First Minister, the SNP's Alex Salmond
Britain's hard-line Dictators Exposed
Intrepid whistle-blower and the UK's ex-Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, today makes a searing indictment of Tony Blair's arrogance, ill manners and anti-democratic nature.
In 'Blair is no Democrat', Craig Murray illustrates how Blair's contemptuous refusal to congratulate Alex Salmond and the Scottish National Party (SNP) on its historic victory in becoming the (albeit minority) government of Scotland hides more than a tyrant.
Many, including myself, believe the SNP victory would have been much greater if Blair and his cronies in the Scottish Office hadn't sabotaged the recent election by ignoring the several warnings they were given by producing a complicated ballot paper. As a result of this (very likely deliberate) de facto rigging of the election as well as several other electoral improprieties, including missing postal votes, well over 142,000 of the electorate in a small country of under 5 million were effectively disenfranchised.
Many, including myself, believe the SNP victory would have been much greater if Blair and his cronies in the Scottish Office hadn't sabotaged the recent election by ignoring the several warnings they were given by producing a complicated ballot paper. As a result of this (very likely deliberate) de facto rigging of the election as well as several other electoral improprieties, including missing postal votes, well over 142,000 of the electorate in a small country of under 5 million were effectively disenfranchised.
Having first tried to frighten the Scottish electorate into not supporting the SNP, Blair's reaction since has been to maintain not only a cold silence but to avoid his own duties of governance by not inviting Scotland's new First Minister, Salmond, for a meeting.
"This," writes Craig Murray, "shows a profound contempt, not just for the SNP, but for Scotland and the Scottish Parliament. More than this, it shows a profound contempt for democracy. Blair is only in favour of it when it gives the "right" result - ie the one he wants. That has been evident in Iran and Palestine. It is now evident in Scotland."
"Blair and Brown are also showing just how unpleasant New Labour in Scotland have become. They still refuse to acknowledge that they lost Scotland after fifty years of dominance. Blair and Brown's failure to congratulate Alex Salmond on his victory is a denial of all the politenesses and decencies that are necessary to the smooth running of a democracy, and which are understood by democratic politicians everywhere. They are showing both their nastiness and their pettiness."
Nasty and petty they certainly are. Corrupt, venal and, we may add, a party responsible for a collective war crime for which their leader stubbornly refuses to accept responsibility.
And if the bad-tempered defensiveness of their media spokespeople is anything to go by, Blair's Nu Labor is a party desperately frightened that the hard lesson in Scotland may well augur something far worse for them in the future.
And if the bad-tempered defensiveness of their media spokespeople is anything to go by, Blair's Nu Labor is a party desperately frightened that the hard lesson in Scotland may well augur something far worse for them in the future.
It may well do. And if it does they will have no one to blame but themselves.
Far from being socialists, the Labour Party was built upon the foundations of reformism, ie. a hopelessly optimistic belief that it was possible to reform capitalism into a more benevolent creature. From the time of Roosevelt's New Deal through to Keynes and the concept of Welfare State capitalism it looked like the reformists could be right.
But all that was brutally ended with the Friedmanites and the monetarists who, under Thatcher and Reagan, began the wholesale dismantling of public ownership, the systematic destruction of public services and the handing-over of national assets at knock-down prices to private market forces.
The ruthless, cold war mentality of the Reagan-Thatcher Axis and the huge surge of military spending it hid became not only an essential part of the ideology of the Atlanticists in all Britain's political parties but embedded itself in the very culture of Anglo-American societies.
Naturally, this process was all along promoted enthusiastically by capital's media whores who themselves have become increasingly embedded as the propagandists for the USUK's new imperialism. Using euphemisms like 'neo-liberalism' the media has and will continue to play an active part in promoting the ruthless economics of the much harsher, totalitarian version of corporate capitalism we face today.
The more Blair and his abortion of a Nu Labor promote this ugly dystopia the more out-of-step they become with their people. In spurning them, Scotland rejected an entire agenda of betrayal and warmongering.
