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The Corruption of New Labour: Britain’s Watergate?


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What do the Brits here think about "Red Ed" Milliband?

Does his election as party leader really indicate the party is, a least partially, returning to its roots?

What are the chances of such a young, inexperienced Jewish guy getting elected PM?

What will become of his brother will he remain Shadow Foreign Secretary?

Having partly grown up under Labour in the late 70s and throughout Maggie Thatcher's Tories in the 80s, I can attest I have never liked Labour. "Incompetent" is the kindest word I use against them. Their latest foray into leadership of the country since 1997 only confirms that to me - yet another budgeting FUBAR. Their education policy is ... erratic, at best. Foreign policy an unmitigated disaster. Health and policing policies saw less actual people doing the job, and more filing paperwork for increased salaries. Transport policy I can't really comment on, but seems the same mess it's always been : first sign of snow in the UK, and everything grinds to a halt.

Suffice to say - the sooner the entire Labour party are arrested, charged and tried for treason, crimes against the people, fraud, embezzlement, and acting in the best interests of foreign powers (namely EU and USA), the better the UK will become.

What is now the Lib-Dems used to be two parties that were considered something of a joke. They merged, not because of similar policies overall, but for declining membership and fiscal contributions. Can they do a better job? It's hard to see how they can do worse than the last two Labour governments - Bankrupting, and near-bankrupting the UK.

Tories are, historically, better for the UK - cleaning up Labour's messes, then losing the plot somewhat and making new ones. Tory policies, especially financial/economic ones, are what Labour "borrowed" and used to get elected in 1997, only to throw them out early in the new millennium.

Now, I've nearly always lived in mostly deep-Labour seats, and pretty useless voting against them in those areas - so I've never really voted. I can't see me ever voting Labour in anything. They're just too much anti-everything I believe a UK political party should be.

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Transport policy I can't really comment on, but seems the same mess it's always been : first sign of snow in the UK, and everything grinds to a halt.

???? Huuuh???

Am I mistaken or didn't that happen at airports privatized by the Tories when a Tory was PM?

Foreign policy an unmitigated disaster.

And its most disastrous steps were fully supported by the party which you claim is "historically, better for the UK". Do you think the UK would not have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan if the Tories had been in power? Do you think any members of your faforite party should be "arrested, charged and tried for treason, crimes against the people, fraud, embezzlement, and acting in the best interests of foreign powers"

Wasn't the UK "near-bankrupt[ed]" because New Labour unwisely deregulated the economy aka acted too much like the Conservatives?

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Well, aside from Labour stealing some kid's thesis, (Iraq can launch its missiles inside 45 minutes), and passing it off as fact to the House, and the country, Tories would probably also have "gone to war", but I don't believe they'd have been half as rabid as Blair, nor half as brown-tonguing to Bush, as he was.

Iraq invasion was certainly nothing like the Falklands Conflict in the early 1980s for Thatcher and her Tories. ;) Except maybe Blair played Galtieri and Labour were the Argentinian Junta "recapturing" .... no that doesn't work either - Iraq never belonged to the British, nor was invaded/captured/stolen by a foreign power.

Yeah, that's what Labour do : Take everything bad by the Tories, and magnify it ten-fold. At least. When the Tories self-destruct, they don't take the nation with them, just themselves.

Edit : Bring back Screaming Lord Sutch!

Edited by Steve Knight
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Has anyone read the book Ghost, by Robert Harris, or the film, The Ghost Writer (directed by Roman Polanski) based on the novel. The book and the film are both worth searching out. Harris was once a close friend of Tony Blair. However, he became disillusioned with his period in power.

When Blair resigned as prime minister in 2007, Harris immediately began work on the book. The book and film begins with the death of Mike McAra, a writer who has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister named Adam Lang, a thinly-disguised version of Blair. His wife (Cherie Blair) is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband.

