I was wondering the other day if I was unfair on Tony Blair. After all, there have been some good things happen since he came to power and he is still preferable to Michael Howard.
But there is too much on the wrong side of the balance sheet, things like:
1) He doesn't seem to have any guiding principles. You may have disagreed with everything Margaret Thatcher stood for but you still knew what she stood for. Not so Blair, whose views will change at the sight of a focus group graph. How can you within a matter of weeks be Bill Clinton's best friend and pushing the third way and then George W Bush's best friend with a neo-con agenda?
2) While claiming to care about the underprivileged, he has allowed the gap between rich and poor to widen.
3) Rupert Murdoch thinks he's OK
4 He lied to justify the Iraq war, a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and achieved nothing. Are we willing to pay such a price in lives and instability to rid the world of a tryant? If it's such a good idea, would he advocate doing it again?
5) He justifies draconian reductions in civil liberties in the name of the war on terror, yet as he has shown in Ireland, terrorism is better tackled by addressing the causes. Military action didn't stop the killing in Ireland, diplomacy did. Eventually you have to talk to people.
6) Cash for peerages. The House of Lords has so little power, even less than the post 1977 House of Commons, so you might as well sell peerages but let the money go to the country not the labour party. Or, more seriously, let's have an independently appointed upper house whose members' qualifications we can all understand, and let them use their expertise to make better the legislation of professinal politicians, who are increasingly out of touch with real people.
7) He has left those of us who want a fairer society with no one to vote for
8) He never says 'I was wrong' or 'I'm sorry'
9) He never gives a straight answer to a straight question
10) He claims to care about Africa yet squanders on his unnecessary war £5bn that would make a massive difference if used for good in that continent. And what is he doing about Mugabe?
11) He has an almost 19th century view of Britain's position in the world.
12) He believes we need a nuclear deterrent but no one else should have one (except of course Dubya). Either that means we are at greater risk because of his policies or he just has delusions of power. If the world is so insecure that Britain needs a nuclear deterrent, then why not Spain or Holland or Germany or any of the other non nuclear European countries? Why not Iran, whose unfriendly near neighbour Israel has one? Why not Australia or Malaysia or Japan? Why not everyone?
13) I don't think he reads books
14) He's still here, not because he's doing anything worthwhile, but because he wants to reach ten years as PM. How pathetic is that?
15) In 1997 he led us to believe a better Britain was possible but he hasn't delivered.
Saltaire Sam
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
You must read this book
If 'What Would Barbra Do' made me smile earlier this year, my most recent reading, Polly Toynbee's Hard Work, made me angry.
Guardian correspondent Toynbee is well known for her left of centre views but this book is in no way a rant. She went and tried to live on minimum wage and, while admitting the artificiality of her own position, her experience and the stories of the people she met, spell out just how hard it is for the poorest people in society to get out of poverty.
While the Daily Mail would have you believe that the underclass is mainly made up of skivers and benefit cheats, Toynbee came across a large number of hard-working people, many quite talented, who the system traps in poverty. Many of them have to run two or three jobs just to survive.
She shows how the system of contracting out services like hospital cleaning, not only means the cleaners are paid peanuts and have terrible working conditions while the companies make big profits, but it is also providing an inefficient service.
She explains how difficult it is for the low paid to change jobs even for something paying better, without running up debts that are almost insurmountable.
She graphically illustrates the problems of living on the meanest estates where a few crack heads and anti-social yobs can make life almost unbearable for the rest.
She demonstrates that the treatment of applicants - making them travel to apply, often during working hours, and then back again for interviews - trap people in unrewarding jobs. While the piling on of targets that mean working many unpaid hours, and the constant cost cutting that adds to the work load and reduces the equipment to do the job, make already grindingly awful jobs even worse.
The most moving section is where she takes a job as a care worker in an nursing home for the elderly. Her description of the work is harrowing and the thought that the people who are doing these jobs, trying to give dignity and care to some of the most vulnerable people in our society, are among the lowest paid is simply a disgrace. And when a director of one of those homes spouts off about how it is important to the profits of his company to keep wages low, you just want to strangle him.
