How I disagree with Greg Dyke on Tony Bliar

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Image of Tony Blair and Ed MilibandInspired by this article about Greg Dyke on Tony Blair.

Tony Blair has been called “a shady figure” and a “very sad man” by former BBC director-general Greg Dyke.

In an explosive interview with the Financial Times, he also said the former Prime Minister had betrayed the very ethos of the Labour Party.

In his 2004 autobiography, Inside Story, Mr Dyke, 66, condemned the former PM as “a man without real principle.”

He wrote: “He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding or he lied.”

“We were all duped. What is really frightening is that Blair still doesn’t believe or understand that what he did was fundamentally wrong.”

Dyke is correct in stating that Tony Blair betrayed the very ethos of the Labour Party. That was intentional: Blair hijacked the Labour Party and used it to pursue his own NeoCon policies. I also agree that Blair is a man without real principle.

Dyke’s analysis of Blair over the dodgy dossier being “sexed up” is too simplistic and depends on an incorrect binary oposition when the truth is more complex.

We were not all misled (‘duped’). There were many people who appreciated Blair & Co fully well by then and realised that he would do anything to go to war. There were also whole sections of society – subcultures if you like – that were fully aware of Blair’s actions.

Similarly it’s not either he was incompetent and had made a mistake or he lied. He was and continues to be amoral, insane and a Neo-Conservative.

I’m not sure that he’s sad although I am certain that he’s insecure. That much is certain from the absolute nonsense peddled out at the time. It is clear that spin doctors massaged his ego repeatedly.

While there are suggestions that Blair provided boys to paedos at Selby Wright’s summer school that he helped organise, he is most definitely not the straight kinda guy he liked to portray.

Traitor Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George 'Dubya' Bush
Tony Blair receives the Congressional Gold Medal of Honour from George ‘Dubya’ Bush

Blair is a NeoCon through and through. That’s what drives him. That’s why – actually combined with not being … – he was so closely-coupled to Dubya Bush.

Image of Mutley getting a medalHe’s also absolutely barking mad – a part of that is being able to rationalise all of the atrocious things that he’s done.

Continue ReadingHow I disagree with Greg Dyke on Tony Bliar

NHS news review

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It has emerged that Andrew Taylor, head of the Co-operation and Competition Panel has been liaising extremely closely with private-sector lobbying groups to produce the report claiming that PCTs impose waiting so that patients either pay for treatment or die. There’s a feint, familiar ring to that … a circular echo, something in a spin?

Anyway then he got taken to a Health Investor’s dinner. Of course, Health Investor’s dinner would be packed with higher management of private health care companies – the perfect situatuion for Taylor to be networked.

Hypocrite Andrew Lansley condemned PCTs for the actions claimed by the report when – of course – he is largely responsible for them. It is Lansley and the Con-Dems that are destroying the NHS and imposing huge cuts. It is clear that this was the intention.

There are reports on Labour’s analysis that deprived areas will see greater cuts than relatively prosporous areas. The Con-Dems’ are stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

Conservative election poster 2010

A few recent news articles concerning the UK’s Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition government – the ConDem’s – brutal attack on the National Health Service.

Private healthcare group lobbied competition body for NHS inquiry | Society | The Guardian

The close links between a private sector lobby group and an NHS regulator in the runup to the launch of a groundbreaking inquiry into competition in the health service have emerged in a series of documents passed to the Guardian.

Emails released under the Freedom of Information Act show that NHS Partners Network, a lobby group which represents companies including Care UK, Circle, General Healthcare Group, Bupa and United Health, helped draft a letter requesting a formal investigation into how firms were being blocked from getting NHS work. A week later the private healthcare lobby group took the regulator out to a £250-a-head gala dinner.

The network began lobbying the Co-operation and Competition Panel (CCP) last October for an inquiry into restrictions on the use of non-state companies in the health service – an investigation that was given the go-ahead two months later. The result was a report published this week which included recommendations to offer patients “more choice” because people were “dying” while waiting for operations in NHS hospitals.

Since 2006, patients have had a right to choose where they go for treatment for elective surgery, including private hospitals. In this week’s landmark ruling the panel found that almost half of NHS primary care trusts, the state bodies which control health budgets, were unreasonably restricting patients’ choice over where they go for operations.

The tactics employed included setting minimum waiting times before patients were getting treated – even when private providers could treat them – and directing GPs to refer patients to keep cash flowing into a local hospital.

In a contentious passage the regulator claimed that “we understand that patients will ‘remove themselves from the waiting list’ either by dying or by paying for their own treatment at private sector providers”.

Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, leapt on the findings, telling the BBC that “too many [trusts] have been operating in a cynical environment where they can game the system – and in which political targets, particularly the maximum 18-week waiting time target, are used to delay treatment.”

However, David Stout, director of the PCT Network, described this claim as “unsubstantiated”, pointing out that average waiting times were just eight weeks for what were non-emergency and therefore non-life threatening operations. He said the regulator’s statements “cause unnecessary public anxiety and alarm”.

Emails, obtained by Spinwatch which campaigns for greater transparency in government, between the head of the CCP, Andrew Taylor, and David Worskett, the director of the NHS Partners Network, reveal the inquiry followed a letter from the lobby group to the Department of Health, which Taylor helped draft.

It’s obvious why PCTs are making patients wait » Hospital Dr

You really have to wonder what it’s like in the world of a Tory minister. It’s evidently a place where nobody has to rely on a public service. David Cameron’s gratitude to the NHS for treating his son Ivan, frequently repeated in the run up to the election, seems to have been conveniently forgotten.