The new ghost-writer (Ewan McGregor in the film), begins to investigate the death of McAra. He eventually finds out that McAra has been killed because he has discovered Lang's secret. This is the same secret that I have mentioned on this thread before. That Tony Blair joined the Labour Party as an agent of MI5. It is also claimed that his wife was recruited by the CIA while at university.

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Gordon Brown, like Tony Blair, has been keen to build a speech-making career. For example, he is paid £71,544 for two weeks work making the odd speech at New York University. He also got paid £62,181 for four hours work in Lagos, Nigeria. However, he is finding it difficult to compete with Tony Blair, who is the world's highest-paid public speaker. For example, he received £400,000 for two 30-minute lectures in the Philippines.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Colin Powell, the US secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to alert him to the unreliability of a key source behind claims of Saddam Hussein's bio-weapons capability.

Responding to the Guardian's revelation that the source, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi or "Curveball" as his US and German handlers called him, admitted fabricating evidence of Iraq's secret biological weapons programme, Powell said that questions should be put to the US agencies involved in compiling the case for war.

In particular he singled out the CIA and the Defence Intelligence Agency – the Pentagon's military intelligence arm. Janabi, an Iraqi defector, was used as the primary source by the Bush administration to justify invading Iraq in March 2003. Doubts about his credibility circulated before the war and have been confirmed by his admission this week that he lied.

Powell said that the CIA and DIA should face questions about why they failed to sound the alarm about Janabi. He demanded to know why it had not been made clear to him that Curveball was totally unreliable before false information was put into the key intelligence assessment, or NIE, put before Congress, into the president's state of the union address two months before the war and into his own speech to the UN.

"It has been known for several years that the source called Curveball was totally unreliable," he told the Guardian . "The question should be put to the CIA and the DIA as to why this wasn't known before the false information was put into the NIE sent to Congress, the president's state of the union address and my 5 February presentation to the UN."

On 5 February 2003, a month before the invasion, Powell went before the UN security council to make the case for war. In his speech he referred to "firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails … The source was an eyewitness who supervised one of these facilities". It is now known that the source, Janabi, made up the story.

Curveball told the Guardian he welcomed Powell's demand. "It's great," he said tonight. "The BND [German intelligence] knew in 2000 that I was lying after they talked to my former boss, Dr Bassil Latif, who told them there were no mobile bioweapons factories. For 18 months after that they left me alone because they knew I was telling lies even though I never admitted it. Believe me, back then, I thought the whole thing was over for me.

"Then all of a sudden [in the run up to the 2003 invasion] they came back to me and started asking for more details about what I had told them. I still don't know why the BND then passed on my information to the CIA and it ended up in Powell's speech.

"I want there to be an inquiry so that people will know the truth. So many lies have been told about me over the years. I finally want the truth to come out."

Powell has previously expressed regret about the role he unwittingly played in passing on false information to the UN, saying it had put a blot on his career. But his latest comments increase pressure on the intelligence agencies and their former chiefs to divulge what they knew at the time and why they failed to filter out such a bad source.

George Tenet, then head of the CIA, is particularly in the firing line. He failed to pass on warnings from German intelligence about Curveball's reliability.

Tenet put out a statement on his website in response to Curveball's admission. He said: "The handling of this matter is certainly a textbook case of how not to deal with defector provided material. But the latest reporting of the subject repeats and amplifies a great deal of misinformation."

Tenet refers to his own 2007 memoir on the war, At the Centre of the Storm, in which he insists that the first he heard about Curveball's unreliability was two years after the invasion – "too late to do a damn thing about it".

In the light of Curveball's confession, politicians in Iraq called for his permanent exile and scorned his claim to want to return to his motherland and build a political party. "He is a xxxx, he will not serve his country," said one Iraqi MP. In his adopted home of Germany, MPs are demanding to know why the BND, paid Curveball £2,500 a month for at least five years after they knew he had lied.

Hans-Christian Ströbele, a Green MP, said Janabi had arguably violated a German law which makes warmongering illegal. Under the law, it is a criminal offence to do anything "with the intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially anything that leads to an aggressive war", he said. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment, he added, though he did not expect it would ever come to that.

