its ruler, the self-styled Colonel Muammar Gaddafy, who used to be referred to by Ronald Reagan as the Middle East’s ‘mad dog’.

Having given up nuclear weapons he is admittedly slightly better than Kim Jong-il, but we cannot know for sure that he has also given up chemical and biological weapons. In a country where tribal loyalties prevail and where the four main tribes occupy the main positions, Gaddafi’s own tribe occupies the top posts and much of his internal repression is carried out through a myriad of different state security institutions as well as a plethora of paramilitary units, recruited from abroad.

The country does not have a constitution, but is run by a revolutionary ruling council which has been in situ for 42 years and cannot be dismissed. There have been regular attempts at coups over this period, which have been ruthlessly put down and there are no evident pointers to a peaceful succession.

Gaddafi’s four sons have long been involved in jostling for the top position and foreign governments were betting on Saif al Islam (the second son) to take over the reins, as he was increasingly the acceptable face of the regime.

Saif al Islam al Gaddafi was awarded a PhD from LSE enticingly titled “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions”. He chairs the Human Rights Commission of Libya, and lest anyone doubt that he is therefore a soft touch, he was his father’s voice last weekend displaying a similar determination to stay in power through putting down the uprising till as he put it, the last man, the last woman, and the last bullet had been expended. He appears to be delivering on his pledge.

Several hundreds have died in the last few days, hospitals are overflowing and as a crackdown has started, anyone moving on the street is shot dead. Reports say that ambulances are also shot at to deter them from trying to save the injured. The air force has been mobilised to bomb civilian residential areas, and the reign of terror has started.

So what should be done now, that the country has descended into chaos?

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged colonel gadaffi, featured, kim jong-il, kishwer falkner, libya, ronald reagan, rwanda, Saif al Islam, united nations | 13 Comments

Opinion: An historical comparison – the Big Society vs the Great Society

By Antony Hook | Published 15th February 2011 - 11:34 am

In the late 90s, Tony Blair’s New Deal deliberately adopted the name of US President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930s programme to increase public spending, create jobs, and escape the Great Depression.

Thirteen years later, one assumes that David Cameron’s Big Society (that Jeremy Browne praised yesterday) at least partially invokes another significant American liberal reform era: the Great Society of President Johnson in the 60s.

I fear that substituting “big” for “great” represents a lesser moral ambition. The Kennedy-Johnson years in America were self consciously “a call to greatness”. Politicians talked of “new frontiers”, putting an end to war, conquering …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged big society, franklin roosevelt, jeremy browne, new deal | 16 Comments

Predicting the future: we didn’t turn Japanese

By Mark Pack | Published 15th February 2011 - 10:25 am

Shortly after the Conservative Party won its fourth general election in a row in 1992, a symposium met to consider the question of whether Britain – formerly a country with regularly rotating government between the two main parties – was turning into a political version of Japan, where the same party had been in power for nearly forty years.

Even between the event occurring and the publication of a book based on it, Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth), political events in both countries had taken a dramatic turn. In Japan the LDP lost power, starting a period of much greater political fluidity with even subsequent LDP Prime Ministers struggling to restore their party’s previous dominance. Meanwhile in Britain the collapse of the Conservative Party’s economic policies following Britain’s enforced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) quickly made the government appear very vulnerable, even if debates in Labour continued on whether, as John Smith preferred, one more heave was all that was needed or whether, as Tony Blair insisted on after John Smith’s death, a more radical reshaping of the party was required to win the next election.

Posted in Books, Op-eds | Also tagged barack obama, gareth smyth, helen margetts, japan, john curtice, john smith, robert waller, stephen harper, vernon bogdanor, will hutton | 5 Comments

Blair criticised by top civil servant for keeping Iraq legal advice from Cabinet

By Mark Pack | Published 29th January 2011 - 10:55 am

The Guardian reports:

The country’s most senior civil servant … said the cabinet should have been told of the attorney general’s doubts about the legality of invading Iraq before Tony Blair went to war.

“The ministerial code is very clear about the need, when the attorney general gives written advice, the full text of that advice should be attached [to cabinet papers]“, Sir Gus O’Donnell told the Iraq inquiry.

The clear implication of his evidence is that Blair breached the code of conduct ministers have a duty to uphold.

You can read the full story here.

Posted in News | Also tagged gus o'donnell, iraq | 3 Comments

Opinion: Brown was deceived by his “friends” – let’s hope the Coalition is more careful!

By Nick Hollinghurst | Published 2nd January 2011 - 10:55 am

In days of old, when Brown was bold (well, in 1992 anyway) he gave a stirring speech, as Shadow Chancellor, calling for a “powerful alternative to free-market thinking”. He clearly explained why regulations and strong institutions were needed to bring the City under control. Then, five years later he was catapulted into power by the Labour landslide, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in Tony Blair’s government.

Tony Blair naively developed an undue admiration for what he romantically saw as the swashbuckling and flamboyant world of supposedly successful entrepreneurs, whose company he found flattering. Gordon, alas, similarly fell for a charm offensive launched by the very people he once …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged derek wanless, gordon brown | 14 Comments

LibLink: Nick Clegg – Poverty plus a pound isn’t enough

By NewsHound | Published 10th November 2010 - 1:24 pm

Over in The Guardian, Nick Clegg writes,

All governments promise welfare reform. Very few deliver. In 1997 Labour promised to “cut the bills of social failure” and to “make work pay”. But during its 13 years in office the welfare bill rose by 40% to £87bn. People moving into work can still lose more than 90% of every pound they earn: a punitive tax burden on the shoulders of the poor.

The real tragedy, however, is not the cost of the welfare system. It is the price paid by the most disadvantaged, too often condemned to a life on benefits. Nearly 1.9

…

Posted in News | Also tagged james purnell, nick clegg, welfare reform | 70 Comments

How to defeat Al Qaeda

By Mark Pack | Published 10th November 2010 - 8:55 am

The cover of Bruce Riedel’s The Search for Al Qaeda shows a group of armed men working their way up a hillside overlooking a beautiful valley that stretches away to rolling hills. It captures the wonder and the tragedy of Afghanistan in one frame.

The book itself is similarly crisp, packing a wide-ranging history of Al Qaeda and its key figures into only 150 pages of moderate size print. It is penned by an ex-CIA man of thirty years service who was frequently closely involved with the figures and events painted in the book, but not so closely as to make the reader fear it is more a justification of his career than a fair account of events.

Posted in Books, Op-eds | Also tagged afghanistan, al-qaeda, bruce riedel, featured, osama bin laden, pakistan, robert pape, saudi arabia | 3 Comments