The beginning of the end? (For Tony Blair)

hamburger wrote:

thanks , mctag !
had never heard of "bawbees" before but i'm never too old to learn something new :wink: .
hbg

apparently this is the successor to the "bawbees"

is it still in circulation ?

1/480 of a pound. No not in circulation. Ditched with lsd in 1971 for decimal currency.

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Some people want to haul Blair and co in front of the courts for starting the war in Iraq. I dont know about that.

I do know, however, that New Labour deserves to be collectively executed for crimes of language and jargon. What they have done with the English language is often unspeakable, and surely criminal.

Yesterday, as Simon Hoggart recounts, it was the turn of Blairite law and order strongman John Reid to demonstrate the gruelling result:

Quote:

Owls of anguish

Simon Hoggart
Wednesday April 25, 2007
The Guardian

I don't know what is scarier about John Reid's disquisitions on terrorism: the "generation-long" war we are supposed to be fighting against the terrorists, or the preparations he has made to cope. Certainly, as always with New Labour, a massive taskforce of jargon has been assembled to meet this ongoing and pitiless menace.

Mr Reid began yesterday's session with the home affairs committee of the Commons by pointing out that the National Security Board now meets weekly, the Committee on Security and Terrorism had met yesterday, and the government is now recruiting someone who will doubtless be known as the Terror Tsar, or the director-general of the Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism to his friends.

It's no wonder we need so many people with such magnificent titles. Acccording to the home secretary, "the level of threat we are facing, and its exponential rate of growth, requires that we re-focus all our efforts".

And what should these re-focused efforts involve? "Better oversight, longer strategic planning and thinking, better integrated responses, and central regeneration and capacity to deal with the battle for values and ideas."

And who should deal with all these matters? Why, "a laterally integrated cross-government centre", of course. So that's straightforward. But Mr Reid was also in philosophical mood. "If we had to look at all the changes in the world and find one defining characteristic, it would be the fact that we are moving from static communities and a static world to a highly mobile world.

"As the world changes, so must we change our response to the world."

Here's another one, missus: "Problems used to come to us. Now we have to go to the problems." [..]

The threat, the guru told us, was so extensive that it could not be dealt with by only one department. They would all have to have a "common and overlapping cause: the values that are enshrined in our lifestyle and our liberties, which are common to all of us".

David Winnick asked: "Are we winning this battle?"

Any normal, boring, unenlightened politician might have answered "yes", "no", or "search me". Not the Swami of Shotts. "If you will permit me to use one of my favourite quotes - in a sense not to answer your question - I think the Owl of Minerva will spread its wings only with the coming of dusk."

I have checked the original quote from Hegel, and, unlike Minerva, I am no wiser. But it didn't half impress the committee. They now expect the terrorists to utter owls of anguish.

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Labour loses ground in the English, Scottish and Welsh elections but claims to have avoided an disaster.

Labour avoids election disaster as the Blair era draws to a close

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I dont know the full results yet, but I would guess that if it was a disaster for anyone, it would be Cameron's Conservatives. Blair might be unpopular (particularly with right wing columnists) but Cameron isnt wooing the masses either.

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Steve 41oo wrote:

I dont know the full results yet, but I would guess that if it was a disaster for anyone, it would be Cameron's Conservatives. Blair might be unpopular (particularly with right wing columnists) but Cameron isnt wooing the masses either.

Thanks to the BBC ...

Your place:

Results so far

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thanks walter

of course I should have checked the results before commenting...It does seem it was pretty good for the Conservatives.

But once Brown is installed as PM, there is enough time before the General Election (i think) for Labour to make up lost ground.

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Wow, that took a long time for the results to get in. I started checking in on the Guardian and BBC websites a little after midnight and kept coming back until 4 or so, but still a lot was left unclear. The elections for the Welsh Assembly were pretty much decided, but those for the Scottish Parliament and local councils across England, far from.

By now, however, the results are clearer (even if the answers to the respective "what next?" questions arent). And the most eye-catching winner must be the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP).

At the last moment, it snatched a one-seat lead on Labour, becoming the largest party in a five-party parliament. If it succeeds in forming a coalition, it would mark the end of how many decades of Labour dominance in Scotland? 30 years, 40 years?

