The cost of Blair's failed bid to become EU President

The Telegraph reports figures from the Office of National Statistics that show the Euro-denominated British contribution to the parasitic kleptocracy in Brussels increased from £5.3billion in 2009 to £9.2 billion last year. On top of that the pound has devalued against the Euro, and the UK Treasury has also had to support bail-outs for Ireland and Greece in support of the Euro.

Stephen Booth of Open Europe said: "We’re now starting to see the full effect of Tony Blair’s 2005 decision to give up a huge chunk of the British rebate. As a consequence, British taxpayers’ contributions to the EU have escalated dramatically and are expected to go on rising. At a time when the Government is trying to cut national spending, it makes no sense to increase our contributions to a bloated EU budget that is in desperate need of reform".

Add in the legal bonanza created by the British Human Rights Act, which gold-plated the 1950 European Human Rights Convention for the benefit of human rights hustlers Matrix Chambers and its leading star Cherie Blair, QC, and the cost of EuroBlairdom is getting on for being greater even than his more successful effort to win a pay-off from the Americans by joining in the attack on Iraq. 

To cap it all, our current Prime Prat fancies himself the "Heir of Blair". We're doomed, I tell you, doomed.

P.S. Whoa! Soothscribe Richard North pounds "Tory Boy" Booth in this post, citing EC figures to come up with gross figures of €11.42 billion for 2009, €12.92 billion for 2010 and €13.13 billion in 2011- respectively £10.04 billion, £11.36 billion and £11.54 billion at the current exchange rate.

The fact that the current gross contribution is increasing roughly in line with the general increase in the EU budget is a testament both to the need for the [Blair agreed] adjustment and its success. It is one that, had the Tories headed the administration, they would have agreed as well [?]. As it stands the UK correction [rebate] in the 2010 budget still amounts to around €4.0 billion. The real issue, therefore, is not the rebate, but the fact that we are making payments of £11.54 billion to the EU. This is happening under the current administration, led by the Tories.

I don't know what to make of that, other than to humbly suggest that it resembles the spirited debate alleged to have taken place among 19th century clerics about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Of course the Tories will seek to blame Labour - it's called adversarial politics, and anyway the EU is their and the Coalition's third rail. Surely any contribution, no matter from what source, that attacks the alleged economic benefits of belonging to the EU should be welcome?

Rod Liddle - tsk, tsk

Purple prose from Liddle on Blair. Sod the legalities, he says, Blair's real crime was:

. . . a separate issue, upon which Blair is terribly culpable; more terribly culpable than any PM before or since.[1] We know for sure now and had indications at the time that Blair’s reasons for taking our country to war were not those which he deemed to share with the country or with parliament. [2] They were not shared because he was well aware that neither public nor parliamentary opinion would go along with him. And in attempting to convince the public of Saddam’s ownership of WMD he misled parliament, misled the public and pressurised, perverted or twisted every institution which might have acted as a check upon his messianic determination to wage war.[3] This included the select committees, the civil service, the security services, the government scientists and even in the end the BBC. Cabinet was ignored. As John Denham put it at the time, Blair demanded evidence of WMD regardless or not of whether WMD existed. This is incontestable; it is the subtext of all those Blair year diaries produced by the either supine, or in Alastair Campbell’s case, conniving, former members of the administration. I do not think it is stretching it to suggest that this was the closest Britain has come to totalitarianism.[4] Regardless or not of whether we were right to have invaded Iraq, we were lied to, repeatedly and the processes corrupted.

1. Ludicrous hyperbole. Judged by the consequences, Asquith and the secret agreement with France that led to Britain declaring war in 1914 makes Blair's commitment to Bush seem a minor lapse.

2. Untrue. He made his moral position perfectly clear long before cooking up the WMD subterfuge. He also explicitly stated that he regarded the USA as the only hope of realizing his hopes for a better world.

3. Not limited to the Iraq war. It was under Blair, not Brown, that England's ancient liberties were fatally undermined, applauded by such Labour party "moderates" as the cuckold Alan Johnson and absolutely NOT denounced with appropriate vehemence by the journopukes of Britain.

4. What makes Liddle think the danger is past? Our whole society has become corrupted, and a people without virtue not only cannot be, but does not deserve to be, free.

Blair tells it like it is

Crap. My flock of bêtes noires is shrinking. Here's Blair making the case for combating Islamofascism and to shed the post-colonial guilt that has left the West so supine. Shame he wasn't so forthright or eloquent when he was in power. Strange the Bitchy Boys didn't report it . . .

