Very good of you, Craig, I’m sure it will be of great utility to those concerned to ensure that the great man suffer no inconvenience.

Nobody expects the Spanish Extradition !

(Sigh. Wishful thinking, eh ?)

Or he can walk through the front door and tell idiots like you to get lost and stop whingeing.

So personal. Have we met ?

At least the hundreds of thousands of people whose deaths he caused in Iraq are very quiet now. Not a whinge from them.

Sorry, that was me replying to Eddie.

Craig, so were you just about to pretend to be Eddie?

“That seems pretty likely. A strong detachment armed with buckets of blood should watch that route.”

Why the weasel words, Craig? Do you want a “strong detachment” to be there or not?

What I’d like to know is why Eddie and Larry were in favour of the war on Iraq, and indeed still in favour of it.

What benefit was it to them?

Or do they just get their jollies watching thousands being slaughtered on Sky?

Because I do not want any physical harm to come to him, I would recommend that he adopts female Muslim dress complete with Burka, as do all his security guards

http://operationitch.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/burka.jpg

Tony

I don’t hold out any great hopes of the Blair criminal and his ilk being held to account.

They can only be held to account by other more powerful entities than the western alliance, or internally by the citizenry.

There are no more powerful entities than the western alliance and the internal citizenry are easily manipulated by more powerful internal forces, which have grown even more powerful under the Blair/Brown regime.

I well remember, years ago, Roy Jenkins remarking that Blair wasn’t very clever. I thought that a strange thing to say at the time, especially since Roy was something of a mentor in the earlier Blair years.

Maybe Roy just spotted something darker. He certainly had a dark expression on his face as he said it.

My idiot comment was to Craig, not Richard. Craig, I seriously think that you must be having another of your turns, what with this and the item above and your constant reference to “war criminals” – are you right in the head? This stuff is all a bit beneath you – I thought you were a more serious commentator.

As it’s all a well rehearsed show I expect him to arrive as a prima donna and exit as one.

“My idiot comment was to Craig, not Richard”.

I realised that just after I posted. You thought it was going to be the first followup ?

Could I ask, what would your idea of ‘serious’ look like ? I haven’t seen anything from you here that didn’t appear completely frivolous.

It’s quite interesting to note that three out of the five panel members are Privy Councillors. Two of them became members in 2009.

In the Lockerbie trial two of the three judges became members just before the start of the trial.

So does it mean that if you are member you bring in verdicts to please the Establishment/those that really rule the country?

If the following statement is true,

“The Privy Council allied with the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and the Cabinet and Cabinet Intelligence Unit which is the real control over the security and intelligence services are part of the secret permanent unaccountable Government.”

then the Chilcot Inquiry will in effect with three members against two make a judgment on itself.

IBC says 98,000 unless you have PROOF of alternative numbers? That is about 1 in 330. Perhaps someone should carry out a poll and ask the Iraqis if they think the pain and suffering to get rid of Saddam was worth it.

Oh, they have.

Look at these results (Q8) carefully. The main change is from those who feel the invasion was “somewhat right” to “somewhat wrong”. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but this is hardly conclusive proof backing your wild asertions. Regardless of what you think, how about stopping for a moment to ask what Iraqis think?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/13_03_09_iraqpollfeb2009.pdf

“Craig, I seriously think that you must be having another of your turns, what with this and the item above and your constant reference to “war criminals” – are you right in the head? This stuff is all a bit beneath you – I thought you were a more serious commentator.”

Perhaps because he’s starting to realize that EVERY SINGLE ONE of his supporters is a 911 conspiracy nut – or, as he put it, conspiraloon.

Interesting survey. The percentage of people who think the invasion was ‘absolutely right’ or ‘somewhat right’ has gone down, from 49% in 2004 to 42% in 2009. The percentage who think the invasion was ‘absolutely wrong’ or ‘somewhat wrong’ went up from 39% in 2004 to 56% in 2009.

Other than that, 72 percent believed that al-Zaidi, the journalist and shoe-thrower, was a hero (10 percent thought he was also a criminal, but still a hero).

IBC have said that it and the Lancet both agree that deaths ‘skyrocketed’ after the invasion. IBC is not a count of deaths; it is a count of reports of deaths in the media.