First we have Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s director of ‘strategy’ (for which his qualification are…ummm…I’ll have to get back to you on that one), suggesting the abolition of maternity leave, job centres and consumer rights legislation.

Then Oliver Letwin claiming public sector workers need more ‘fear and discipline’ (how about a spot of whipping?). Thanks for that, boys – if that’s the direction of travel, we’ll soon be opening workhouses again. Let’s admit this government is devoid of intelligent ideas for deficit reduction, or indeed, any grasp on the realities of life for the majority who don’t have a trust fund and didn’t go to Eton.

Then we have the Cooperation and Competition Panel doing what it was set up to do – clobbering the NHS and cosying up to the private sector. Its report last week claims that PCT’s are unfairly giving work to local hospitals, and restricting access for elective surgery to save money.

Making patients wait for treatment, we’re told, is designed expressly to force those who can afford it to go privately. Not only that – those wicked managers are hoping that many others will tidy themselves off the waiting list by dying before they finally get an op date. With breathtaking hypocrisy, the government piles in with expressions of horror, completely ignoring the reason why PCT’s are so desperate to save money. It’s a shame PCTs are so strapped for cash that they can’t treat CCP members to the same corporate entertainment package that lobbyists from the private healthcare industry recently did, according to a report in The Guardian. It was obviously be money well spent.

What the government also fails to acknowledge, is that this was always the plan – i.e. to force NHS waiting lists to increase so that the private sector is able to ride in and save the day – patients will either pay privately, or demand an alternative provider. And this is before the Health and Social Care Bill has even become law.

Deprived areas in England will ‘lose out’ in NHS reforms – UK Politics, UK – The Independent

Deprived areas in England will lose out to affluent parts of the country under health spending reforms, Labour has claimed.

Changes to funding formulas means poor health rates will be given less consideration when cash is allocated, the party said.

It suggested areas like Manchester and the London borough of Tower Hamlets would lose out to parts of the wealthy south east, such as Surrey and Hampshire.

Labour based the claims on an assessment of funding reforms by public health bodies in Manchester.

 

27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

dizzy

Continue ReadingNHS news review

Yet more confirmation that Tony Blair is a lying, divorced-from-reality war-mongering little shit

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The Independent confirms that the interests of UK’s oil companies was central to Bliar & Co while they were publically lying and promoting some bullshit smokescreen about weapons of mass destruction, killing his own people – as if USUK wouldn’t do that – morality, etc.

Bliar denounced the cliams that oil was a major issue as an “oil conspiracy theory”. Who would believe that slimy, lying politicians conspire to promote corporate interests and their own wealth, eh?

Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq

By Paul Bignell

Over 1,000 documents were obtained under Freedom of Information over five years by the oil campaigner Greg Muttitt. They reveal that at least five meetings were held between civil servants, ministers and BP and Shell in late 2002.

The 20-year contracts signed in the wake of the invasion were the largest in the history of the oil industry. They covered half of Iraq’s reserves – 60 billion barrels of oil, bought up by companies such as BP and CNPC (China National Petroleum Company), whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403m ($658m) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.

Last week, Iraq raised its oil output to the highest level for almost decade, 2.7 million barrels a day – seen as especially important at the moment given the regional volatility and loss of Libyan output. Many opponents of the war suspected that one of Washington’s main ambitions in invading Iraq was to secure a cheap and plentiful source of oil.

Mr Muttitt, whose book Fuel on Fire is published next week, said: “Before the war, the Government went to great lengths to insist it had no interest in Iraq’s oil. These documents provide the evidence that give the lie to those claims.

“We see that oil was in fact one of the Government’s most important strategic considerations, and it secretly colluded with oil companies to give them access to that huge prize.”

Lady Symons, 59, later took up an advisory post with a UK merchant bank that cashed in on post-war Iraq reconstruction contracts. Last month she severed links as an unpaid adviser to Libya’s National Economic Development Board after Colonel Gaddafi started firing on protesters. Last night, BP and Shell declined to comment.

Not about oil? what they said before the invasion

* Foreign Office memorandum, 13 November 2002, following meeting with BP: “Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP are desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity to compete. The long-term potential is enormous…”

* Tony Blair, 6 February 2003: “Let me just deal with the oil thing because… the oil conspiracy theory is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it. The fact is that, if the oil that Iraq has were our concern, I mean we could probably cut a deal with Saddam tomorrow in relation to the oil. It’s not the oil that is the issue, it is the weapons…”

* BP, 12 March 2003: “We have no strategic interest in Iraq. If whoever comes to power wants Western involvement post the war, if there is a war, all we have ever said is that it should be on a level playing field. We are certainly not pushing for involvement.”

* Lord Browne, the then-BP chief executive, 12 March 2003: “It is not in my or BP’s opinion, a war about oil. Iraq is an important producer, but it must decide what to do with its patrimony and oil.”

* Shell, 12 March 2003, said reports that it had discussed oil opportunities with Downing Street were ‘highly inaccurate’, adding: “We have neither sought nor attended meetings with officials in the UK Government on the subject of Iraq. The subject has only come up during conversations during normal meetings we attend from time to time with officials… We have never asked for ‘contracts’.”

 

27/11/13 Having received a takedown notice from the Independent newspaper for a different posting, I have reviewed this article which links to an article at the Independent’s website in order to attempt to ensure conformance with copyright laws.

I consider this posting to comply with copyright laws since
a. Only a small portion of the original article has been quoted satisfying the fair use criteria, and / or
b. This posting satisfies the requirements of a derivative work.

Please be assured that this blog is a non-commercial blog (weblog) which does not feature advertising and has not ever produced any income.

dizzy

Continue ReadingYet more confirmation that Tony Blair is a lying, divorced-from-reality war-mongering little shit