Quote:

SNP beats Labour in Scottish poll

The SNP has surged to historic victory over Labour and become the Scottish Parliament's largest party on a gloomy final election day for Tony Blair.

The Scottish election, marred by huge problems with voting systems, showed "that the wind of change is blowing", according to SNP leader Alex Salmond.

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Here's the final results for the elections to the Scottish Parliament. The Nats (SNP) win 20 seats; all the other parties lose.

Although Labour is the loser in the race that counts, it hasnt actually lost all that many seats itself. But the Nats appear to have absorbed all of the seats that last time went to smaller parties: the Socialists, the Greens.

SNP = Scottish Nationalists
LAB = Labour
CON = Conservatives
LD = Liberal Democrats
GRN = Greens
Note: In the previous parliament, the Scottish Socialist Party also held 6 seats, which they all lost this time. A pensioners' party held the remaining seat in the previous parliament (also lost now).

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/9429/scotparliament2007pj0.jpg

(Scottish parliament seats are elected in two ways. 73 MSP's are elected on a first-past-the-post basis in their district (constituency). 56 more are elected through a separate regional list ballot that is used to "top up" each party's seats to achieve proportional representation. Makes for 129 in total; 65 needed for a majority).

OK, now here's the resulting map. It's a striking image. Yellow means the Nationalists won; orange means the Lib-dems won. Red is Labour, of course, and blue the Conservatives.

Basically, Scotland is now clearly divided in two. SNP constituency gains of Dundee West, Falkirk West, Fife Central, Stirling and the Western Isles and a Libdem gain in Dunfermline West mean that there is a stark border from Clyde to Forth, just north of Glasgow and Edinburgh, to the north of which Labour has been all but wiped out, just like the Conservatives were long ago. The Nats (SNP) and Libdems reign supreme there.

In the South, Labour and the Tories divide up the seats in the rural Borders, while Labour still dominates in the (post-)industrial West-Central area around Glasgow. Even there though, the SNP has made inroads, including snatching the inner city constituency of Glasgow Govan.

http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/1238/scotparlmap2007qn9.jpg

The Scottish also elected new local councils across the country, and in the results for those elections the Nats lead as well, by an ampler margin:

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/6858/scotcouncils2007hi0.jpg

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nimh wrote:

'S gonna be hell getting a coalition government though, with these numbers.

Labour + Libdems = 62, three too few
SNP + Libdems = 63, two too few
Labour + Libdems + Greens = 64, one too few.
Neither Labour nor the SNP will ever govern with the Tories.

Only majority government I see is SNP + Libdems + Greens, which precarious combination would have a majority of 1.

Times ahead will be shaky (not stirred).

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Meanwhile, in Wales, another of those four-party systems that must confuse Americans endlessly:

LAB = Labour
PC = Plaid Cymru (Welsh nationalists)
CON = Conservatives
LD = Liberal Democrats

http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/816/walesparl2007jj4.jpg

Here too, the nationalists and Libdems do best in the more rural areas, while Labour does best in the (post-)industrial urban zones. But Labour has a stronger grip on those still than it does in Scotland; and Plaid, though it made a few good gains, is far from breaking out of its heartlands the way the Scottish Nats have succeeded in doing this time.

Another difference is that, more than in Scotland, the Conservatives have really made something of a comeback here. 20% of the votes is not much, but going from one to five constituencies in which they are the largest party isn't bad.

Again, orange means the Lib-dems won, red is Labour, and blue the Conservatives; but Plaid Cymru seats are coloured green.

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/9222/walesparlmap2007qt9.jpg

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And, after those results and maps from Scotland and Wales (which will now be on the previous page, I think), the almost-complete results for the English local elections:

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/661/englcouncils2007bb8.jpg

Those are still some staggering numbers, and not just because those 875 seats gained by the Conservatives are a few hundred more than were expected.

I mean, look at the totals! 5077 Tory councillors versus a total of 4991 councillors from all other parties put together. Thats depressing.

