Bye Bye Blair

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vaz02

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Blair is to resign on the 27th of June , whats everyone's reaction to this ?

EDUCATION - Failed
NHS - Failed
LAW AND ORDER -Failed
 
LJT 02-05-2007 02:36 AM - said:
Blair really isn't in control of the country anymore, all the diplomatic meetings etc are being carried out by Gordon Brown, there is only one reason I can think why Blair is still remaining on.....he wants to sort out the Northern Ireland assembly, it is the only thing he can salvage that will be a good mark in history for him.

LJT nailed it - in this thread
 
I have friends in the UK who feel the same way about Blair as many feel about the Bushes in the US. They abhor him. They say he cares more about any other country and people than Britain. That's not fair, right or healthy. I hope he's out. Time for a change.
 
First time I think I have ever been quoted for something:wink:

Honestly, I think people are being a bit unfair to Blair if they make a direct comparison between him and Bush...for a start I believe Blair to be no where near as incompetent as Bush. Apart from the war in Iraq, idelogically they are very different people.

Honestly in the past 10 years I think we would have been far worse of if the Conservatives had continued in power......and if you want to see Blair's lasting impact, look no further that David Cameron the leader of the Conservatives, to make themselves electable they have had to create Blair lite....Blair has forced politics to the certain ground, which I find better than the extremes.
 
I want a real leadership contest for the next Labour party leader , they owe that to the public.

In a Prime Minster i want a real Nothern Man / Women who really cares about issues that effect the average joe working man or women.
I was hoping John Reid or some other senior labour party figures were to challange Brown but that doesnt look like its happening.
 
John Reid would be awful:no:

9 ministerial posts in 10 years......he has never hung around to do anything of consequence.
 
I've voted for Blair in all the General elections (i live in his constituency) and will miss him.Don't get me wrong,i know he's made mistakes and i totally agree Iraq has been a disaster but i'm in my mid-thirties so i can remember all to well the Tories in charge.15% interest rates,the treatment of the Miners,clause 28 (for those of you outside the U.K. this was an amendment to the local government act which would:-"not promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".I think he has been a brave leader by getting rid of the majority of Hereditory peers,Fox hunting and bringing in a minimum wage.Also the tories were against LIVE AID !!
 
^

EDUCATION EDUCATION EDUCATION

TOUGH ON CRIME AND TOUGH ON THE CAUSES OF CRIME

Do these phrases mean nothing to you ?:wink:
 
Crime levels have dropped overall, just I believe violent crime has increased.....which is the scarier figure the media like to latch onto.

He did focus on education an awful lot, it was a priority, he has just had mixed results with his policies.
 
LJT said:
Honestly, I think people are being a bit unfair to Blair if they make a direct comparison between him and Bush...for a start I believe Blair to be no where near as incompetent as Bush. Apart from the war in Iraq, idelogically they are very different people.

Honestly in the past 10 years I think we would have been far worse of if the Conservatives had continued in power......and if you want to see Blair's lasting impact, look no further that David Cameron the leader of the Conservatives, to make themselves electable they have had to create Blair lite....Blair has forced politics to the certain ground, which I find better than the extremes.



this is a good summation of my outsider perspective.

yes, Blair has made a mistake with Iraq, and what's worse, his endorsement gave the whole debacle an air of much needed legitimacy to the American public back in 2002/3 -- that October 2002 dossier got lots of attention over here -- so he was ultimately the prime enabler of what has turned out to be a calamity.

from afar, i always admired Blair's political skills -- i always enjoyed Question Time, which i'd sometimes catch at odd hours on C-Span -- and he did seem to be, at the beginning, the Way Forward (or whatever the phrase was). he came across as smart and sincere, but i can see how, if you live with that every day for 10 years, it starts to come across as quite hollow.

Britain seems, on the whole, to be a very vibrant, multicultural place these days, and London has probably surpassed New York as the de facto "global capital," not necessarily in influence, but in its wildly diverse reflection of the world-as-it-is. whether that has anything to do with Blair directly, i don't know, but i don't think it was true 10 years ago.
 
I use 'Honestly...' too much, plus the spelling was quite bad in that post:reject:

I think London has overtaken New York recently as the finance capital of the world.