Hat-tip: Archbishop Cranmer

Heir of Blair

Given that he was one of the few who shared my bleak evaluation of  Michael Howard's muppet long before he squeezed into 10 Downing Street through the back door, Autonomous Mind shows magnanimity in urging us to pity the foolish trusting souls who believed that "call me Dave" would keep any of his "cast iron" promises. The following description might as easily have been written of Cameron's predecessor but one.

He just seemed so . . . sincere. The narrowed eyes, the tightened lips, the determined set of his jaw. The recognition of the urgent need to act to put right so much of what was wrong. He knew what we wanted, what the country needed, and he told us he would deliver it. His promises of change gave us hope.

 
Enter Red Cloud, the war chief who actually halted US invasion of Lakota tribal lands for a while after the Civil War, but who - unlike Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse - realized his people must make the best deal they could in the face of the unstoppable white tide.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land, and they took it.

To bring that up to date:

Cameron made us many promises, more than we can remember, but he has kept only one: he promised to be the heir of Blair - and he is.

High unemployment forever?

Thought-provoking article in Foreign Policy about the possibly permanent unemployability of the ill-educated.

We have seen the rise of a large class of "zero marginal product workers," to coin a term. [1] Their productivity may not be literally zero, but it is lower than the cost of training, employing, and insuring them. That is why labor is hurting but capital is doing fine; dumping these employees is tough for the workers themselves -- and arguably bad for society at large -- but it simply doesn't damage profits much. It's a cold, hard reality, and one that we will have to deal with, one way or another.

In other words, the US economy is going through some major structural shifts. It's not a question of getting back to where we were, but that the economy must solve a new problem of re-employing a lot of people who were not, in reality, producing very much in the first place.[2] That's a steeper challenge than we realized early in the stages of this recession -- and so far policymakers have failed to meet it. Analysts still disagree on how rapidly the US economy will recover. But they're missing the point. The era of low unemployment may be in our rearview mirror for a long time to come.

1. In the UK, that would be the bloated state sector, whose already low productivity actually declined under the impact of the Blair-Brown borrow and spend binge. There was no employment increase in the productive sector under the Labour regime.

2. Just a thought, but maybe the cost of labour in the UK was already so high, and the labour force already so ill-educated, that this phenomenon had already manifested itself over a decade ago - hence the Blair-Brown "solution", which was to create a million new non-jobs in the bureaucracy.

Channel 4 - Trillion Pound Horror Story

As Hemingway's hero Jake Barnes says at the end of The Sun Also Rises, "Wouldn't it be nice to think so?"

I'm a member of the choir Martin Durkin was preaching to, but I do not share his optimism that the British people would rebound if the crushing burden of statism were lifted from their backs.

They - the British people - have voted enthusiastically for every increase in the Welfare State and have furiously resisted every effort to shrink it. There is no constituency - none - for a small state if it means giving up the smallest part of whatever "entitlement" each enjoys.

All generalizations are falsifiable, but the salient characteristics of the British as seen by other nationalities is that they are lazy, drunken, undisciplined and unable either to think things through or to do anything thoroughly. Oh yes - and unconscionably self-satisfied and conceited. 

It is WAY too easy to blame it on the politicians and on the bureaucrats. Agreed, they do little but make things worse - but they are made in Britain, respectively elected and selected to lead this society.

Consider for a moment what would happen to any politician who told the Great British Public the truth about itself, and then explain how democratic change can possibly come about. Britain's biggest export for centuries has been its most ambitious and talented people, seeking fulfillment almost anywhere else on earth.

Nobody imposed our over-priced and under-performing institutions on us. They have evolved in response to the expectations of an envy-rotted society where popular pressure for many generations, from the school-yard to House of Commons, has been to level down.

The most withering judgment was delivered by the most popular prime minister in British history, who saw the country as something to be traded for his personal advancement, and whose administration "created" hundreds of thousands of statist jobs - and had to fill them mainly with immigrants.  

You couldn't make it up - the Blair $aga

The Worldwide Cleaning Industry Association has announced that Tony Blair will be the keynote speaker at its trade show. Attendees are invited to submit questions to help "shape Mr Blair's address". Here are a few:

• What advice can you give us on sweeping shit under the carpet?
• Do you recommend concealment or whitewash for corruption?
• Is there anything you and your wife will not do for money?
• Have you been properly reimbursed for joining the US attack on Iraq?
• Aren't you just a bit embarrassed that your countrymen despise you?
• Did you ever have any principles?