What point was being made?

Larry,

Craig wrote “sorry folks I just deleted the whole “truthers v conspiraloons” comment spat because I want to keep this one somewhere near its important topic.”

Whilst I may be wrong, I thought the people who he was referring to as “truthers” were the posters (who though they maybe wrong) were posting what they thought was the truth.

Logically, if true, this would mean that the conspiraloons was a reference to yourself and angrysoba.

Tony

IBC ? Lancet !

Lancet Lancet Lancet !!

Lancet ! !! !!!

Just because you didn’t respond last time this got dragged up a mere couple of days ago.

“How about stopping for a moment to ask what Iraqis think?”

Like Q8 in the pdf you link to, where a majority (56%) say the invasion was absolutely wrong ?

I don’t remember hearing Baha Mousa’s dad saying that, when the Beeb waved a microphone at him, that’s for sure.

Tony, no, no, angrysoba and I haven’t pushed any conspiracy – only you and your kind have done so. I think Craig must be quite embarrassed about this, as he doesn’t by into your crazy, thoroughly debunked “911 inside job” non-claims.

IBC 98,000 – Lancet 1 million plus. What the statisticians would call a significant variance,so someone is wrong. As I’ve said before, doctors meddling in politics is a recipe for disaster. The Lancet is not credible. Read the IBC website. their methodology is credible and realstic. It is not just media reports and you know it.

“IBC 98,000 – Lancet 1 million plus. What the statisticians would call a significant variance,so someone is wrong. As I’ve said before, doctors meddling in politics is a recipe for disaster. The Lancet is not credible. Read the IBC website. their methodology is credible and realstic.”

You are playing at false dichotomies. Because one methodology is credible, does not indicate that another isn’t.

As I said last time this was raised, my understanding is that they measured different things. Maybe you missed that bit ? Or do you disagree ? Why ? About how one tried to count ‘excess mortality’ and the other documented individual cases ? Do you really expect these 2 numbers to be the same ? Surely not ? So, why do you think they exclude each other ?

I don’t know, either, whether the people behind either of these studies, or any other studies, might have had political motivations, as you suggest.

Or whether it would be discreditable if they did, as you seem to imply (are you actually suggesting falsification ?) But the way you’re trying to treat it like a football match (“My team, right ! Your team, wrong !”) makes me suspect that you do.

Which is understandable, that people might want to deny the implications, because they’re horrible. And, of course, the excess mortality didn’t stop as soon as the Lancet team went home. But I do think it’s a mistake to give way to the temptation to pretend it’s not like that.

And of course, me not being a statistician, it might be that someone really has “disproved” it, I wouldn’t necessarily know. Certainly, lots of people claim that lots of other people have debunked it. All I can say for sure is that the claims I’ve seen so far had even less grip of logic than I do. And the last time I checked, the original authors appeared to have debunked their debunkers and not been redebunked at all; the “debunking” was 99% people repeating what they’d been told, rather than anything of their own work.

Shorter: I suspect bad faith, somewhere. It shouldn’t get a hearing because the numbers are incovenient.

Too long, sorry. I might just as well shorten it by deleting it all, it’s not going to make any difference.

Whatever he says and lies about does not matter, I would love to see his face coimng out of the Conference centre and there stands one allmighty huge guillotine.

Sadly i live near Norwich and have no access to such methods of disposing opf scoundrels and blue blooded bon viveurs.

This inquiry is becoming a farce and it is becoming increasingly untenable that the Chilcot team should get paid for mediocre acting in a this third rate production.

eddie,

As you seem to be totally obsessed by numbers and the credibility of doctors I have spoken with doctorsforiraq and they (the Iraq physicians) confirmed around 655,000 excess deaths from March 2003 to July 2006 and a further 318,000 excess deaths to July 2009. The original survey conducted was overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and the latest survey by Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

According to the survey results, Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people; in the post-invasion period it was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The difference between these rates was used to calculate “excess deaths.”

A similar study of excess infant mortality was conducted by Dr Gideon Polya in which he recorded the post-invasion Iraqi under-5 infant deaths total 0.6 million as determined from UN Population Division data. 90% of these under-5 infant deaths have been avoidable and are due to gross Occupier violation of the Geneva Conventions (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ).

