Polishing Blair's Halo

Matthew Taylor on Tony Blair's admission about regime change in Iraq:

I was going to post about my former boss’s interview with Fern Britton. Tony Blair said that even if had not thought there were WMD he would still have tried to make a case for regime change in Iraq. Whatever we may think of this opinion, it is simply wrong to claim, as many commentators seem to, that this is the same as saying ‘I had decided to invade and made up the WMD threat as a pretext’.

Well, yes, it is. Some of us don't have problems understanding the English language since it is completely clear that this is exactly what Blair has admitted. Here is what he said:

"If you had known then that there were no WMDs, would you still have gone on?" Blair was asked. He replied: "I would still have thought it right to remove him [Saddam Hussein]".

Significantly, Blair added: "I mean obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."

Being politic in his choice of words he may have been, but the import is undeniable, especially when you take into account Blair's self-regarding opportunism and his reverential attitude to the sanctity of his own conscience.

Saddam had no WMDs; Blair and his advisers knew it; the Americans knew it and most of us knew it. It was perfectly obvious to many people (perhaps the majority) that even if Britain did not join in the Americans were going to invade Iraq whether they had justifiable reasons or UN resolutions or not.

For years now we have had to put up with this charade conducted by the politicians and the media that there were reliable justifications for the war. Blair lied and lied again about it and the lickspittles in parliament and the civil service gave their assent to this criminality.

It's sickening to watch the spectacle of a moral derelict such as Blair parading his self-justifications in public, being 'interviewed' by someone like Fern Britton (surely as rigorous as playing roly-poly with a Dulux puppy) when so many thousands of people have died and suffered as a result of his vanity.

BBC Impartiality? It's An Education, Whatever

BBC partiality - unprofessional behaviour

Fausty takes exception to the treatment of Dr Sheila Lawlor in this discussion about school places.

The presenter, Naughtie, typically skews the discussion by not going back to the underlying problem but carries on with the government schtick about punishing parents who cheat. Dr Lawlor, however, does go back to the fundamentals.

Taylor (CEO of the RSA, Fausty, not the Arts Council, though these people are all of the same cloth) spins the whole thing and doesn't address the problem at all, which is what you'd expect from a former political adviser.

Hats off to Dr Lawlor, who doesn't put up with this shite. I'm coming round to her view that government ought to butt out of more than a basic input into education. The more they interfere and micro-manage, the worse it gets.

Bastards To The Left, Bastards To The Right

Don't trust the Tories | Henry Porter | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Henry Porter makes a sensible point. After all, these people are all absolute shits.

I was particularly cheered by the fact that he also names people off-piste, as it were, such as Matthew Taylor, CEO of the Royal Society of Arts:

But any pleasure one feels at the party and leader's discomfort is tempered by a strong suspicion that the Conservatives will follow more or less the same path. The Sun's defection was proceeded by the smarter parasites from think-tanks like Demos, which is lifting its skirt in an indecent way at the Tory conference next week, and by people like Matthew Taylor, formerly of Blair's No 10 and now the RSA and the sinister Julian le Grand of the London School of Economics, also formerly of No 10, who of course suggested that the state should forcibly marry pregnant teenagers.

These characters long ago sensed the flow of power from one party to the other and have hopped like so many fleas on to the new host. The fact that someone like Le Grand is granted any kind of hearing at all the Conservative conference, even though a fringe event, is a rather bad sign.

Reading Matthew Taylor's blog posts recently had led me to the same conclusion.

None of these people is to be trusted. They all trim their sails to the winds of power. Older voices may call them Vicars of Bray. I wouldn't be so polite.

To Quango Or Not To Quango

Cameron says quangos to be more accountable under the Tories:

He said: "There is a lot of money to be saved, but more to the point, we want to make these more democratically accountable, so that people don't feel the rage and anger against the machine that they have no control over."

Mr Cameron's remarks were made as he announced that a Conservative government would cut the number of unelected quangos in "a massive shift in power from bureaucracy to democracy".

Shadow Cabinet ministers have been told to review every publicly-funded independent body within their briefs to determine which should be scrapped or slimmed down.

A list of quangos can be found at the Taxpayers' Alliance site.

On the other side of the divide (such as it is) Matthew Taylor comes up with a number of reasons to beware of 'quango bashing'. He ends

The big challenge for Government is to stop doing things or to do things massively more efficiently. Getting rid of quangos may or may not contribute. Still, neither major party is facing up to the scale of the public sector spending cuts and, as the Sunday Times correctly reported yesterday, despairing civil servants are taking matters in to their own hands. ‘Quango bashing’ is clever politics but, too often, lazy policy making.

He doesn't consider the possibility that many quangos may actually a total waste of time and money, for instance. If they are then they should be abolished, irrespective of how small the saving is.