We live in a deeply unfair society in which the lowest earners pay an unfair proportion of tax, especially indirect taxes, and some of the most important but unpleasant jobs are so undervalued that we refuse to pay a living wage to the people doing them. Yet others - from city whiz kids to footballers - are paid obscene amounts of money. Banks, who make billions of pounds in profits, refuse to deal with the poorest, sending them into the arms of loan sharks and rip-off merchants.
Everyone, especially politicians, company directors and Daily Mail readers should be made to read this book. And afterwards they should ask themselves how much would they have to be paid per hour to wipe the backsides of several pensioners with dementia. It may not need a degree or the ability to pull off a city killing, but it is much more valuable than most jobs undertaken by the very rich.
Saltaire Sam
Guardian correspondent Toynbee is well known for her left of centre views but this book is in no way a rant. She went and tried to live on minimum wage and, while admitting the artificiality of her own position, her experience and the stories of the people she met, spell out just how hard it is for the poorest people in society to get out of poverty.
While the Daily Mail would have you believe that the underclass is mainly made up of skivers and benefit cheats, Toynbee came across a large number of hard-working people, many quite talented, who the system traps in poverty. Many of them have to run two or three jobs just to survive.
She shows how the system of contracting out services like hospital cleaning, not only means the cleaners are paid peanuts and have terrible working conditions while the companies make big profits, but it is also providing an inefficient service.
She explains how difficult it is for the low paid to change jobs even for something paying better, without running up debts that are almost insurmountable.
She graphically illustrates the problems of living on the meanest estates where a few crack heads and anti-social yobs can make life almost unbearable for the rest.
She demonstrates that the treatment of applicants - making them travel to apply, often during working hours, and then back again for interviews - trap people in unrewarding jobs. While the piling on of targets that mean working many unpaid hours, and the constant cost cutting that adds to the work load and reduces the equipment to do the job, make already grindingly awful jobs even worse.
The most moving section is where she takes a job as a care worker in an nursing home for the elderly. Her description of the work is harrowing and the thought that the people who are doing these jobs, trying to give dignity and care to some of the most vulnerable people in our society, are among the lowest paid is simply a disgrace. And when a director of one of those homes spouts off about how it is important to the profits of his company to keep wages low, you just want to strangle him.
We live in a deeply unfair society in which the lowest earners pay an unfair proportion of tax, especially indirect taxes, and some of the most important but unpleasant jobs are so undervalued that we refuse to pay a living wage to the people doing them. Yet others - from city whiz kids to footballers - are paid obscene amounts of money. Banks, who make billions of pounds in profits, refuse to deal with the poorest, sending them into the arms of loan sharks and rip-off merchants.
Everyone, especially politicians, company directors and Daily Mail readers should be made to read this book. And afterwards they should ask themselves how much would they have to be paid per hour to wipe the backsides of several pensioners with dementia. It may not need a degree or the ability to pull off a city killing, but it is much more valuable than most jobs undertaken by the very rich.
Saltaire Sam
Monday, 19 March 2007
What did we get for our money
My objections to the Iraq war are many, the greatest being that I don't believe getting rid of Saddam was worth what some estimates now put at one million Iraqi lives. Add to that the fact that it was probably an illegal invasion on a false pretext, and I'm well and truly in the anti-war camp.
Now there is an extra reason, possibly the least important, but nevertheless worth noticing.
According to estimates published today, the war has cost the British tax payer £5bn. Think for a moment what we could have achieved if we had invested that in education or in care homes for the elderly. Or how far would £5bn go towards stopping children in Africa dying from the lack of clean water?
Instead, what did we get for our money? We created a civil war without getting any nearer solving the problem of terrorism. We increased the number of people in the world who despise the very name of Britain. We gave a focus for terrorists that didn't exist before.
For a tiny island off the coast of Europe, that's a hell of a way to spend five billion quid.
Saltaire Sam
Now there is an extra reason, possibly the least important, but nevertheless worth noticing.
According to estimates published today, the war has cost the British tax payer £5bn. Think for a moment what we could have achieved if we had invested that in education or in care homes for the elderly. Or how far would £5bn go towards stopping children in Africa dying from the lack of clean water?
Instead, what did we get for our money? We created a civil war without getting any nearer solving the problem of terrorism. We increased the number of people in the world who despise the very name of Britain. We gave a focus for terrorists that didn't exist before.
For a tiny island off the coast of Europe, that's a hell of a way to spend five billion quid.
Saltaire Sam
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