UK Guardian: With friends like Bush...

[T_i_B]

Great article about how Blair's strategy of appeasement and capitulation is damaging Britain's national interests. Make of this what you will.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1020621,00.html

Diplomatically, the gains of many decades have been frittered away by our blind obedience to the American administration's wars. Huge numbers of people view the British prime minister as Bush's poodle, and see Britain as no more than the errand boy for the American neo-conservatives. What price British influence in the world if Albion has no influence with its American godfather?

For that is the case. We have next to no influence with the US administration. If we did, we would surely have demanded some quid pro quo for our loyal support to America in its military adventives. Perhaps some flexibility would have been forthcoming on the Kyoto protocol or on America's development of nuclear weapons. Not a chance. We continue to cravenly support all things American-inspired, whether missile defence or a distorting World Trade Organisation. In return, the prime minister receives plaudits from Congress delivered in a manner reminiscent of Beijing's Great Hall of the People. As America's love affair with Tony Blair blossoms, the world - and the UK's place within it -becomes less stable.

What an ignominious way we have begun the 21st century - as a satrapy of the new American world order. Old friends despair as old rivals mock this once-proud nation. No longer is it able to hold its head up as a free-thinking, sovereign state.

We are now viewed as a rather ignoble island, subservient to the world's superpower, and incapable of committing itself to its natural home within Europe. The irony of our position is that, as we further alienate our friends, including those in America who look for constructive criticism rather than sycophancy, so we reinforce the prejudices of our enemies. Thus do nations dwindle into insignificance and irrelevance.

[NJCher]

1. excellent piece

How did the leaders of the UK lose their way? We know many of the people never did as they were in disagreement with their leaders. This piece is a call for policies that result in national self-respect.


Cher

[T_i_B]

3. "How did the leaders of the UK lose their way?"

Put very simply, Blair has had two landslide majorities and this has allowed him to become completly out of touch with the people he is supposed to serve. It's not like "new" labour has any love for Britain anyway though. Allow Greg Palast to explain.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=236&row=1

How did Blair get into this fix? The answer is, he can't help himself: Blair's an 'Ameriphiliac.' I noticed the Prime Minister's mad affection for all things American in my job reporting from London for BBC and the Guardian/Observer. As a Yank in King Tony's court, I've seen during Blair's six years in office, what began as puppy love for Bill Clinton degenerate into pathetic poodledom at the heel of George Bush.
The Prime Minister's need to pad along behind Bush is the result of the strange pathologic politics that Blair calls, 'modernization.' Blair, you see, hates Britain.

This Prime Minister despises his storybook countryside and its grumbling farmers with their two little pigs and their tiny fields edged with dry stone. He cringes at the little bell ringing over the door of the village post office - so quaint and so maddeningly inefficient. He cannot fathom a nation that weeps when he shuts the last filthy coal pits.

Blair is frustrated to tears by what he sees as fossilized trade unions which chain workers to dead industries, rather than building new ones. Britain's Prime Minister dreams of birthing the Entrepreneurial State. Instead, he finds himself caretaker of a museum of nineteenth-century glories made somnolent by easy welfare and low ambitions.

So Tony gazes across the water with almost erotic envy at a thoroughly ‘modernized' America Inc., where Wal-Marts and McDonald's and Microsoft roam free, creating a shiny New Economic Order.
I saw Blair's America-mania up close and inside in 1998 when I went undercover to investigate US corporate influence on his government for the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday paper. Working out of an expensive hotel suite overlooking the Tower of London, my confederates and I pretended to represent Blair's favorite American corporation, a Texas company called, 'Enron.' We wanted to find out how much it would cost in 'consulting fees' to overturn England's environmental laws for the benefit of our US client.

[indepat]

5. My, it seems Enron's tenacles have had a very long

reach.

[T_i_B]

8. Oh yes

Blair got his fingers into the Enron pie too. The Blair Enron story broke a short while after the Bush Enron mess started but here is an article from that time on the subject.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,636228,00.html

You didn't need 'anti-business bias' or a Luddite's hatred of 'wealth creators' to know that Robert Maxwell was bent or James Goldsmith was a monster. Even the Thatcher administration had its standards. In 1982 it stopped Arthur Andersen receiving Government contracts because the then accountancy and consultancy firm had failed to spot spectacular losses of public money when it audited the accounts of the corrupt DeLorean car maker.

For a company to be censured by the Conservatives was the corporate equivalent of being thrown out of the Gestapo for using excessive force, but the rarity of the phenomenon can't disguise the fact that the Tories recognised that the public interest and business interest weren't always one. Tony Blair's credulity is limitless. He fell for the ideology of the New Economy bubble market that business, any business, was the sole source of creativity and righteousness. The mania still grips the Prime Minister. Wall Street crashes and the black joke of a privatised railway can't shake his faith in the most degraded enterprises.

Arthur Andersen became a New Labour favourite. It worked for 'free' for New Labour for two years. Blair came to power and the DeLorean dispute with Government was settled within months. The profits made when the Whitehall contracts were renewed will probably be seized by the courts. Andersen's now separate accountancy wing audited Enron's accounts and, once again, didn't notice that money was pouring into the pockets of executives.

The investment wasn't wasted. In opposition, Labour promised to stop the Conservatives' 'dash for gas' and save the jobs of miners who had, stupidly, stuck by their party. Enron hired Karl Milner, a former aide to Gordon Brown who found more remunerative work in the lobbying industry, to oppose the moratorium on gas-fired power stations. Our reporter Greg Palast recorded Milner bragging in 1998: 'We have many friends in government. They like to run things past us some days in advance, to get our view.' He proved the boast wasn't idle by producing an unpublished draft of a Parliamentary report. He then explained how he dealt with energy policy. 'You play on the existing prejudices within the Cabinet for coal, you play on the existing prejudices within the Cabinet for competition, and you play the forces off against each other.'

And just for good luck, here is a BBC article detailing "new" labour's Enron links.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1791168.stm

While Tony Blair toured Britain aboard his election battle bus in 1997, senior members of his economic team were working alongside experts at Arthur Andersen, Enron's accountants.

That relationship - which produced key planks of current economic policy - lies behind the awkward questions Labour now faces over Andersen's return to government work

That close relationship is clear from the memoirs of Geoffrey Robinson, the former Paymaster General and a key player in Chancellor Gordon Brown's economic team before Labour came to power.

Even with the election under way, Mr Robinson and Ed Balls, now chief economic adviser at the Treasury, managed to spend much of the campaign working with Andersen.

[Old and In the Way]

2. If Blair had stood up to what was right and against Bush,

I think the Iraq War would have been seen as it truely is..naked aggression. Sad that Blair gave cover to these criminals.

If Blair is deep sixed, future empire building by the BFEE will be considerably more difficult....I sure hope you guys can take him down.

[indepat]

4. Devastatingly brutal

assessment: right on the mark?

[shirlden]

6. Such a shame

that Blair is so two-faced. He swore his undying love for BC, but as soon as Bill was gone from the WH, he jumped right into bed with the little Shrub. Bet Bill is just crushed. England and America deserve better than this.

:argh:

[samsingh]

7. if shrub and Blair are friends

Blair doesn't need anymore.