Iraq was wrong but I don't think I have ever doubted his sincerity in what he believed to be right. I thought the speach he gave yesterday was quite good and a fair summation of his premiership.

Foreign policy has been his failing but I don't think on the whole...he had everyone with him through Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan...Iraq was where he failed, but I don't think a different prime minister would have did anything other than back the US:shrug:
 
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LJT said:
I think London has overtaken New York recently as the finance capital of the world.



i've heard this too, and i think New York is in the midst of quite a bit of self-flaggelation, but the fact is that London is more geographically central to the rest of the world than New York is, so this might be the future.



[q]Iraq was wrong but I don't think I have ever doubted his sincerity in what he believed to be right. I thought the speach he gave yesterday was quite good and a fair summation of his premiership.[/q]

while i don't doubt his sincerity -- though i'm sure the more cynical might -- a good politician needs to realize that intentions are nothing; it's only results that matter. you have to be as good as you think you are, it's not enough to have simply tried to do the righ thing, and more self-reflection and self-criticism might have changed things. now, it's 4 years too late. we can't improve our judgement of his leadership simply because he says he tried his best and struggled to do the right thing

at least he has the capacity for such thinking, though. Bush certainly isn't equipped with the faculties for anything approaching self-examination.
 
^ID cards are stupid and costly, I have no issues with CCTV though:shrug:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions....results as you say are what matters...and sadly it is probably better to have someone who doesn't believe they are doing the right thing, but who is better at managing it.

I think most politicians need to take a management course or something similar, it might save us the people a lot of headaches. If Bush and Blair were heads of any large corporation, they would have had to step down after a debacle like Iraq.
 
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I'm obviously in a minority of people when i say that i really like Tony Blair and i think he's been a brilliant PM for us :up:



Sorry Carek, i don't agree with your friends views on him at all really!
 
I'd take 10 years of Blair over 8 years of Bush anyday.




Here's to hoping I get to see him on the lecture circuit :wink: My friends are convinced I'll become a Tony Blair groupie whenever he tours around the US. I do have an "I :heart: Tony Blair" t-shirt...:shifty:


Anyway, he was far from perfect...but he was a great politician. I plan to study a lot of what he did and learn from him. I wonder what we would be saying about him if he hadn't been so gung-ho about Iraq.
 
I'll be interested to see how history looks upon him. I don't know...I disagree with him whole heartedly on Iraq, but from an American perspective looking at how things are going in Britain I still really respect him.
 
U2democrat said:
...I disagree with him whole heartedly on Iraq, but from an American perspective looking at how things are going in Britain I still really respect him.

How do you perceive things as going in Britain?
 
A heck of a lot better than the way things are going here. A thriving economy (the pound is almost twice the dollar), embracing multiculturalism, better healthcare, and less crime.


Let me put it this way: Tony Blair has a knack for winning elections, with the exception of this last one (which could have been worse). I want to study this and adapt it to politics in the US.
 
I have to say Tony Blair was one of the main reasons I had doubt about whether going into Iraq was a mistake. He really helped the Bush administration's faulty position. I had had so much respect for him due to his international work, especially helping Albanian Muslims in Kosovo. He was willing to go much farther than Clinton, who didn't want to send in ground forces in order to keep US casualities low. Blair just seemed to care more and he really won me over when arguing that the legal status of state sovereignty shouldn't permit abuse of peoples within that state's borders -- that there was such a thing as universal rights we had to protect.

After 9/11, Blair really let the free world down. I really don't understand why he did it. Was it stubbornness or unwillingness to make mistakes? Does he still believe in his simplistic division of the world into good and evil, rather than regular people facing hardship or negative cultural influences becoming more easily seduced by violence and cruelty? I expected more from him. I hope he lives the rest of his life in shame and misery because he has really hurt our future, and has shown no willingness to stop Bush and his administration's hierarchcal approach to the world. Same for Colin Powell.
 
Actually I've been very lucky and very blessed and this country is a blessed nation. The British are special. The world knows it...

