I have a guilty political secret. I do not detest Gordon Brown. That is such an unfashionable opinion that I don’t really expect any comments at all to agree with it. And yes, I do realise that he went along with the Iraq War and all the other horrors of the Blair era. Interestingly, I don’t remember the question of what Gordon Brown really thought about Iraq ever being discussed; he deserves condemnation for having not tried to stop it, and perhaps he was indeed an enthusiast. And I am well aware that the Private Finance Initiative is a terrible disaster, and that he oversaw creeping privatisation in the health services, and – worst of all – the introduction of tuition fees.
And yet I cannot dislike him. Probably because I just know too many people who have known him through decades, who are themselves good people, and who like him. Around Edinburgh and Fife you will find it hard to find people who actually know him who share the hatred and contempt he seems to arouse among the political and media classes of London.
As a general rule I do not like or dislike people according to their politics, but rather according to the sincerity of their political beliefs and the goodwill with which they hold them. I am sure Anders Breivik is sincere in his political beliefs, but those are lacking in goodwill. Sincerity is not enough – humanity and inclusiveness are also important.
There are one nation Tories who seem to me perfectly decent people, genuinely trying to do good. I don’t hate them because their political conclusions on the best way to do good are different to mine. Gordon Brown I put rather in the same category – I feel he was trying to do good for ordinary people, he just got it wrong.
Blair is in a whole different category again – insincere, absolutely focused on attaining personal power, and with a Messianic belief that what is good for him must be good for the World. The Guardian is publishing some emails around the Blair Brown rivalry this week. I don’t care and won’t read them. But while I see Blair as quite properly damned for eternity to the seventh pit of hell, I don’t think Brown deserves anything worse than North Queensferry.
I have been in Ghana the last 20 days living in a house with no internet connection and working (extremely hard) in an office with virtually no internet connection – not enough to load WordPress. I hope to get more chance to blog shortly.
“If what you say is what you honestly believe in, who am I to judge you?”
Just to clarify Daniel, I’m not asking or expecting you to judge my sincerity, neither am I judging Craig’s sincerity, rather I’m judging on both the rational & moral level, that with which he is being sincere about.
Oops ! Way past my bedtime, so that my last post for tonight/morning, goodnight one & all !
I can’t believe how off topic the comments are. Surely the issue is nominating a precinct of Queensferry as a way station to Hell?
I can just hear the strategy sessions at hasbara HQ: “Whining, that’s what we need – that will arouse all the antisemites! You know how antisemites hate whiners!”
You’ve got to be joking. Is this a xmas card list article or is brown coming out for yes?
I remember the loss of the labour party to the workers. The runaway excesses of the financial services. And of course as you even acknowledge, brown, as the second most powerful politician in the uk, kept stum throughout the iraq war. But that’s ok because you have some pals who are his pal and he’s not as bad as blair.
I definitely do not agree with you Craig. Perhaps money wasn’t Brown’s prime mover but there definitely were Messianic similarities to Blair. He saved the world remember from economic ruin.Supported every war.His economic acumen was maxing someone elses Credit Card out for popularity.
People in Kirkcaldy still like him, because he filled the yard at Rosyth for 10 years and he supports Raith Rovers.If a monkey wore a Labour rosette in Kdy, he’d be elected too.
His speeches were constantly peppered with ” New World Order” references.No idea what their heads are filled with at Bilderberg meetings , but GB was a true disciple of handing real Govt. to the faceless few.
The world is better off without him, and North Queensferry would be too.
I think he went along with the Iraq War not just because he would have been out of government if he hadn’t, but also because it was believed at the time by those in government that it would be “successful.” Apparently Brown was concerned about Blair being able to wallow in the victory!
Brown may lack the polished delusion hypocrisy of Blair, but he ended up as a failed Machiavellian politician peddling authoritarianism, the virtues of capitalism and a foul version of British chauvinism.
My guess is that Blair got out because his financial mates had told him the shit was inevitably going to hit the fan*. Brown was dropped right in it. Was Brown flawed? Sure. Who isn’t, in some way? And did he have any autonomy at all, at the end of the day? Agree with Craig.