The One - the perils of catching a wave

John Podhoretz writes a "what oft was thought" paragraph about the strange disappearance of Obama's once all-conquering charisma, which zeroes in on what I most liked about The One - the fact that he is an unusually articulate (as opposed to glib) person, rare enough in everyday life and almost unheard-of in a politician.

It has become axiomatic to many of Obama’s well-wishers and passionate supporters that something has gone wrong with his "communications skills". That misses the point. His communications skills are just fine; terrific, in fact. Any of us would kill to have his communications skills. You really have to hate him as a precondition to finding him charmless, or uninteresting, or turgid. He’s none of those things. He’s an interesting shaper of sentences. He says things in unexpected ways.

He can communicate. What he seems unable to do any longer is persuade . . .

Pause for thought. I suppose the nearest comparison over here - in terms of charisma - has been Blair. But he was glibness personified, an exemplar of the profoundly shallow paradox. Blair's lack of substance was his principal political strength, if you measure that in terms of gaining and remaining in power, helped by an opposition that was - and remains - mesmerized by him. But he changed nobody's mind about anything.

Obama's situation is exactly the reverse. He is a conviction politician who has used his charisma to achieve concrete political objectives. By doing so, he went from being a screen onto which people could project their yearnings to being a defined target/scapegoat for their dissatisfactions. And he has violently changed people's minds, mainly to a point of view hostile to his own.     

Were I a politician, I know what conclusions I would draw from that.

A tenner here, a tenner there

No great surprise to learn that Cherie Blair has been trying to flog a bookplate page on eBay signed by her husband that can be slipped into his autobiography. Offered at £25, reduced to £10 - how pathetic.

The woman has always exhibited the classic symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, and it is remarkable that none of Tony Blair's biographers have explored the link between the pathological insecurity revealed by her shameless money-grubbing and his behaviour in power and subsequently.

Or, for that matter, the obvious link between OCD and the ultra-bureaucratic control-freakery of the Blair regime.

Thirteen worse than wasted years

Ian Duncan-Smith's wholesale reform of the welfare system, Gove's first step in the reform of the educational system and now Vince Cable's trailing of a "very radical" reform of the state pension system - all of these could have been, and should have been carried out by the Blair government. There is not one thing about the new policies that Blair did not identify as "progressive" alternatives to a dysfunctional status quo.

So why, possessed of a repeated electoral mandate such as few prime ministers have ever enjoyed, did he not carry them out? Because he lacked the courage to get rid of the malevolent Gordon Brown, who sabotaged every such initiative, and inflicted him on the nation when he departed to cash in his international IOUs.

If posterity even bothers to do so, it may record - as the Massachusetts polemicist Sam Adams predicted it would in 1772 - that 1997-2010 marked the point of no return in Britain's journey to "obscurity and contempt".

Robert Harris on Blair

When I returned to Britain in 1999 after 20 years away, Blair still walked on water as far as the media and a host of celebs, including the novelist Robert Harris, were concerned. I could not account for it. It was obvious to me that he was a mendacious little shyster with an eye to the main chance.

It reminded me of the exaggerated hopes that were vested in Harold Wilson when he won the 1964 general election. Both came to power in the wake of tired and scandal-wracked Conservative governments, and although I had been abroad throughout the whole Thatcher-Major period, eighteen years was far too long for one party to be in office. If I had been in Britain in 1997, I'm sure I would have voted for change. So I can relate to the chagrin expressed by Robert Harris in his review of Blair's auto-bio in today's Sunday Times (£):

The colossal joke history has played on those of us who supported Blair back in 1994 was that he appeared to us at that time to be the quintessential normal guy - refreshingly sensible, modest, non-ideological, sympathetic, pragmatic. That was why he was elected so overwhelmingly [actually, with exactly the same share of the popular vote as Thatcher in 1979], first by the party and then the country: because his instincts and ambitions seemed so in tune with what might loosely be called middle England.

What I could not understand was how press and public had given him a pass in the matter of lifting the ban on cigarette advertising for Formula 1 in exchange for a £1 million donation to the Labour party, and that he was allowed to get away with saying that people knew he was "a pretty straight sort of guy". Il que s'excuse, s'accuse. Nixon damned himself when he said "I am not a crook" - why were the rules different for Blair?