Fuck the numbers! March 20, 2010 will mark the 7th anniversary of an illegal, utterly unjustified, war criminal invasion of Iraq by US, UK and Australian forces.

Polya has said, ‘post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths total 1.3 million and refugees total 4 million in a continuing Iraqi Holocaust and Genocide.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in the 1939-1945 World War 2 conflict (that commenced with the Nazi German invasion of Poland in September 1939), the defeated Germans adopted a post-war and post-Holocaust protocol that can be summarized by the acronym CAAAA (C4A), specifically Cessation of the killing, Acknowledgment of the crimes, Apology, Amends and Assertion “never again to anyone”.

Unfortunately, unlike the Nazi Germans, the pro-Zionist, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, imperialist war criminals of the US Alliance are comprehensively violating the 5-point CAAAA (C4A) protocol by continuing the war in Occupied Iraq; refusing to acknowledge the horrendous carnage; declining to apologize; refusing to make amends; and making it clear that they will continue and indeed expand war in Occupied Afghanistan and the North West Provinces of Pakistan.

Mark,

Ummm, something went wrong in your last para. I think you’ll find the Nazi Germans refused to apologise, continued the war etc too.

Yes – watch Downfall – highly impressive. I didn’t even notice it was all in German. If a film is any good you read the subtitles almost subliminaly

I was going to post about NAZI involvement in 9/11 but didn’t want to offend the Muslims, cos they think they did it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0

Tony

I’m amazed that studies into excess deaths due to war from the John Hopkins institute and the Lancet were fully accepted – when it was used to wage war in Kosova and Sierra Leone. But when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan, an even more conservative approach by the same institutions are suddenly left-wing propaganda which can be waved away.

Mark: you wrote “Iraq’s mortality rate in the year before the invasion was 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people” – but I wonder, what was the mortality rate before the medieval siege we imposed called “sanctions”? That genocidal policy concerning which Clinton’s M. Albright admitted had caused 1/2 million deaths of _children alone_ by 1995, was “a price worth paying” – so surely that sways the “normal” figure of the year before the invasion somewhat?

I’m still puzzled why enthusiastic supporters of the war like “wide stance” Larry etc. didn’t sign up to get on down there and bring peace ‘n freedom to the grateful masses, instead of stopping at home, beating off to war-porn for the entire duration.

“enthusiastic supporters of the war like “wide stance” Larry”

Glenn, why, if I call you out on your silly, immature conspiracy theories, must it mean that I ever supported any war?

Have you even seen how anti-war people treat you loons when you show up at their rallies?

Mark Golding, I am not obsessed with numbers, just the truth unlike you. Fuck the numbers indeed! Let’s just resort to hysteria and tantrums shall we?

From IBC’s website front page: “Data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents.”

I rest my case.

No you twit; they start from the media reports. Ring them tomorrow, or I will.

You obviously can’t read. It’s clear enough.

OK , eddie, my eyes are spinning. I’ll ring them tomorrow and get back to you.

In the meantime, goodness me:

“IBC’s documentary evidence is drawn from crosschecked media reports of violent events leading to the death of civilians, or of bodies being found, and is supplemented by the careful review and integration of hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures.”

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/about/

You will note that IBC’s ‘documentary evidence’ is supplemented by the hospital, morgue and NGO figures. Not the ‘media reports’, from which the documentary evidence is drawn.

As in, eddie, they read a newspaper report about a civilian being killed in Iraq, and then if possible they (? a very small staff, I think, at least originally) check with the local morgue. They don’t add a figure from a media report to their statistics, and then get a call from a Baghdad morgue reporting a death, and then add that too.

At least, in the interest of facts, one would hope not.

Would you really be so horrified to understand that a million people could have been killed in the invasion and its aftermath? Do you not know that according to UNHCR estimates, over 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003?

Eddie, really, of course, I hope you’re right, and that only 100,000 people have died as a result of the invasion. I mean, that puts it at acceptable levels. It’s only, say, Eastbourne.