*Note that sense of dedication to the national interest for which Blair is justly unknown…
Are we talking about Brown because the media is?
Are blogs steering themselves? by their amplification of MSM issues, in many times decided on long before they go to print? or are they thinking for themselves.
Craig does not seem to have noticed that three super power navies are facing each other in the eastern Med. and that a single gulf of Tonkin exercise could set off a chain of ‘mishaps’?
Gordon Brown, in 17 auctions, sold 398tons of gold at a throw away price and he did not make much fuss when in 2006 the financial regulations bill was wiped off the agenda, because Blair thought its really not necessary.
I think that both of these steps make him a party political hand raiser who can be ruthless, to his own party and believes, as Phil pointed out, as well as in ignorance to that of a wider public, remember, 2 million of us spent a day telling him so marching against the Iraq war.
I can’t warm to any of the party politicians anymore and prefer a random selection process of representatives, no need for an ineffective and useless electoral commission, no need for voting at all, or election expenses, doorstep lies, media hypes and dependent propaganda from the BBc, or pumped up appearances of x or y leader, just a hat full of NI numbers and a blindfold.
And even the German voting system, complicated but fair, is too expensive, favouring large parties that poll over 5%, but nevertheless a dream compared to FPTP, AV,or AV plus.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-election-system-explained-a-923243.html
Are blogs steering themselves? by their amplification of MSM issues, in many times decided on long before they go to print? or are they thinking for themselves.
Good point. Agree.
Only slightly O/T:
Blair claims not to be offshore.
Someone registered two companies – Windrush Ltd and Firerush Ltd – in Gibraltar in Sept 2010. The details are held by Gibraltar Companies House.
These nowhere appear in the rather patchy accounts of Blair’s complex financial structure, which contains at least ten UK companies in two functional groups, Windrush and Firerush. There is no UK Windrush/Firerush Ltd – where named, the companies are W/F Ventures Ltd/LP/LLP. The name Firerush is unique to Blair’s consortium. Blair’s non W/F companies are nominee shells, staffed by Bircham Dyson Bell staff/nominees. BDB specialises in nominee accounts.
Gibraltar has a flat tax rate of 10%.
I find this interesting. Neither the Guardian nor the Mail does.
“*Note that sense of dedication to the national interest for which Blair is justly unknown…”
Did Brown really think that attacking Iraq was in our best national interest ? Was he unaware of either the bogus “debate” when the decision had already been made long before, or of the fraudulent “sexing-up” the case for war ?
Does Craig post provocatively to stimulate debate?
Doon with the Broons!
http://www.tomandnev.co.uk/comicscripts.htm
Brown as an avowed Zionist presumably approves of this daily horror endured by the Palestinians and B.Liar as the risible Quartet Representative presides over it.
Wednesday 18 September 2013
Israeli Army prevents families (made homeless by its destruction of their homes) from erecting tents donated by the International Red Cross
Gaza incursion: Israeli Army bulldozes crops
Israeli Army position opens fire on Gaza refugee camp farmland
Israeli forces, firing stun and tear gas grenades at schoolchildren, seize and hold 12-year-old boy
Israeli Army orders resident to destroy his own home
Night peace disruption and/or home invasions in 3 villages
2 attacks – 10 raids including home invasions
3 acts of agricultural/economic sabotage
6 taken prisoner – 9 detained – 105 restrictions of movement
http://palestine.org.nz/phrc/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1716&Itemid=43
This too from Defence for Children International about one of the Daddies taken from his family. A story repeated thousands of times. Terrible.
http://www.dci-palestine.org/documents/short-film-about-zeina
Did Brown really think that attacking Iraq was in our best national interest ? Was he unaware of either the bogus “debate” when the decision had already been made long before, or of the fraudulent “sexing-up” the case for war ?
I have no idea. He didn’t share with me. And I didn’t say he did. But he’s not a technical specialist, and like 412 other MP’S, took the crap intelligence he was being served to be genuine caviar. Probably encouraged by Blair working overtime in the bullshit department. Y’know (TM) Gordon, think of the benefit to the Exchequer of those lucrative oil contracts when it’s all over by Christmas?…..