There was another such moment when the millennium celebrations proved to be an ill-organized, embarrassing flop. "Well," pouted Blair, "I'm not going to apologize for trying to do something special for the millennium". Nobody was asking him to - what they wanted to hear was how a vastly expensive event organized by his right-hand man Peter Mandelson had turned out to be so cringingly naff.

I was also astonished that no Brit seemed to have noticed that the "Third Way" touted by Blair's tame academic Anthony Giddens was simply warmed-over corporativism, a Roman Catholic concept that had been around for a century and which was, in fact, the guiding philosophy of the founders of the European Community. Nobody seemed to notice that European leaders were ho-hum about Blair's supposed political philosophy, and that he stopped talking about it not long after.

So, although Harris was enthusiastically on board the New Labour express and I regarded the whole thing with sardonic puzzlement, I share Harris's surprise at what Blair's memoir reveals:

. . . a reckless feeling of invincibility, arising out of a solipsistic sense of personal destiny; an almost ludicrous penchant for self-dramatisation; a deluded detachment from the advice of colleagues and officials; and above all, an oversimplistic view of the world as place of good versus evil.

My surprise, however, is that Harris believes what I regard as an alibi. I don't think Blair had any other desire than to ensure himself the big bucks after leaving Downing Street. That he may have convinced himself that he had higher motives - indeed a higher calling - is no surprise: the most convincing liars believe what they want to believe, and it is that conviction which enables them to deceive others.

Harris has to find some excuse for his past credulousness; but I never bought into Blair's bull-shit in the first place, so I do not need to believe a word of his memoir. He is still a mendacious little shyster, but that was good enough to take his case to the country three times, and to win all three.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times and I'm a gullible imbecile who deserves whatever you may, with merited contempt, do to me.

Tough on slime, tough on the causes of slime

Blair's deep hostility towards the civil liberties once enshrined in British Common Law emerges clearly in his Telegraph interview:

On criminal justice, we need a big debate about law and order in our developed society. We have a real problem on how to deal with modern criminality.

Dysfunctional families who produce 14-year-old kids stabbing one another to death and organised crime, such as drugs and people trafficking, are making [people's] lives hell.

People are operating outside the law, yet we sit here with the political and legal establishments saying, "That's our system and if you challenge it, you're destroying the rule of law".

Some of the emerging market countries have tried to adopt law and order systems that get ahead of this. In some of those societies, they don't have these levels of criminality. They just don't accept them, and they're not going to accept them, and we need a debate about what we do about it here. It may involve being a great deal tougher.

This from the man responsible for the Human Rights Act (1998) to give "further effect" in Britain to the rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights by making it unlawful for any public body to act in a way incompatible with the Convention and permitting legal redress in British courts?

The principal "further effect" being to vastly increase the power of shysters to make public policy and to boost the revenues of Human Rights specialists Matrix Chambers, founder member Cherie Blair QC?

You can't make an omelette . . .

. . . without having some eggs thrown at you. It seems some Irish people are not properly grateful to Blair for bringing peace to the northern part of their benighted island.

Wasteful that - deliquescent potatoes still held together by thick skins would have been far more appropriate.

Edmund Burke on Blair's memoir

When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very rational account of a man's life, that he has always acted right but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence.

Blair - point of departure

Fraser Nelson's article today in the Spectator expresses my POV pretty well.

Blair's book tells how the world is changing, and governments are losing control of it. He paints a picture of a new global elite, and it's easy to see that he regards himself as a potential master of this new universe. Bill Clinton has this status, of Global Leader For Hire, and even found himself resolving real disputes - taking hostages back from North Korea last year. 

Blair is transcending both party (there's nothing left-wing about his memoir) and even country (he's less and less British every time he makes a guest appearance here). Like Clinton, he has discovered that a smile and a contacts book can be worth a lot of money.

Blair Inc isn't about making a rich man even richer. It's about pioneering a new form of statesmanship - for leaders who are no longer shackled to their electorates. Blair is going global. "I now travel to China frequently" he says - and you can bet it's not for the lemon chicken. Not for nothing does the Blair Faith Foundation have offices in East and West. 

This book is about promoting a global brand: that of Blair himself. So we should not waste too much time scouring it for his thoughts about the country he has left behind.

Indeed. But that's what everyone is doing. See, in particular, the bleat by Polly Toynbee in this compendium of Guardianista comments. The truth is not merely galling for the Labour party, it is humiliating for those who once thought Blair walked on water - and a harsh reminder to all who live in this country how small it looks to those with a global perspective.

