Tag Archives: tony blair

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

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 , and | 15 Comments

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

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 and Polls | Also tagged , , , , and | 2 Comments

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

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 , and | 27 Comments

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

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 …

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

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 and The Independent View | Also tagged and | 2 Comments

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

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?

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

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 …

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Predicting the future: we didn’t turn Japanese

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 and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , , and | 5 Comments

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

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 “, 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 and | 3 Comments

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

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 and | 14 Comments

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

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 , and | 70 Comments

How to defeat Al Qaeda

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.

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Just how bizarre will the Brown / Blair revelations get?

The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would get most people the sack but didn’t stop Gordon Brown getting the Premiership:

During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of

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Opinion: New Labour, New Machiavelli?

What has already become the best-known anecdote in Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli is a snippet of conversation he had with his then master, Tony Blair. Powell asked him how he could put up with having a three-hour conversation with Gordon Brown, to which Blair responded by asking him whether he had ever been in love. ‘“Not with a man”, I replied’ — and we know he was lying. This book is testimony to his devotion to Blair.

It is, for sure, a curious billet doux -– less like a bunch of roses than a handful of thorns. Comparing, however …

Posted in Books and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 8 Comments

A Glee-ful invitation to Labour

In just five days the Liberal Democrat Conference will be gearing up to what for some is the highlight of their week. The tradition will again be honoured of singing songs from the history of Liberalism as well as more recent topical and light-hearted offerings. There will be a brand new edition of the Liberator Songbook with new songs, and I’m sure some offerings to mark the return of Liberals to Government.

A further tradition of the Glee Club is that new MPs ‘do a turn’; we know some of them are regular members of the Glee Club, …

Posted in Conference and Humour | Also tagged , and | 14 Comments

Clegg: Governing for the long term

Nick Clegg gave the following speech to the Institute for Government yesterday:

Successful governments require a number of ingredients: strong leadership, public support, dedicated ministers, and a good dose of luck, to name but a few.

But above all they need a clear sense of purpose.

When governments lose sight of their overriding purpose for being in power, the glue that holds them together dissolves. We saw this in the latter years of Labour’s time in office. A directionless government, without the underpinning of a clear purpose, inevitably ended in factionalism, intrigue and bankruptcy.

This is a mistake we will not repeat.  In my speech …

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Tony Blair’s A Journey: 3 reasons I’m impressed without having read a single page

No, I haven’t read Tony Blair’s A Journey yet (though it should be waiting for me at home). I haven’t even had time to read more than a handful of the preview articles, such as The Guardian’s trailer. With that confesion of near-total ignorance of A Journey established, I think there are three points worth making…

1. It’s an Event.

The decision that Mr Blair’s book would not be serialised (apparently modelled on the strategy for Alastair Campbell’s diaries) has made publication day much more of an Event-with-a-capital-E, the political anoraks’ equivalent of a release of a new Harry …

Posted in Books and Op-eds | 6 Comments

Book review: Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man – Life at the heart of New Labour

At the book’s title suggests, Peter Mandelson’s memoirs The Third Man do not hold back from placing himself not only at the heart of New Labour but also at its top, variously using the phrases the three musketeers or the triumvirate to describe himself and the two Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Mandelson is also, alongside Peter Watt and Deborah Mattinson, part of another trio – Labour insiders who have recently published their account of life in New Labour. They all scatter some compliments about Brown through their books, but the overall picture painted of Gordon Brown is a deeply unflattering one. It’s a picture of a once talented politician and strategic thinker who spent over a decade in a sulk at not becoming Labour leader, frequently indulging in highly partisan infighting and repeatedly pushing to one side policy priorities as so many at the top of Labour were consumed with trying to keep the Blair-Brown show from completely imploding. As Mandelson records it, even Gordon Brown (speaking to him in 2008) admitted,

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In praise of… Tony Blair

I voted for Tony Blair as Labour leader in 1994; I voted for him again to become Labour prime minister in 1997. I soon learned my lesson.

As Prime Minister, he failed. Not so much domestically: sure, he disappointed but show me a political leader who doesn’t.

But in foreign policy, Mr Blair was an unmitigated disaster, the most incompetent post-war Prime Minister bar none (yes, even worse than Anthony Eden).

His intentions are irrelevant: the results of his – and it was his – decision to wage war against Iraq have made Britain and the world less safe at huge …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 14 Comments

Information Commissioner upholds complaint over Tony Blair’s activities

During the general election campaign I highlighted how TonyBlair4Labour, the official vehicle for Tony Blair’s campaigning on behalf of the Labour Party, looked to be illegally exporting data overseas.

The Information Commission has now (finally) ruled on my complaint, agreeing that the organisation had indeed failed to follow data protection rules properly and is now writing to instruct that this is fixed. As with my complaint about Unite breaking data protection rules during the election (also upheld), the Information Commissioner only took action after the election was over – hardly ideal as in both cases it was an issue …

Posted in News | Also tagged | 1 Comment

Does Tony Blair support the Coalition (and would it matter to Lib Dems if he does)?

This was a story which entirely passed me by, but throws up a couple of intriguing questions. I tip my hat to the Independent’s John Rentoul for highlighting Tony Blair’s address to the Institute for Government entitled, How to Be Prime Minister, held at the end of June. In it Mr Blair commented,

The British people have again elected a centrist government, and that’s what they decided to do in that extraordinary way they do, they decide they will put in the Conservatives and put the Lib Dems alongside them.