"It should not be forgotten that key to the SNP's victory was their profound opposition to the War in Iraq and to Trident nuclear missiles, and their replacement. The SNP showed what happens when a genuine choice on these issues is given to voters. That is a huge threat to the conservative establishment in the UK, and explains Blair's arrogant hostility."
The hostility towards the SNP's victory from both Labour and the so-called Liberal Democrats underscores the deep commitment of the leaders of these two Atlanticist parties, as well as the Tories, to not only obediently toe Washington's line but to actively promote its belligerent, unipolar imperialism.
In treating Scotland so contemptuously they are exposed as the cold, hard-line establishment, enemies of democracy they really are.
In treating Scotland so contemptuously they are exposed as the cold, hard-line establishment, enemies of democracy they really are.
This Story is now at OpEdNews.com
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"Many, including myself, believe the SNP victory would have been much greater ..."
ReplyDeleteYou MIGHT be right about that, but at the Edinburgh Counting Centre I also saw large numbers of rejected regional votes where one of the two regional Xs was for the Scottish Labour Party and the constituency vote was blank. So who can say what the result might have been had those voters not made their mistakes?
"... if Blair and his cronies in the Scottish Office hadn't sabotaged the recent election by ignoring the several warnings they were given by producing a complicated ballot paper."
Conspiracy theories are great fun, especially when you can give a politician or a political party a good kicking. But the facts are much more prosaic.
The move to the combined ballot paper was recommended by the independent Arbuthnott Commission. The change was supported by 83 of the 100 ordinary electors who took part in the qualitative research on ballot paper design. There was a full public consultation. And the change was approved by ALL the political parties.
Of course, there is no denying it went badly wrong. In the Glasgow and Lothians electoral regions the "missing arrows" almost certainly had a big effect. But why were there so many rejected ballot papers in the other six electoral regions? It is a real puzzle because New Zealand and Germany both use combined ballot papers (two X votes) for their AMS elections and their voters don't make anything like so many mistakes as Scottish voters did on 3 May. Understanding that difference is the real challenge.
NB I am not a member of any political party and have no association with any organisation involved in running the elections. I was an Accredited Observer at the elections and attended the Edinburgh Counting Centre.
Your observations in Edinburgh cannot be applied across Scotland where the SNP, correctly as it turned out, expected to receive its greatest support in the regions.
ReplyDeleteSo, on a pro rata basis, it is reasonable to assume that the SNP and the smaller parties were the main victim of the 142,000 ballot disenfranchisement.
How do you explain Sir John Arbuthnott's statement, given on national television, where he placed the entire blame for the fiasco (premeditated or no) on the Scottish Office?
Your contemptuous use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' gives you away. Anyone who uses that phrase as a pejorative term is simply unaware of the real world where conspiracies are a very unpleasant reality, especially in politics and government.
Conspiracies have been around for an awful long time. The pejorative use of the phrase was only introduced very recently by a mainstream media whose intention, from the start, was to promote official government policies AND conspiracies and to rubbish and marginalise those who opposed them.
Seems you support the official conspirators.
BTW, read the quote by Sir Thomas More on my blog webpage :-)
"Your observations in Edinburgh cannot be applied across Scotland where the SNP, correctly as it turned out, expected to receive its greatest support in the regions.
ReplyDeleteSo, on a pro rata basis, it is reasonable to assume that the SNP and the smaller parties were the main victim of the 142,000 ballot disenfranchisement."
Maybe, maybe not. We won't know until (if) the Inquiry gets access to the rejected ballot papers or the images of the rejected ballot papers and does a full analysis. I haven't yet done any detailed analysis of electoral regions other than Glasgow, but my preliminary analyses have shown that there are some very large and obvious differences in the patterns of rejection among constituencies within all electoral regions. I have looked in detail at Glasgow and can confirm that there was a large constituency vote for the SNP in Govan that gave the anomaly there (much lower than expected percentage rejection of constituency ballot papers), and that was not at the expense of the Labour Party (region) or the Labour candidate (constituency).
"How do you explain Sir John Arbuthnott statement, given on national television, where he placed the entire blame for the fiasco (premeditated or no) on the Scottish Office?"