Whatever, I think of the images from Fallujah, and Mark Golding’s website, and the poetry which has come out of Iraq, and I think, it’s not like that, is it? I do feel rather sorry (it’s relative) for Tony Blair, because I think he was isolated and ill advised. But then apparently he used to sack everyone who disagreed with him, so what can you do?

IBC admit that their figures may be a slight underestimate but on a scale of ten times less than the actual figure? Give me a break. They are the only people doing any serious work on the issue and they are a respected outfit, unlike those who attack them.

“Iraq Body Count (IBC) compiles data from news reports to provide a baseline number of confirmed fatalities, but it should be noted that many deaths will likely go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media. Further, IBC statistics refer solely to violent incidents which caused civilian deaths”

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/year-four/

Enough now.

“Logically, if true, this would mean that the conspiraloons was a reference to yourself and angrysoba.”

Tony, it is quite clear you are a conspiraloon.

The word now means what it ought to mean whatever Craig Murray meant it to mean.

The people who worry about the numbers are the people who want to cover up the prediction that an invasion of Saddam’s Iraq would create a blood bath, and the people who ignored the prediction of millions of their citizens, who signed for the war and who are now on popular trial.

The people who don’t worry about the numbers are the Iraqis because they know that the victims of war are martyrs, whose place in paradise is waiting for them and also the people who know that the US UK and Israel are no longer trusted in the world, and that their time is finished.

The US wanted to control the oil so that it’s Eastern competitors could not benefit from it, which they would have done under Saddam Hussein. The UK joined the war because one man refused to listen to all advice in pursuit of approval from the fanatical US religious Right. Zion wants to expand into Iraq. Jews prosper in law-abiding Muslim societies with strong religious mores, which is what Iraq will now become.

angrysoba,

I do realise that you and Larry maybe covert 9/11 Truthers, just trying to get detailed info out of people like me – by posting the opposite point of view…

But I have never been to a 9/11 Truth Meeting – whilst you freely admit that you have on your own web site…

What do you want me to say?

All the information is freely available if you look and can analyse the nonsense from the physics – and then go on to study the psychology

An old uncle of mine was such a successful forensic scientist that he was knighted.

My daughter is studying some of this for her course at University – and so far has achieved a FIRST

Tony

“I rest my case.” (eddie)

case ? *CASE* ? I have seen cases, and this is not one. This is a record with a stuck needle.

sigh. Another dying analogy, I suppose.

“All the information is freely available if you look and can analyse the nonsense from the physics – and then go on to study the psychology”

Indeed Tony, but what are you blathering about.

“An old uncle of mine was such a successful forensic scientist that he was knighted.

My daughter is studying some of this for her course at University – and so far has achieved a FIRST”

I once ate a piece of alligator in bread crumbs. Tasted a bit like chicken.

“I do realise that you and Larry maybe covert 9/11 Truthers, just trying to get detailed info out of people like me – by posting the opposite point of view…”

Of course, Tony. Nothing is ever simple (well, except Truthers who are by and large very simple).

“But I have never been to a 9/11 Truth Meeting – whilst you freely admit that you have on your own web site…”

I have no problem listening to what people have to say, but if someone sticks a tea cosy on their head and declares that they are Napoleon, emperor of France I tend to think that it isn’t simply a difference of opinion but that they are quite wrong and quite insane.

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/lancet100000/

We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording. It is no part of our practice, at least as far as our published totals are concerned, to make any prediction or projection about what the “unseen” number of deaths might have been.

But not at a level that is TEN TMES their count – i.e. the figure quoted by the Lancet and others (anywhere between 1.3 million and 2 million). That is just not feasible and you do not respond to the point. IBC is based on detailed work, the Lancet was pure speculation. I know that the figure will be closer to IBC than the Lancet and so do most serious commentators.

eddie, do you feel comfortable with the UN figures for the number of Iraqi deaths to 1999 as a result of sanctions? – that’s 1.7 million, including 500,000 or 600,000 children. Does that qualify for genocide?

Figures taken from ‘Behind the War on Terror’ by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. If you disagree with these figures, I suggest you refer to the book, where the pros and cons of the estimate are discussed at length.

eddie wrote: “at a level that is TEN TIMES their count – i.e. the figure quoted by the Lancet and others (anywhere between 1.3 million and 2 million). That is just not feasible”

Fog Of War; in a chaotic warzone, it is not at all unusual that only a small fraction of deaths would be securely documented as per IBC’s interests.