Wrong Green Gurkha Bloggers In British Line Jobs

Gurkhas win the right to stay in UK. Where's the catch?

Keeping an eye on Matthew: Matthew Taylor is keen to organise political bloggers; he wants them to form a club with rules:

This goes towards strengthening the idea of the blogosphere as a place where people engage with other points of view and where writers develop their skills of argumentation and communication

There it is again, that automatic impulse to take control, to impose a vision, rather than allow people to exercise their own desires and get on with things.

British jobs for British workers: it just won't go away. Wildcat strikes were eventually called of at a number of British oil refineries after disputes over the employment of foreign workers.

The wrong green? A driver was arrested because police thought his MOT was the wrong type of green. No doubt they'll keep his fingerprints and photograph even though he is totally innocent of any crime.

It's More Than Expenses, You Fools

The political class, by and large, and the media continue to ignore the background to the public anger over expenses. I've already linked to John Redwood's point about it but it's worth doing so again.

The anger is a reaction to the increasing arrogance and bullying authoritarianism of politicians and the state. What becomes harder to bear each day is the nauseating spectacle of politicians with their self-appointed assumption of their entitlement to preach and govern (and get paid for it).

In this clip from Channel 4's discussion you'll note that the guy from Demos partly touches on this, but the point is not effectively understood. Matthew Taylor, as UK Libertarian Party says, defends 'hard working' MPs. But it's not enough:

I'm really tired of listening to all these political apologists who keep trying to defend MPs.

People like Matthew Taylor who on Channel 4 last night spouted a load of hot air about hard working politicians, pay cuts and system reform.

Excuses about hard work, etc don't cut mustard. But worst of all is blaming it on the 'system'. It is just plain nonsense.

It's a bit like Stalin blaming the famine on the ideology.

I can accept that many MPs do indeed work hard, but this plea about work is flawed.

Firstly, hard work is no guarantee of anything positive or useful. Plenty of people work hard, with nothing to show for it. The idea underlying this belief is a moral one - that hard work is of itself a virtue - something the idiot Brown keeps mouthing. It's not a virtue. Brown is an example. He works very hard indeed, but morally, he's a mephitic swamp.

Secondly, if we accept these MPs have been working very hard, then what we have we got to show for it? Well, among other things, a knackered economy and banking system, undemocratic government from the EU, a mess of an education system, chaotic health care, masses of form-filling, increasing prohibitions on this, that and the other, the transforming of the country into a huge state panopticon in which every detail of our lives is to be recorded, etc, etc.

It is only gradually dawning among some of the politicos that it is not the country that is 'broken' but the political class itself.

The Internet Is Part Of The Political Solution

The unofficial blog of the Libertarian party draws attention to a comment made by Matthew Taylor, when he was outgoing adviser to Tony Blair in 2006, about the internet 'fuelling a crisis of confidence in politics'.

The reader (all one of you) may recall I have mentioned Mr Taylor a couple of times before, in his role as CEO of the RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - though this description has been replaced on the website by the strapline 'Removing Barriers to Social Progress', which I don't think is exactly the same thing).

The article referred to can be read here. Matthew Taylor is a political insider and as such hasn't grasped the fact that there's a vertiginous chasm between people like himself and the rest of us.

His attitude is very much that 'we', ie he and similar-thinking folk, need to be guiding 'us' in the right way to do everything, including using the internet. Hence he opined that:

more needed to be done by the web community in general to encourage people to use the internet to "solve problems" rather than simply abuse politicians or make "incommensurate" demands on them.

Well thank you, Matthew, and fuck off. I think it's up to us to decide how we use the internet. We don't need lessons, lectures or encouragement. Certainly not from someone who was an adviser to one of the biggest shites in modern British politics (only exceeded in shiteness by the present incumbent of Number 10).

The internet is part of the problem for the political class because they don't control it. That's why, for the rest of us, it's part of the solution.

Matthew Waffle Taylor Waffle Spending Waffle Cuts Waffle

Over on his blog Matthew Taylor, CEO of the RSA, makes waffly sounds about the supposed savings made by cancelling such projects as the ID card scheme:

The costs of dropping a scheme could include money spent winding it down, compensation for cancelled contracts or redundancy payments. These costs are rarely counted in claimed savings.

He seems to saying that a) the amount saved by scrapping 'one-offs' is minuscule compared to the vast debt we're facing and that b) the saving may not be as large as people estimate.

Nothing at all, of course, about the unacceptable nature of the ID card system and its attendant 'one-offs', such as the National Identity Register, ContactPoint, etc.

But there again, Matthew apparently was 'in government' (I thought he was just an adviser to Tony Blair?) and knows about this stuff.