Yes, Tone of-course they do. Of-course they do...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1261151,00.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6108302.stm http://english.people.com.cn/200602/28/eng20060228_246586.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/10/ncancer10.xml
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1222223.ece
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/retirement/article.html?in_article_id=416221&in_page_id=6

...In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth
Obviously we know it Tone...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6210358.stm




To be honest I really don't know how I feel about Blair's Premiership now that he is finally going. I suppose a lot will depend on how successful Gordon Brown is as his successor. I guess he's just like all the other British Prime Ministers really isn't he? He's had his successes, he's had his failures and he's had his deranged melomaniac moments. :shrug:

But we're all forgetting the true loss to British politics:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VRQDnGTcc4A&mode=related&search=

Goodbye Prezza and your chipolata. :sad: You'll never get back into the Cabinet if Gordo's running it and British politics will never be as entertaining ever again :sad:
 
Muldfeld said:
I have to say Tony Blair was one of the main reasons I had doubt about whether going into Iraq was a mistake. He really helped the Bush administration's faulty position. I had had so much respect for him due to his international work, especially helping Albanian Muslims in Kosovo. He was willing to go much farther than Clinton, who didn't want to send in ground forces in order to keep US casualities low. Blair just seemed to care more and he really won me over when arguing that the legal status of state sovereignty shouldn't permit abuse of peoples within that state's borders -- that there was such a thing as universal rights we had to protect.

After 9/11, Blair really let the free world down. I really don't understand why he did it. Was it stubbornness or unwillingness to make mistakes? Does he still believe in his simplistic division of the world into good and evil, rather than regular people facing hardship or negative cultural influences becoming more easily seduced by violence and cruelty? I expected more from him. I hope he lives the rest of his life in shame and misery because he has really hurt our future, and has shown no willingness to stop Bush and his administration's hierarchcal approach to the world. Same for Colin Powell.
So you support a liberal internationalist position in the Balkans but that stops under Saddam; Saddam was responsible for state violence, genocide, annexation of neighbouring states and apparent refusal to disarm WMD - at least some of which don't fall under sovereignty.

At least somebody like financeguy is consistently opposed to such interventions because the arguments that get thrown out for or against Iraq are equally applicable to other interventions.
 
U2democrat said:
A heck of a lot better than the way things are going here. A thriving economy (the pound is almost twice the dollar), embracing multiculturalism, better healthcare, and less crime.



Crime has become worse under Blair.
 
TheQuiet1 said:



But we're all forgetting the true loss to British politics:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=VRQDnGTcc4A&mode=related&search=

Goodbye Prezza and your chipolata. :sad: You'll never get back into the Cabinet if Gordo's running it and British politics will never be as entertaining ever again :sad:

Who could forget that although if the Conservatives get in next time I think Boris Johnson could give Prezza a run for his money in the entertainment stakes.

I've got mixed feelings about Blair. I think some things have improved during his leadership (mainly the economy) but they haven't lived up to most of the expectations made in 1997, (although which party ever has done?) and there's been too much style and spin over substance. That said if someone had said 20 years ago when Maggie was at her height that Labour would go on to lead the country for over 10 years with the results they've had, noone would have believed it possible so he's been effective at turning the party around and making Labour credible. I always think it was a real shame though that Blair's predecessor John Smith died of a heart attack as I think he would have made a really good PM.

Blair will be remembered for the war in Iraq as much as anything although if the Conservatives had been in power after 9/11 I bet they would have supported Bush and wouldn't have managed it any better.

As for crime, I don't think you can generalize that it's got worse. Certain types may have done such as muggings but I thought other crimes such as house robberies, car theft etc had been reduced in the last 10 years :shrug:
 
U2democrat said:
A heck of a lot better than the way things are going here. A thriving economy (the pound is almost twice the dollar)


That's pretty much always been the case and has nothing to do with Blair. The Brits keep their pound artificially high. The fact the disparity is now greater is a reflection on the US dollar going down, not on Blair enacting some marvelous economic reforms.


embracing multiculturalism,

LOL!

better healthcare,

What has Blair personally done in this regard?

Blair was a great politician and not a great Prime Minister, IMO. He has been able to create the perception that things are better, but concretely speaking, what exactly did he do to improve the situation domestically? He did a great job with Northern Ireland - that's pretty much the only thing that obviously stands out.
 
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