I suspect that lesson may prove to Blair's most lasting legacy to the land of his birth. Maggie Thatcher challenged the British people to be what she believed they could be. Blair did not, either because he did not believe they were capable of rising to the challenge, or because he simply couldn't be bothered.

Blair's autobio

I'm wondering when the penny is going to drop for British politicians, press and people that Blair was the first British prime minister for whom Number 10 Downing Street was never more than a stepping stone to greater things. James Kirkup's piece in today's Telegraph identifies the dots, but shrinks from joining them up.  

Often, [Blair's autobio] reads like a management school textbook written by an evangelical preacher. Or perhaps a modern history lecturer who’s read too many self-help books.

Or, a book written by someone with his eye firmly set on the US market, where bookshop shelves groan under the weight of self-help books (alien to modern British culture) and where Christianity is still a living force.

It’s written for an international (or at least, non-British) reader. Lots of fairly basic features of British political life are explained as if to someone unfamiliar with them. Most British political books are aimed squarely at Westminster and the UK electorate. I’m guessing Mr Blair is thinking of a rather larger stage.

Good guess! Now then, develop that thought - d'you suppose he was thinking of a larger stage all along?

Then there's the exclusive he gave the newspaper he bribed so heavily while in office:

Speaking to the Guardian before he left for White House talks on the Middle East peace process, Blair said that his 700-page memoir showed New Labour would in time come to be seen as a "great reforming government" in which Brown played a very significant positive part. But his book reveals numerous occasions on which the struggle between the two New Labour titans sapped the strength and direction of the government, leading Blair to delay his handover to his chancellor.

Titans? Only in Lilliput.

The making of a one-party state

The following are excerpts from the Daily Telegraph editorial of 5 August 2003. That's SEVEN years ago.

Under Labour, the public sector has become a Moloch, to whom the lifeblood not only of the present generation but that of posterity must be sacrificed. The public sector has employed an additional 354,000 people since 1997, and is due to grow by more than 200,000 over the next three years. It now employs 5.3 million, one in five of the working population, a proportion that is bound to grow as the productive sectors of the economy shed labour in the face of prohibitive regulations and costs. While the Guardian’s ‘Society’ section is now the size of a telephone directory thanks to the number of public sector jobs advertised, manufacturing industry has lost 11 per cent of its workforce. Whitehall has more than half a million civil servants, about as many as the City of London. The greatest engine of growth in Europe is carrying the burden of the largest bureaucracy in Europe.

It is not only a question of size. The new ruling class has privileges that most people working in the productive sector can only dream of. Generous state-funded pensions, guaranteed against fluctuations in the stock market; jobs guaranteed against fluctuations in the labour market; and subsidised housing reserved for public sector workers. Half, at most, of the new staff are nurses, teachers, police officers and other front-line professionals; the rest are administrators. Public sector inflation, though hard to measure, is running far ahead of the private sector at 19.6 percent over the past two years. Almost all the new money pouring into health and education is being spent on salaries: £2.45 billion out of £2.7 billion of this year’s increase on schools, for instance. Public sector pay is now rising faster than ever before, but efficiency is some 16 per cent below that of America. We are spending a third more on the NHS, with hardly any improvements.

Meanwhile, economic growth has slowed to a mere 0.5 per cent so far this year. According to the Treasury’s own survey, economists expect government borrowing to exceed its estimates next year by about £10 billion, causing the Chancellor to tell the last Cabinet meeting that, in the words of one minister, ‘we are sailing close to a waterfall’. Taxes to pay for the burgeoning public sector have cost the average household £4,000 a year, to which must be added the cost of lost growth: some £2,000 a year. April’s National Insurance rise has caused average incomes to fall by 1.2 per cent for the first time in recent memory. Yet taxes are due to rise by another £95 billion over the next three years. There is political method in this economic madness. Half a million new bureaucrats will form part of the payroll vote: they owe their jobs to Labour. John Prescott announced yesterday that 200,000 new houses would be built east of London, many of them reserved for public servants. Over time, such colonisation will cost the Tories seats. This is gerrymandering on a national scale. 

Tony Blair surprises

OK. Time to eat a REALLY big, squawking crow.

Blair is giving the very considerable proceeds of his autobiography to the Royal British Legion.

Damn! There's nobility in the man! I'm going to find it hard to stick banderillas in him from now on. Curses.