Without reference to the findings of proper mortality studies (such as those published by the Lancet, peer reviewed and professionaly produced at great expense and risk to a small army of trained researchers in war torn Iraq) -any discussion of the IBC’s relevance is PURE Speculation.

“But not at a level that is TEN TMES their count – i.e. the figure quoted by the Lancet and others (anywhere between 1.3 million and 2 million). That is just not feasible and you do not respond to the point. IBC is based on detailed work, the Lancet was pure speculation.”

eddie. They were trying to measure different things. You do not respond to this point.

Nor do you give good reasons (any at all, in fact) for your assertion that the John Hopkins study was pure speculation. How, if that is so, did it come to be published in a professional journal, do you suggest deliberate editorial malpractice ?

Small, sad point: eddie was attacking Craig for using the term ‘hundreds of thousands’ of deaths, I believe. To arrive at that figure you would not, as eddie continues to imply, have to multiply the IBC figures by ten. I presume eddie is using a factor of ten because John Sloboda’s already said he doesn’t believe IBC figures are that far out (for what it’s worth: I don’t know how much time he’s spent on the ground). Anyway, to arrive at a figure of hundreds of thousands, you would only need to double the IBC minimum baseline.

this is a CD with jam on it?

@hawley_jr – whether the effects of the invasion constitutes genocide is a tough question, in my view. Certainly if one looks at the numbers, then yes, it would qualify. But a genocide has to have specific intent to kill, and I don’t have the sense that Blair, Straw, even Bush *intended* to kill that many people. I just think they didn’t care whether people were killed, or believed in their own bunkum so deeply that they regarded the deaths as acceptable costs. I think therefore there are war crimes to answer for, but I am less certain about the charge of genocide. I think there has to be a high level of deliberateness, as in the cases of Rwanda or the Holocaust.

Still, heads of the UN Food Programme (Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck) quit humanitarian coordination in Iraq because they (I am paraphrasing here) “would not continue to look after a genocide masquerading as a food programme”. So, perhaps causing avoidable deaths in large numbers does qualify for the term.

@Jon: “Still, heads of the UN Food Programme (Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck) quit humanitarian coordination in Iraq because they (I am paraphrasing here) “would not continue to look after a genocide masquerading as a food programme”. So, perhaps causing avoidable deaths in large numbers does qualify for the term.”

Yes, apparently they were not alone. In agreement with them were (at the risk of inviting abuse from Larry) Scott Ritter as Chief UNSCOM Inspector in Iraq, the Pope and 53 US Catholic bishops.

The following info I posted previously on another thread, but I like it enough to post it again.

A panel of judges of the International War Crimes Tribunal, presided over by Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and consisting of many legal and human rights experts from around the world, in 1996 issued charges at the International Court on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security Council on Iraq.

The charge sheet includes:

3. The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction and violation of Article 54, Protection of Objects Indispensible to the Civilian Population, of Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Convention 1977.

Source: ‘Behind the War on Terror’ by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

I didn’t know all that, very interesting indeed. The sanctions were called ‘genocide’ by the Pope at the time? That would be quite remarkable, given how diplomatically the Vatican tries to treat certain hot topics.

Thanks for the book reference, I’ll get a copy.

@Eddie: so when you looked at the Labour party three or four years ago, Eddie, and decided to join, what was it that attracted you to them?

By the way, you’re not an MP. You don’t have to follow the whip, you know. You can express your own opinion. You can dissent from within the party.

Incidentally, I thought your jab about doctors meddling in politics was a little unfair, considering you’re (I think?) a bloody teacher doing just the same thing. And to less effect. In fact, people like Dr David Haplin (I am passing no verdict on him here) and the doctors behind the Lancet article are contributing far more to the political process than you are through your seemingly uncritical membership of a poltical party. No wonder they make you angry. Who do they think they are, hey?

I only know you from your posts on here, but you might want to temper your language and mature your argument, or you will only do a disservice to the party that (apparently) you spend your time and money supporting.