As Mr Rentoul notes,

… this rather goes against the attempt

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 14 Comments

Guardian: Labour’s involvement in illegal abduction and torture of British citizens

Today’s Guardian reports the involvement of senior Labour figures, including Tony Blair and Jack Straw, in the illegal abduction and torture of British citizens by the secret services:

The true extent of the Labour government’s involvement in the illegal abduction and torture of its own citizens after the al-Qaida attacks of September 2001 has been spelled out in stark detail with the disclosure during high court proceedings of a mass of highly classified documents.

Previously secret papers that have been disclosed include a number implicating Tony Blair’s office in many of the events that are to be the subject of the

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The Independent View: Child poverty

In 1999, the government announced that it meant to end child poverty by 2020. Making progress towards that objective is now the responsibility of the Coalition; how well is it likely to do?

Tony Blair’s pronouncement, made out of the blue at a meeting in Toynbee Hall, was a typical coup de théâtre, and it even surprised his own cabinet. It illustrated Mr Blair’s strengths – reassuring supporters who worried that new Labour had lost touch with their Party’s traditional values and at the same time neutralising critics from the other end of the spectrum. For a generation, inegalitarians had …

Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Also tagged and | 9 Comments

Would the coalition dare to cut welfare back to Labour levels?

After adjusting for inflation, welfare spending today is an astonishing ten times higher than in 1948, according to figures published in yesterday’s Guardian.

The graph shows that the sharpest rises in welfare spending were both under Conservative administrations (presumably not unconnected with the recessions at those times – 1981-84 and 1991-94 – though the bill rose in all but three of the 18 years of Conservative government).

Only under Churchill and Eden in the 1950s did the welfare bill fall slightly.  Under Macmillan it rose about 50%, and the welfare bill Labour inherited in 1997 was almost double that they’d handed …

Posted in News | Also tagged , , , , and | 19 Comments

Government moves right, political agenda moves elsewhere

Whether driven by circumstance or long-term plan, the reaction of David Cameron to the general election result has been an attempt to realign British politics around the centre-right, using the need to strike – and then keep an agreement – with the Liberal Democrats as a way to drag his party away from its more right-wing elements. Doubtless future biographers will spill much ink over what might have been had he got closer to the winning post on his own, or even past it, just as the question of how pluralistic Tony Blair would have been had he not got …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , and | 77 Comments

Labour split on tactical voting advice to supporters

Labour embarked on an odd campaigning trick yesterday. Two of Labour’s most senior (and tribally partisan) figures – Ed Balls and Peter Hain – called publicly on Labour voters to lend their support to the Lib Dems in those seats where the choice is Lib Dem or Tory. It’s inconceible that Ed Balls in particular would do so without the explicit consent of Gordon Brown.

In public Gordon Brown makes the case for a “maximum Labour vote” – how could he do otherwise as party leader? Yet the mixed signals will have given their cue to many Labour …

Posted in General Election | Also tagged , , and | 4 Comments

How do people really think?

The last edition of ALDC’s Campaigner before the start of the election contained this piece from me:

Knowing why people vote the way they do is tough. It’s not just because people may be reluctant to be honest to others about their motivations, but people are also often bad at understanding themselves.

In fact, one of the findings increasingly coming out from research into how we make decisions is that often we make a decision using our subconscious and only afterwards come up with a justification for it. Our subconscious decides, our conscious rationalises.

It is an intriguing – and in some ways, scary – finding that is best illustrated by a clever experiment where people were shown two photographs of similar, but different, people. They were asked to pick which one they thought was the most attractive. They were then given that photograph and asked to explain the reason for their decision.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 4 Comments

Is Tony Blair illegally exporting private data overseas?

I’ve previously covered the question of the secret owners behind TonyBlair4Labour.org, not to mention its unfortunate terms and conditions. Meanwhile the Telegraph has reported that the Conservatives have called for an inquiry into whether charity and political data is being mixed up and that the site’s data protection information has been changed since launched.

But there’s another issue I’ve spotted: the site looks to be storing in the US private data given by site visitors. However, the necessary legal steps to allow such data exports have not been taken.

To be more specific: the site’s IP address traces to a server in …

Posted in Online politics | 1 Comment

LDVideo Easter Saturday special: Lib Dem leaders at PMQs

Welcome to this latest LDVideo instalment, and today as a special holiday treat we’re highlighting three political video clips showing Lib Dem leaders on top form at Prime Minister’s Questions.

First up, is Ming Campbell. Now Ming didn’t always have the happiest time at PMQs, but there were times when he hit his stride perfectly, and this was one such occasion, on 24th January 2007, when shaming Tony Blair’s failure to debate in the Commons whether troops should be withdrawn from Iraq:


(Also available on YouTube here).

Secondly, how could we forget Vince Cable‘s starring turn as acting leader? Certainly Gordon ‘Mr Bean’ Brown will never forget it:

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TonyBlair4Labour: who are the secret owners behind the site?

Tony Blair’s new campaign website to support Labour has an extremely complicated ownership trail behind it that ends in secrecy – but his office has declined to explain why or provide details.

A few days ago TonyBlair4Labour.org was launched, bringing to us the shock news that Tony Blair wants people to vote Labour. (Actually, it is interesting is that Gordon Brown’s star has fallen so far that now being associated with Tony Blair is viewed as a positive by Labour. At the last general election photos of Tony Blair were frequently all over Liberal Democrat leaflets and often completely absent …

Posted in News | Also tagged | 5 Comments
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