November 18, 2001

1:57 AM

Blair's Road to Nemesis"There will come a day when the Government commits suicide" Columist of the year, Andrew Rawnsley's devastating critique of new labour is also supported by the BBC's Mark Mardell "Blair will get bored of just being the British PM soon". Ex-labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley says He must be stopped
posted by quarsan (8 comments total)

Fancy that, a Prime Minister with a thirst for power.
posted by Jack Torrance at 3:10 AM on November 18, 2001

The final section of Mark Mardell's Political Diary must not be missed:

"Which of these didn't happen this week? A state of public emergency is declared. A government minister denounces 'airy fairy' civil liberties. The second chamber is emasculated. The guardian of MP's behaviour is down graded. The cabinet is told: 'Our struggle must not be dependent on legal considerations.' Oops, the last one was some German chap after the Reichstag fire. Anyone smell burning?"
posted by Carol Anne at 5:23 AM on November 18, 2001

I think the Labour backbench MPs will be Blair's undoing. Once they realise they're being made increasingly irrelevant they'll start ignoring the chief whip and make things v. difficult. Well that's my hope anyway, because the Tories and Lib Dems certainly don't look like they're capable of mounting an effective opposition.
posted by Summer at 5:27 AM on November 18, 2001

I think that he should stick to running the country as a dictatorships. Given the mediocrity of the people that surround Blair, Brown excluded, I'd suggest that he continues doing exactly what he is doing. What makes anyone think that it is a good idea to put power into the hands of bog standard politicians who have rarely stepped foot in the real world, and certainly don't have any experience of running anything more complicated than a bath? Concensus politics is just awful, I say dig up Maggie.
posted by RobertLoch at 6:13 AM on November 18, 2001

Indeed, it's no surprise that a prime minister should have a thirst for power. What's worrying about the current state of British politics is that such a thirst may go unchecked. The impotent, incompetant, utterly unimaginative shambles that is the Tory 'opposition' are equally to blame for the current and future undemocratic excesses of the Labour leadership.
posted by normy at 9:59 AM on November 18, 2001

Hey, this is almost like the U.S. except for a slight political inversion!

Blair = Bush
Ineffectual Tory Opposition = Ineffectual Democrat Opposition

The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. :)
posted by solistrato at 3:41 PM on November 18, 2001

I wouldn't call nearly winning the election (or winning it?) an ineffectual Democrat opposition, solistrato. Whereas the odds of the Tories winning an election this decade and Charlotte Church conceiving Eminem's illegitimate love child are about the same.
posted by Summer at 5:32 PM on November 18, 2001

Emigrate to Northern Ireland. You can't deny that there's a pretty vibrant experiment in cross-party democracy going on in that corner of the kingdom. (Alas, there are too many Labour MPs who got in by surprise in 1997, and who seem too indebted to the spinners to assert themselves from the back-benches.)
posted by holgate at 9:30 PM on November 18, 2001