Curveball told the Guardian he was pleased to have finally told the truth. He said he had given the Guardian's phone number to his wife and brother in Sweden "just in case something happens to me".

Further pressure on the CIA came from Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff at the time of the invasion. He said Curveball's lies raised questions about how the CIA had briefed Powell ahead of his fateful UN speech.

Tyler Drumheller, head of the CIA's Europe division in the run-up to the invasion, said he welcomed Curveball's confession because he had always warned Tenet that he may have been a fabricator.

Tenet has disputed Drumheller's version of events, insisting that the official made no formal warning to CIA headquarters.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/16/colin-powell-cia-curveball/print

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Having partly grown up under Labour in the late 70s and throughout Maggie Thatcher's Tories in the 80s, I can attest I have never liked Labour. "Incompetent" is the kindest word I use against them. Their latest foray into leadership of the country since 1997 only confirms that to me - yet another budgeting FUBAR. Their education policy is ... erratic, at best. Foreign policy an unmitigated disaster. Health and policing policies saw less actual people doing the job, and more filing paperwork for increased salaries. Transport policy I can't really comment on, but seems the same mess it's always been : first sign of snow in the UK, and everything grinds to a halt.

Suffice to say - the sooner the entire Labour party are arrested, charged and tried for treason, crimes against the people, fraud, embezzlement, and acting in the best interests of foreign powers (namely EU and USA), the better the UK will become.

What is now the Lib-Dems used to be two parties that were considered something of a joke. They merged, not because of similar policies overall, but for declining membership and fiscal contributions. Can they do a better job? It's hard to see how they can do worse than the last two Labour governments - Bankrupting, and near-bankrupting the UK.

Tories are, historically, better for the UK - cleaning up Labour's messes, then losing the plot somewhat and making new ones. Tory policies, especially financial/economic ones, are what Labour "borrowed" and used to get elected in 1997, only to throw them out early in the new millennium.

Now, I've nearly always lived in mostly deep-Labour seats, and pretty useless voting against them in those areas - so I've never really voted. I can't see me ever voting Labour in anything. They're just too much anti-everything I believe a UK political party should be.

I am the first to condemn some of the short-comings of the last Labour government. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were definitely under the control of big business and the city. This resulted in a regime that allowed the wealthy to pay low-rates of taxation. The large corporations were allowed (encouraged) to exploit tax loopholes and the lack of regulation was clearly partly responsible for the financial crisis.

However, I am appalled that government ministers continually justify the ideological cuts in public spending to the policies of the Labour government. Although Brown clearly made serious mistakes as chancellor he was no way responsible for the world’s banking crisis. In fact, by arguing for the major countries to increase public spending helped to stop a world depression that would have been as bad as the 1930s. The main problem stems from the deregulation that took place in the United States.

Bailing out the banks was a very expensive business but in the long-term this money will come back and this will considerably reduce the national debt. The government continually argues that the public spending cuts are necessary because of the high-level of national debt. What they don’t tell you that our level of debt is lower than almost OECD countries. When cabinet ministers go on about how much they are having to pay off in interest (less than 3% of GDP), they don’t explain that it was higher under Tory administrations: Margaret Thatcher (5.15%) and John Major (3.8%).

Labour borrowed less and repaid more debt than previous administrations (borrowing was roughly 50% less under Blair/Brown than it was under Major; more than twice Thatcher’s debt repayments were made).

A major cause of the national debt is the low overall tax-take (36% compared with the EU average of 40%). The previous Labour government was partly responsible for this by continuing with the policy of Thatcher/Major of low-rates of taxation on high-earners.

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  • 4 months later...

Why was Ian Edmondson not interviewed by the police during their investigation (his name appeared on documents recovered from the private detective hacking the phones on behalf of Murdoch)? The News of the World case reveals corruption at the very top of the Metropolitan Police. The man who oversaw the original investigation and carried out the phoney review of the case, was John Yates, assistant commissioner. He also was in charge of the bungled Tony Blair, cash-for-honours investigation.