From what I saw and heard, Sir John was clearly trying to defend the decision of his Commission to recommend the combined "ballot sheet" (which they did for the reasons set out in their report). He put the emphasis on the decision by the Scottish Executive and the Scotland Office to hold the two sets of elections on the same day. It is possible that there would have fewer mistakes on the combined ballot paper had the Scottish Parliament elections been held on their own, but neither Sir John, nor anyone else, has any evidence to support that. It is always easier to conduct a sharply focused voter education campaign when there will be only one set of elections, all by the same voting system. However, I am doubtful whether the decision to hold the two elections the same day (as in 2003) made much (if any) contribution to the mistakes on the Scottish Parliament ballot papers. Why do I suggest that? Because the level of mistakes with the STV ballot papers that were completely new to the current generation of voters in Scotland was so much lower. All the evidence suggest the voters coped extremely well with STV and its numbered preferences. So the real (and unexpected) puzzle is why did Scottish voters make so many mistakes on the combined ballot sheets compared with voters in New Zealand and Germany where combined ballot sheets have worked satisfactorily.
One aspect of the "rejected" ballot papers that has been nearly universally ignored by the media and the most of the politicians, is that constituency ballot papers that were left blank have been counted in the total of rejected ballot papers. Of course, they were correctly "rejected", but it must not be assumed that ALL of those rejected blank papers were "mistakes" made by the voters. An unknown (and unknowable) proportion of those constituency blanks were deliberately left blank by the voters who marked valid regional votes on the other half of the ballot sheets. How do I know? Because I have been consulted by voters who deliberately did mark their papers in just that way (and wanted reassurance that they had cast a valid regional vote), and from similar comments I have read in the letters pages of the more serious newspapers. My own guess would be that this happened particularly in constituencies where there was strong support for the Scottish Green Party, for the SSP or for Solidarity, none of which nominated candidates in the constituencies.
"Your contemptuous use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' gives you away. Anyone who uses that phrase as a pejorative term is simply unaware of the real world where conspiracies are a very unpleasant reality, especially in politics and government. Conspiracies have been around for an awful long time. The pejorative use of the phrase was only introduced very recently by a mainstream media whose intention, from the start, was to promote official government policies AND conspiracies and to rubbish and marginalise those who opposed them. Seems you support the official conspirators."
I am sorry if you thought my use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" was pejorative - it was not intended to be. And I most certainly don't support those who seem to have been identified as "the official conspirators". My concern is the misinformation (deliberate ?) and disinformation that has appeared in the media (broadcast as well as print) and some of the grossly misleading statements made about this problem by some politicians, especially some Conservatives and some Liberal Democrats, who have conveniently ignored the facts to make a "good" (very biased) story. Mistakes there have been (eg the missing arrows), but the verifiable facts should not be ignored or buried just for political convenience. The debate on this in the House of Commons was appalling!
I don't think the root of THIS problem lies in any conspiracy, not even by the Labour government at Westminster or by the Labour Party. I think there was a genuine acceptance by ALL parties of the Arbuthnott recommendation to change to a combined ballot sheet with the principal purpose of making clear to the voters the significance of the two different votes in AMS and the importance of the regional vote. If anyone in the Labour Party conspiratorially thought that might advantage the Labour Party, they were completely wrong. It was obvious from the 2003 elections that, if voters really understood how the two votes worked, and voted accordingly, it be to the benefit of the SNP.
I doubt if it could be called a conspiracy, as the question was put out for open public consultation, but there is little doubt that some Labour politicians thought that a New Zealand style combined ballot sheet might work to their advantage. In New Zealand the ordering of the parties in the regional half of the ballot sheet is linked directly to the position of those same parties whose candidates appear on the constituency half of the ballot sheet. But other parties and respondents to the consultation opposed that and so the two lists were ordered alphabetical and independently.
I would just add that I am well aware that politicians, political parties and governments all can and do engage in promoting conspiracies when that suits their purposes.
Many thanks for your detailed comments and apologies if I misunderstood your comments. Just after replying to you, I read this at Stef Zucconi's blog at
ReplyDeletehttp://stefzucconi.blogspot.com/2007/06/on-conspiraloons-two.html
More strongly put than mine but a point well made, methinks.