A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left. Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.
Thanks to Susan Press for alerting me to Gordon Brown's piece about Tony Blair in the Sun today:
posted by Luke Akehurst at 1:10 pm
Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012 and since 2020. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Supporter of Europe, NATO/nuclear deterrence, Israel, electoral reform. Guardian reader. Dad. Oxford resident. Unite union member. Employment history as a Labour Party Organiser, Local Government Political Assistant, Director at a Public Affairs company. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.
6 Comments:
Indeed, what a great 10 years it has been!
Think what the next 10 years could bring? I'm sure that Luke will continue to casually call for third world nations to be smashed to the ground from the comfort of his air-conditioned offices, safe in the knowledge that his family aren't likely to have their skulls cracked open by American bullets.
After all, Hackney is a long way from the stench of corpses piling up in Iraq...
1:25 pm, May 01, 2007
Alternatively I could sit in my office and turn a blind eye to genocidal fascist dictators until they do start using WMD to kill people in Hackney as well as their own people and their neighbours, by which time it would be too late ...
Hackney happens to be full of Kurds, many of whom fled Iraq leaving their murdered relatives behind them.
The stench I can smell is the stench of hypocrisy from a "left" that embraced appeasement of dictators and fails to condemn the very terrorists who are doing the killing in Iraq, preferring to vent its spleen at the leaders of countries supplying the troops trying to keep the peace.
1:39 pm, May 01, 2007
Luke, you're view is an honest and creditable one, but you'd be better to acknoelwdge that opponents of war had an honest and creditable opinion too, and without corpse counting, one that seems to have filled out: that war would wreck Iraq. Ic an recall predicting urban warfare, fragmentation and regional intervention twelve years ago or more.
As for appeasing dictators, never forget that teh US used the invasion of iraq to pull troops out of Saudi - troops whose presence was destabilising the viscious tyranny there.
1:47 pm, May 01, 2007
Ah yes, those WMDs! Tell me, where exactly are those WMDs?
Have you ever seen a corpse, Luke? Maybe a pile of corpses, covered in blood and shit? Perhaps their faces have been ripped off and their internal organs are hanging out of their chest?
No, I wouldn't think that you have. After all, war is just an abstraction to you. You'll cheer on the cruise missiles, because your kid isn't going to be disembowelled as she sleeps. It's easy to cheer on wars that aren't going to end up with you and your loved ones losing both legs, isn't it?
And oh yes, Saddam slaughtered thousands of innocents. Indeed, it takes some doing to slaughter far more than he ever achieved in 25 years in just 4 years - and to turn Iraq into a hell on earth far worse than anything the Ba'athists could create.
Sleep well, Luke... far from the screams of Iraq...
1:47 pm, May 01, 2007
Bill
I agree that most opponents of the war have honest and creditable positions.
My problem is not with those who are anti-war and presumably therefore condemn the terrorist attacks going on in Iraq now, but with those who seem to think the wrong side won in 2003 - i.e. are just anti-west rather than anti-war, or who call for troops to be withdrawn immediately without thinking (or caring?) how deaths would result in the bloodbath that would follow.
2:11 pm, May 01, 2007
Luke, you are an OK chap for a right-winger but starting to sound a tad like Sham. I am no Ba'athist.Nor anti-American.I am just deeply disheartened to see our would-be Prime Minister embracing the whole Blairite she-bang, especially on foreign policy.Lord Kinnock had it right the other day when he described Blair's association with Bush as "a tragedy" for his legacy and his reputation.It's certainly a tragedy for the thousands dead as a result of our adventurism in Iraq. The four-year nightmare that continues to haunt the Labour Party.Your very evocative piece on May 1 1997 certainly reminded me of how happy everyone was that day. Ten years on, weare facing a roasting at the ballot box and New Labour's answer is facile "blue-sky" features written by the Govt spin machine on Gordon's behalf. Will they never learn? Seemingly not.If he gets in, he's got two years max.Then maybe we will get a Labour leader worthy of the name. And, given Miliband's majority, it won't be him.
2:48 pm, May 01, 2007
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