OK, so its true that local elections are a long-standing means of kicking the government in the shins - and the government has been Labour for 10 years now. Back in the 80s, Labour started ratcheting up waves of council wins from 1983, 1984 onwards, just a couple of years after Thatcher took power - but it still took more than another decade for it to win the national elections.

But still, after the second year in a row of Labour falling back to barely over a quarter of the popular vote, it is now back to its hard core, locally. And worse, in entire regions, like the West Country, it has been wiped off the scene. In most of the non-metropolitan South, its now the Tories versus the Libdems, with the Tories winning.

In the North, on the other hand, where many of the elections had in turn become Labour vs Libdem two-horse races, the Conservatives are making some renewed headway.

Not in the biggest cities: in Manchester, the Tories still hold 0 out of 95 council seats (!), with Labour taking 60, the Libdems 34 and the Greens 1. In Liverpool, where the proportions are inversed, the Tories also get 0 (out of 90), with the Libdems winning 51, Labour 35, old-style Liberals 3 and the Greens 1.

But in the Northwest, the Conservatives take control of a fair number of councils, for example going from 20 to 44 out of 55 seats in South Ribble, and coming from behind to take overall control of the seaside resort town of Blackpool (from CON 13 LAB 25 to CON 26 LAB 13). In towns like York it is at least getting a foothold again, going from 0 to 8 seats out of 47. Further south, the Conservatives have taken over from Labour as largest party in Birmingham.

Here's the resulting map, with mostly swathes of blue as the Tories reign throughout the countryside (blue = Conservative, red = Labour, orange = Libdem, black = no overall control, grey = no elections held or result not in yet):

http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/6936/englcouncilsmap2007nv1.jpg

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The BBC has an overview of Who are the winners and losers?

Meanwhile, I want to point out, the Greens may not have had the best of elections overall (because of the bummer result in Scotland), but do notice this here in the results of English local councils:

Greens: +15 makes for 60 seats
BNP: +1 makes for 10 seats
UKIP: -1 makes for 5 seats
Respect: no change makes for 3 seats

OK, look at that and then compare the amount of media coverage the Greens get in comparison with the right- and leftwing-extremists.. something not right there.

In Tory-held Brighton, on the south coast, the Greens doubled their number of council seats and won a total of 12 (out of 54) - just one less than Labour, the second largest party. And in Norwich, the Greens also just missed becoming the second largest party by one seat: Labour 15, Libdems 11, Greens 10 (with the Conservatives trailing at 3).

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nimh wrote:

If [the SNP] succeeds in forming a coalition, it would mark the end of how many decades of Labour dominance in Scotland? 30 years, 40 years?

These elections marked the first time since 1955 that the Labour party has lost an election in Scotland, apparently.

Meanwhile, in Wales Labour's vote declined to 32 per cent - and that's its lowest level there since 1918..

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From today's The Guardian (pages 10 - 15)

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The situation is Scotland is very interesting. (Except if you are involved and then it is a nightmare for all but Alex Salmond).

Not only is it a constitutional crisis...Scotland potentially breaking away from England...but Gordon Brown has been embarrassed in his own back yard before he even takes over as PM.

And on top of that, the election process was a fiasco with many thousands of spoilt ballot papers due to a too complex voting system, local and regional and MSP elections at the same time, and the break down of very wonderful computer systems (not) specifically designed at great cost to ensure a smooth result process. Plus helicopters broke down delaying ballot returns from the Western Isles. Plus a large number of foreign journalists and observers to watch it all unfold.

And it will all be blamed on the out going Labour administration (if thats what finally happens). Its probably unfair to make comparisions with a banana republic. So I shall just say its a porridge...

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Whisky republic?

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nimh wrote:

Whisky republic?

Whisky/porridge dogs breakfast

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Steve 41oo wrote:

And on top of that, the election process was a fiasco with many thousands of spoilt ballot papers due to a too complex voting system, ...

Or perhaps the stupidity of the natives. :wink:

I see Labour are challenging the Hamilton (?) result where they lost a ministerial seat by only about 50 votes.

Legal challenges could be messy and lengthy. A bit rich too, since they were responsible for setting up the system they are challenging.

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The beginning of the end? (For Tony Blair)

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