The results of judging these two buggers for their personal or political morals, truthfulness or effectiveness as national leaders will always be partial. Over their lives and careers (so far), the record of each has, on different issues, made me feel admiration and sympathy as well as anger, contempt and despair. Let’s reserve hatred for what people have done (or failed to do) and leave it to God and history to judge them as individuals (including as spouses, parents and friends). However different Gods and perspectives will always assign them shifting places in schemas like Dante’s. (Some might regard North Queensferry as Purgatory but for devotees of the Forth Bridge, it’s close to Paradise.)
The most instructive way to compare them is as politicians and as Labour party colleagues. Think what their government could have achieved if it had been able to combine Brown’s determination to improve the lives of the downtrodden and disadvantaged and his attention to fiscal detail with Blair’s ability to sense the public mood and use it to political advantage; and to persuade colleagues not to become bogged down by the weight of inherited dogma. Think, then, of the short-term successes they were able to achieve despite their personal chemistry (at times catalytic, more often toxic): electoral victories, minimum wage, devolution, low inflation and unemployment, a settlement in Northern Ireland. But think, next, of the opportunities missed: to create greater social cohesion; to tackle the structural weakness in providing public services, especially health, welfare and education; to find a safe pathway through the minefields of immigration and climate change; to reform the Constitution; to move decisively away from traditional myths in our relations with Europe, the USA and the Commonwealth.
They were, in their way, political giants. We’ll never have politicians without flaws – but can we please have ones without such big ones?
Despite the claim that Hague is capable of doing any good at all, an interesting article:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100236865/tony-blair-nearly-destroyed-the-foreign-office-william-hague-is-rebuilding-it/
Does this fit with your experience, Craig?
I like Brown. Always have. I think he is sincere, and sincerely wanted to do good things, but that he was fundamentally wrong about the means of achieving good things. Essentially, I think the means make the end, and so his infatuation with neoliberalism and the idea that private entrepreneurs could be harnessed via their greed to serve the greater good could only end in disaster. I think my tendency to take his side is more because he was so horrifically demonised by Bliarites, who had the cheek to accuse him of “psychological failings”. Well, we all have them. But to lambast Brown for his while ignoring Bliar’s blatant messiah complex and total dishonesty just takes the biscuit. The after effects are hobbling Miliband and turning him into a nonentity. If only we had New Zealand’s Cunliffe, who is an out social democrat who wants New Zealand to occupy the moral highground occupied by the Nordic countries in the Northern Hemisphere (though Norway’s disgraceful U turn on immigration and their social fund this week suggests the moral highground will soon be vacant). I will also always like Brown for calling a bigot a bigot, instead of ignoring the racism currently being courted by mainstream parties as they seek to ostracise and persecute immigrants in the name of the “traditional working class”. I’m traditional working class. Assuming I am also a racist disguising my bigotry as an objection to immigrants taking “British jobs” insults me. Brown may have been browbeaten by spin doctors into coining that repellent phrase, but I won’t be. I still know that, under the political-reptilian skin, he is as disgusted as I am by the BNP/UKIP tendency.
I have to say that I have personal and family contacts in Kirkcaldy in the sixties and I was aware of GB (although I had no contact with him ). My brother met him and plenty of people I knew moved in the same social circles. I have a very clear idea of the GB social and formative influences of his early life.
I also remember well his early career and his campaign to become a (post graduate) student rector of Edinburgh University, rather a novel idea at the time-when it was customary for a well known wag, clown or personality to be elected, supported by a group of goofing students with funny hats.
I also remember the kinds of political circles he inhabited then and the speeches he made-some of them still on record. The curiosity of these is that they are so distant in tone and content from anything he did subsequently, and it is very difficult to not think that he was involved in a game, both of words and ideas that, regardless of the vehemence and apparent logic of his previous comments, now, with hindsight, reveal no connection to a deeper sincerity.