It is now clear that John Yates was in the pay of Rupert Murdoch. That is why he did not bring a case against the News of the World hackers. It is also probably the reason why he bungled Tony Blair's, cash-for-honours investigation. Yates will probably end up in prison. Unfortunately, Blair has probably got away with it.

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The home affairs committee resumes its hearings on Tuesday into phone hacking with four past and present Scotland Yard chiefs. First up is assistant commissioner John Yates, who decided in 2009 that the Met did not need to reopen its phone-hacking investigation, which had closed two years earlier after gaining two convictions. This is the same John Yates who was in charge of the investigation into Tony Blair. If he was under the control of Rupert Murdoch, no wonder he could find no evidence to prosecute Tony Blair.

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According to Vogue magazine, Tony Blair is godfather to Rupert Murdoch's nine-year-old daughter, Grace, the second youngest of his six children. Blair was present at the d baptism of the child on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony. This well-kept secret was revealed in a rare interview by Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, in a forthcoming edition of Vogue.

In July it was reported that Blair rang Gordon Brown to ask him to tell his friend and ally, the Labour MP Tom Watson, to lay off attacking News Corporation over the phone-hacking issue. Brown is thought to have refused the request, although neither Blair nor Brown has confirmed such a conversation took place.

Blair's relationship with Murdoch dates back to July 1995, when the leader of the opposition provoked a political row by accepting an invitation to address a News Corporation conference on Hayman Island, Australia. Labour benefited from the loyal support of Murdoch newspapers, with the Sun switching from Conservative to Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election, and the Times dropping the Conservatives in 1997 and endorsing Labour in 2001. Meanwhile, Labour placed few restrictions on the operation of either News Corp's newspapers or BSkyB, in which News Corp owned a 39.1% stake, during its time in office.

Support from the Murdoch titles intensified at the time of the Iraq war, and Murdoch and Blair were in close contact through Blair's premiership, speaking, for example, on the phone three times in the nine days before the Iraq war. Information released by No 10 under freedom of information rules also showed the pair spoke on the day the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly was published.

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According to Vogue magazine, Tony Blair is godfather to Rupert Murdoch's nine-year-old daughter, Grace, the second youngest of his six children. Blair was present at the d baptism of the child on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony. This well-kept secret was revealed in a rare interview by Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, in a forthcoming edition of Vogue.

We all know about Blair's religious views that were kept secret during his period of office? Does Murdoch have strong views on religion? It does seem very strange to have your child baptised on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The Telegraph, By Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter

9:32PM BST 24 Sep 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/8787074/Tony-Blairs-six-secret-visits-to-Gaddafi.html

Tony Blair’s close relationship to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has come under fresh scrutiny after it emerged he had six private meetings with the dictator in the three years after he left Downing Street.

Five of those meetings took place in a 14-month period before the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber.

Mr Blair is coming under increasing pressure to make public details of all his meetings and discussions with Gaddafi. It follows the disclosure in The Sunday Telegraph last week that on at least two occasions Mr Blair flew to Tripoli on a private jet paid for by the Libyan regime.

Among the new meetings uncovered by this newspaper is a visit to Gaddafi in January 2009, when JP Morgan, the US investment bank which pays Mr Blair £2  million a year as a senior adviser, was trying to negotiate a deal between the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) and a company run by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a friend of Lord Mandelson. The multi-billion dollar deal, which later fell through, would have seen the LIA provide a loan to Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium producer.

JP Morgan’s involvement in the deal is revealed in an email sent to the LIA by the bank’s vice-chairman, Lord Renwick, in December 2008, in which he sought to “finalise the terms of the mandate concerning Rusal before Mr Blair’s visit to Tripoli”.

JP Morgan said Mr Blair had no knowledge of the Rusal proposal. A spokesman added: “JP Morgan declined to participate on such a transaction and thus Mr Blair was never involved, and it was never discussed with him.”

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