Hi Craig,

I agree with the article you picked up concerning Cadbury’s. Kraft are famous for what many would indeed call plastic cheese, while Cadbury’s with their Quaker origins are a high quality and socially reponsible company. It is sad that the discredited Royal Bank of Scotland are providing the finance to put this company in foreign hands. As a quaker I am disgusted at this turn of events. Keep Cadbury British they dont need to be taken over. Dont let Kraft destroy Cadburys as they did Terrys of York.

For what it’s worth, here’s a way of putting a bit of pressure on the trial to get something like a confession out of Blair: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/ask-blair-tough-questions-next-friday

It’s a war of aggression (war crime) that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians at least (another war crime) and has employed extradition, detention without trial and torture to obtain ‘intelligence’ (yet more war crimes!). You have to say that it’s a little bit iffy, eddie.

Rob

I’ve been a member of the party since about 1980 – I lived through the Thatcher years – 18 very bad years if you recall, and never thought I would see a Labour government. Perhaps you and others on here don’t remember those times and that may be why you have such a naive view of politics. I was involved in the miners’ strike and the awful election of 83 when Benn very nearly destroyed the Party. So to see a Labour government in 1997 was a great moment and I am proud, actually, of what has been achieved by Labour governments since then. The obsession with Iraq and 911 and all the other garbage that you and others on here appear to be pre-occupied with just leaves me cold. You need to get on with life in the real world. I am not a teacher although I do lecture part time. I honestly believe Halpin and people like him are dangerous, naive idiots. To me they have exactly the same status as the Webbs and GBS in the thirties who believed that the USSR was a workers’ paradise. Time will tell, but when the history books come to be written I believe that people like him will be exposed as the useful idiots.

Did GBS really believe that the USSR was ‘a worker’s paradise?’ Please supply quotes.

Hi Eddie,

I have at least partially got you mixed up with somebody else, it would appear. My apologies. I didn’t realise you’d been in the party for so long. You should talk about it more, it’s a wealth of experience and it would be interesting to hear your tales.

I too was very proud and happy when Labour won in 1997. But it’s been a journey of disillusionment for me since the Iraq war, to be honest. I wouldn’t say it was an obsession, although I think we’d both agree there is a great deal of obsession in evidence around these parts. But politically it has seized me more than a lot other issues. And in fairness, this site really is something of forum for discussion about the Iraq War, and the War on Terror, and the Afghan War, and foreign policy generally. Those issues are key areas of Craig’s blog. So to see plenty of comments on the Iraq War on here is kind of natural.

Anyway, I don’t see the Lancet survey as dangerous at all. I think it was apolitical research that followed a pre-set statistical methodology and just happened to come up with a very high extrapolated estimate, which exposes it to criticism that it WAS political. I wouldn’t impugn the motives of the doctors that did it. Apolitical research deserves apolitical criticism. The benefit of the doubt has to be given.

Did you ever go leafleting or anything? When was the last time? By the way, if you lecture I reckon you’ve at least spent some time on a council somewhere.

Do you miss Robin Cook much, or Mo Mowlam?

Rob

I was involved in Hackney and Camden LP in the eighties, during the ratecapping campaigns etc, fought against the SWP and Militant, lots of leafletting and canvassing during the 1983 campaign in particular (“the longest suicide note in history” campaign. I can rememebr Mao being quoted in Hackney Town Hall and Blair was one of the local secretaries. Read Ian Sinclair’s book, “Hackney a rose red empire” for a flavour of those times. I used to go up to Yorkshire during the miners’ strike and have them staying with us in London when they went out picketing and collecting money, went on lots of marches and riots with scargill etc. I used to go to meetings at County Hall when Livingstone was leader and saw at first hand as the party tore itself apart. Hence the joy in 1997 after Blair had made the party electable once more. We may well have a hung parliament but I am sure the party will renew itself in the long run. These things go in cycles. There is a vacuum which is there to be filled if people like you want to get involved. I will have to disagree about the Lancet.

Cook I liked, although he had an ego that outmatched his looks (not his fault, he was just an ugly man), Mowlam I liked too, although I am not sure she should have lied about her cancer if it was affecting her judgement in such an important job.

Other threads aside, this is a moving evocation in many ways, thanks.

I think I will take at that Sinclair book, cheers.