It is perfectly palpable now that he was on a quest of self-aggrandisement. It seems painfully clear now that his aim was history and his fantasy was that young people like him, in later generations would read his name in the history books to come.
Re-constructing him and his motivations and previous thoughts is possibly chancy-and why hold people to account for their early life ideas and actions and hold them to standards when context is so important.
However there are clues. Sincerity is important. It is sometimes impossible to maintain some degree of consistency as circumstances change, however it is essential that someone such as Brown shows the logic of the progression of his ideas. Somehow he managed to go from leftist firebrand and speechifier to Brigth young thing within Labour, to deep thinker, to protector of the left agenda in a Labour party that had compromised nearly all its principles ‘to make it electable’. nulabour was exactly that. An unprincipled quest for electoral success, exploiting the tribal affiliations of generations, publicly appealing to such people in terms they approved of while privately an entirely different dialogue was going on.
Some clues. Some years ago I listened to Brown waxing lyrically about his love of Raith Rovers as a child.attending the Starks park. However there was something that realy just did not ring true. Brown attended a school where football was simply not played. Rugby was the sport and Brown did indeed play rugby. The atttitude to football was that it was played by junior secondaries. It seems highly improbable, knowing what i know of the culture of his social cohort at that time, that he was sneaking away to watch Raith Rovers instead of heading off to watch Kirkcaldy senior rugby club
( it was a decent team then) at Beveridge park. That is where his friends would have gone.
There is also the basic reality that Starks park-like most football grounds of the time, were less than salubrious. Beaten earth terraces. People pissing where they stood( on the people in front), drunkenness, bottles flying, fighting.
Certainly, I, with parents with much less of a social position to maintain (a minister was a figure of some social importance in (smallish) town Scotland of the time), would have had something to say if I had wanted to go to Starks park
( and that was when I lived two doors away from the Raith Trainer, who was friend of my dad. It was dangerous, unpleasant and socially questionable.
I could not imagine his going regularly to watch on saturday afternoons. Simply unbelievable in a well ordered genteel manse of the time, where the priority was sober reflection and academic excellence. GB almost certainly spent some of his saturdays doing his homework-his sunday was very much ‘the church’ and family commitments to that.
When i heard him fabricate this world on television – his deep connection to the working classes, his connection to that great working class pursuit-football- I knew he was lying and dissembling.
He was simply creating a myth that would meet with some approval or build credibility within the ‘nulabour party, that, having abandoned all principle to socialism and commitment to the ‘working class’ , had a great need to create a compensatory attachment to the signs of down to earth working class life, football being one of those ‘signs’. So we had a succession of Nulabour figures falling over themselves to reveal their tribal connection and deep love of, some less than successful minor footie team. It was necessary to attach t some small club as by then, ‘big ‘ football had long since passed over to the big players in the entertainment/media world-such as Murdoch.
The contradictions here are massive.
I remember very well Brown’s early speeches and writings on global strategy and colonialism and imperialism and the nature of exploitative capitalism. There can be not the slightest doubt that Brown has a deep, exceptional, understanding of historical events and movements related to the current world and has a close detailed understanding of the processes that lead to such evens as the election of GW Bush ad his drive to war. He will have been completely aware of the deeper background of these events.
What we have to realise is that the great contradiction of power is exactly the one that Brown reveals so well due to his inherent personal weakness and insincerity. It is somehow-for everyone- a moral matter- and choices are deeply revealing. ( Obama’s feebleness and role as a mouthpiece has recently been revealed over Syria).
Brown made an announcement very soon after much of the Blair +Blair cabinet decision making had been made to go to war. Brown announced he would make some billions of cash available from the contingency fund for the purpose of waging the war. Despite his knowledge and deeper understanding of ‘events’ and full awareness of contradictory analyses that predicted accurately the outcome, he was able to endorse the project fully. Despite ample opportunity he has never once expressed regret, regardless of the overwhelming evidence that the war was ill-conceived, fraudulently evidenced, catastrophically executed and profoundly illegal. He has at all times remained a stalwart cover for Blair, despite the appearance that they are in some kind of ‘opposition’. that factional fighting is actually simply further evidence of his failings-to indulge in that petty performance for power simply confirms the nature of the man. Why would anyone indulge themselves in tis way-when the reality is that behind that internal factionalism and point scoring, are decisions that afflict millions.
