Conference ready for Blair

Tony Blair is to give his final speech as prime minister to Labour’s annual conference with a plea for the party to focus on a fourth election victory.

Mr Blair faced protests during his TUC conference speech a fortnight ago, but he is expected to be given a hero’s send off by Labour delegates.

source: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5380004.stm

Count ‘em

£27,247,000. The Labour Party’s debt.

£23,815,000. Labour’s running costs.

£15,166,000. Labour’s election spend.

£3,685,000. Raised from membership.

£8,000,000. Raised from affiliations.

£13,900,000. From Donations.

To deal with this, Labour has arranged £13.5 million overdraft and long-term facilities with the Co-Op and Unity Trust banks. And, quoting from page 51 of the NEC’s Annual Report,

Furthermore the party has entered into discussions with its other lenders to re-schedule the repayment of loans amounting to £12.4 million.

Twisting the Lion’s Tail

A note of a private meeting between Mr Blair and President Bush in January 2003 shows that Tony Blair failed to confront Mr Bush when he claimed Saddam Hussein had tried to buy aluminium tubes for nuclear weapons production.

Mr Blair did not contradict the President despite having received “private briefings” which indicated that the aluminium tubes were more likely to be for conventional weapons, according to the new edition of a book by the international lawyer Philippe Sands published tomorrow.

Source: news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1726064.ece

‘Victims have to be paramount’ – PM

Queen’s Evidence

Prosecutors will now be able to strike deals with suspects within a statutory footing, offering either immunity from prosecution or reduction in sentence in return for co-operation. This will provide a strong incentive for those further down the ‘food chain’ to give evidence against the most powerful heads of organised criminal networks.

It is hoped this will lead to the arrest and imprisonment of more senior figures which in turn will help to make the UK a more difficult place to do business. But it will also help to breed uncertainty inside criminal organisations, whilst maintaining the essential checks and balances to prevent potential miscarriages of justice

Source: http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9274.asp

Trout Mask Replica

Captain Sieghart (she was a child genius, you know , but sadly is no longer a child) has a piece in today’s Times 2 explaining how, 16 months before the putsch that removed Charles Kennedy, she tried to expose his drunken incompetence.

All very, ‘old friend in the ‘eighties; crisis of conscience; public duty before personal ties’; self-justifying stuff. But what is clear is that “Kennedy’s office” intimidated The Times into printing a clarification over when, not if , he was rat-arsed and forced them to apologise.

The Lib Dems want to be thought guilty only of sins of omission in their covering-up for Charlie. But the campaign to protect him from exposure was active, even aggressive.

Who was “Kennedy’s office” back in September 2004 ?

2 + 2 still = 4

JERUSALEM (AFP) -
Israel’s army chief Dan Halutz reportedly offloaded his stock portfolio hours before the Jewish state unleashed a massive offensive in Lebanon and the stock market tumbled.

According to the Maariv daily, Halutz sold the shares at noon on July 12, three hours after two soldiers were seized by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid and as Israeli artillery began to pound the positions of the Shiite militia in Lebanon, the paper said.

Seymour Hersh in the current issue of the New Yorker writes,

“According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings.”

He also writes,

“Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”

Lord Levy is the Prime Minister’s Personal Representative in the middle east and the Foreign Office publishes his appointments diary at www.fco.gov.uk/Files/KFile/Lord%20Levys%20Diary%202006.doc

 

He appears to have been quite busy this spring and summer, meeting Palestinians like Yasser Abed Rabbo, Saeb Erekat and the President, Mahmoud Abbas, but no-one from the elected Hamas government. He went on from Ramallah to meetings in Jerusalem.

 

 

25 April 2006	Jerusalem	US General Dayton
25 April 2006	Jerusalem	Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister
26 April 2006	Jerusalem	Major General Amos Yadlin, Head of Israeli Intelligence
26 April 2006	Jerusalem	Tzippi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister
26 April 2006	Jerusalem	Amir Peretz, Israeli Defence Minister
27 April 2006	Jerusalem	Haim Ramon, Israeli Minister of Justice

 

12 June 2006	UK	Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister
13 June 2006	UK	Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister

 

 

 

You’re Fired

William Rees-Mogg, in The Times, writes,

I made inquiries in Washington and was told that Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had taken exception to Mr Straw’s statement that it would be “nuts” to bomb Iran. The United States, it was said, had put pressure on Tony Blair to change his Foreign Secretary. Mr Straw had been fired at the request of the Bush Administration, particularly at the Pentagon.

Rees-Mogg also adds some stuff from the Mail on Sunday, which claimed ’senior sources close to the U.S. government’ had told it that Straw was removed from the Foreign Office after Condoleezza Rice’s visit to his Blackburn constituency with its 20 per cent muslim population. It is unclear if this is new information by the Mail or a recycling of Irwin Stelzer’s well-informed gossip which carried the same message. Irwin Stelzer is Rupert Murdoch’s voice on earth, and in a diary piece in today’s Sun, The Whip writes,

Pals of Jack (Man of) Straw are pushing their luck by bleating that he was sacked from the foreign office on the orders of President Bush AND that he was going to quit anyway in protest at the PM’s tough line. Funny, say Tony Blair’s chums. When the Cabinet last discussed the Middle East war there wasn’t a peep from boy Jack.

Rees-Mogg asserts that this was the first time that a foreign power had removed a British Foreign Secretary since Chamberlain and the Italian Ambassador, Count Grandi, conspired to force the resignation of Anthony Eden in 1938.

This was a period in history when a British Prime Minister was convinced that his personal powers of persuasion could moderate the actions of a country gripped by a hypertrophied sense of nationalism. Then, a British Prime Minister believed that ultra-nationalist leaders, if treated sympathetically and public criticism of them was avoided, would come to see reason; that they were men he could do business with. This policy was called appeasement.

 

Murdoch to put Blair on News Corp board

 

 

 

 

 

 

“How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos In Peru”
By John McMillan and Pablo Zoido
A Stanford University study, published March 23rd 2004

Abstract: Which of the democratic checks and balances – opposition parties, the judiciary, a free press -is the most critical? Peru has the full set of democratic institutions. In the 1990’s, the secret police chief Montesinos systematically undermined them all with bribes. We quantify the checks using the bribe prices. Montesinos paid television channel owners about 100 times what he paid judges and politicians. One single TV channels’ bribe was four times larger than the total of the opposition politicians’ bribes. By revealed preference, the strongest check on the government’s power was the news media.

Omerta

Andrew Pierce, assistant editor of The Times, is getting all the good leaks from Operation Ribble, the Met’s investigation of cash for peerages.

Now, he is reporting ’senior Whitehall sources’ as telling him that Lord Levy read a prepared statement when arrested and then replied ‘no comment’ to police questions. The source is reported saying that this will slow the investigation, increase its costs and delay the questioning of Tony Blair that was expected at the end of September.

“You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.”

Questions to the Deputy Prime Minister

Norman Baker MP: When the Deputy Prime Minister met his Chinese opposite number, did he advocate adoption of the concept of contraction and convergence? What is his view of that concept?

Deputy Prime Minister:
I didn’t understand the question