I could talk about the PFI disgrace. I could talk about the ‘election’ fiasco in his first year of power when he misunderstood a matter of principle for a matter of strategy.
That is the summation of the person. He is, behind that manse derived presbyterian propriety , and his no doubt, private urbanity erudition, a very weak man, who is a moral failure at every level who has sought power for the simple sake of it, and, unhappily for him-was successful in his fantasy.
Some might regard North Queensferry as Purgatory but for devotees of the Forth Bridge, it’s close to Paradise.
Just got a mental picture of approaching North Q from the Fife side, and seeing the hills across the Forth dusted with snow. Shit, why did I LEAVE? *sob*
O/T Is the civil war and the fighting petering out? If so, praise be.
Breaking News BBC
Rebels agree truce in Syrian town New
After days of fighting, two rebel groups, the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, agree a ceasefire in the town of Azaz.
Hope you are right Mary, it is a pre condition for the Russian plan to work.
What seems vital is that this lull is not being used by chemical Prince Bandar and his CIA compliants to re-arm the various factions.
Further, the vast fire power assembled in the Med. a potential flashpoint in its own right, should be dispersing, ship for ship, tit for tat, their omni presence and stand off will get tedious after a while, boredom sets in and ideas of ‘what happens if’ come to mind.
Breakthrough in US/Iranian relation?
“ranian President Hassan Rouhani’s comments that his government would never develop nuclear weapons were welcomed by US Secretary of State John Kerry with the caveat that “everything needs to be put to the test”, and lauded by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the pledge was an attempt to deceive the world. LINK.
OK, shelve it.
@ Jon.
They want your scalp. I’ve got your back.
Good summary and analysis there Deep Green. Glad you mentioned the PFI construct which, from small beginnings under Major, went big time under his and Blair’s watch. How many hundreds of £millions are we in debt for hospitals and schools alone? Yet it continues under the ConDems. Surrey CC have given a PFI contract to Skanska to replace and maintain all the county’s street lighting. Just one small example.
Anyway I have both Blair and Brown down as power hungry types with psychopathic tendencies.
Glad we don’t have to see that jaw grimace of Brown’s and his left hand squaring up his papers, both of which mannerisms used to really annoy me.
Lets hope so Mary.
Deepgreenpuddock
Very insightful Info in all that,
It would seem by you’re thoughts – that Brown was an international expert, on the whole shebang machinery, almost up there with the likes of Pilger, and Chomsky, if that is true, Oh Deary me, and Wtf
FYI.
Blair’s bunker: leaked emails reveal real story of rows, abuse and threats.
How Tony Blair’s team fought and failed to see-off Gordon Brown’s coup.
“Syria”
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG738.pdf
“Special Report: Syria intervention plans fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concerns”
http://www.nafeezahmed.com/
Daniel: “@ Jon.
They want your scalp. I’ve got your back.”
That’s not what this is about. This is what is at stake here:
“Blog Information
This excellent blog from a former ambassador is worth a visit,regardless of which end of the political spectrum you come from.
Filled with revealing information about any number of things, Craig’s contacts in the government and security services give him access to data other bloggers can only dream of.
It looks good, and we enjoyed the clear, easy-to-read writing style. All in all, an excellent blog.”
extract from: http://www.politics.co.uk/reference/craig-murray
Keep it simple, but not that simple.
Brilliant and informative post at 9:59am today, Deepgreenpuddock, thanks. It could be written up into an article and published somewhere.
Craig/Jon:
Let’s ask the Margaret_Brennan_question: Is there anything that Habbabkuk can do for the silencing “ban” to be rescinded?
Second Suhayl. Thnaks for your insights Deepgreenpuddock. Very thought-provoking about the phenomena of human failings and the dynamics of power.