always being here at this one moment when in fact he is making a difference, not
only to the standing of our country but to the ability of Britain to contribute and to
punch its weight... [and this: "I will end the] "animal extremists' reign of terror." For a different view - a few examples of UK atrocities:
US animal activists may be kept out of UK
By Steve Bloomfield - 01 August 2004
David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, is planning to ban three American animal rights activists from entering Britain after examining statements they have made that he fears could provoke violence. If Mr Blunkett is not satisfied with their answers they will be prevented from entering the country.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=546804
A wee bit of a misquote of our dear Home Secretary: -
"It has been a very interesting job since I took over from the tremendous strides that
were made by Jack, Barbara, Paul, Charles and Mike as the previous Home Office
1 team – dealing with issues ranging from police and crime reduction, through
nationality and asylum, drugs, criminal justice and now the social cohesion agenda.
We quite rarely come across some amusing incidents in this job. There aren’t all
that many laughs actually in the Home Office. I would put an email out asking
people in the Home Office to tell me a joke – except that the email doesn’t usually
work in there so I can’t really do it.
Tony Blair has opened up the horizons, as he did at Party Conference and beyond,
of Britain playing a new role, not over-exaggerating our part but accepting that
mutuality and interdependence is global, that we depend on each other, that what
happens in one part of the world has a profound impact on another – whether it is
drugs... [or]our ability to invest. All of it affects us, day in and day out, and yet do our media give him praise... ? No, they do not. He gets ridicule for not
always being here at this one moment when in fact he is making a difference, not
only to the standing of our country but to the ability of Britain to contribute and to
punch its weight. [ PUNCH ITS WEIGHT ? eh..? ]
So let us be proud of this Labour government, of those – all of you – who are
supporting and making it possible for us to be here to celebrate an enormous
victory last June that now seems so very long ago........
And we don’t ask to be let off the hook, we don’t ask people to forgive us for failing
but we ask people to sensibly debate what can be done within a reasonable
timescale to put that legacy right.
... the Greater Manchester Police who have told me they are desperately hard up, have set £110,000 aside for the next financial year to buy strengthened underwear after their experience in the disturbances in Oldham – make of that whatever you will.
[ - The above from LABOUR PARTY SPRING CONFERENCE CARDIFF – 1 FEBRUARY 2002;
http://www.davidblunkett.org.uk/ ]
Mr. Howard has received numerous awards for servicing the public and "Innovative Fascist Thinking!"
US wins David Blunkett Lifetime Menace Award
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/29/big_brother_awards/
By John Leyden
Published Thursday 29th July 2004 09:47 GMT
Big Brother awards 2004 The UK's sixth annual Big Brother awards last night honoured outstanding achievement by those individuals and organisations who make your business their business, and generally interfere with, snoop on, aggravate and irritate the public with their activities.
Laurels were bestowed to recipients in five categories: Worst Public Servant, Most Invasive Company, Most Appalling Project, Most Heinous Government Organisation and Lifetime Menace Award - now renamed the David Blunkett Lifetime Menace Award. Human rights watchdog Privacy International, which organises the awards, said it was overwhelmed by nominations for Blunkett, the Home Office and national ID cards but since each had been recognised in previous years different candidates were considered instead.
And the winners are...
WORST PUBLIC SERVANT: The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Minister of State for Children
Margaret Hodge has received numerous nominations because of her patronage of the controversial tracking provisions in the Children Bill and for her determination to develop a wide spectrum of intrusive databases and information systems. Event host Mark Thomas joked that Hodge wasn't available to collect the award because she was at home "tattooing her children". Runner-up in the "Worst Public Servant" category were joint nominees Katherine Courtney, director of Home Office's identity cards programme and Stephen Harrison, head of the identity card policy unit at the Home Office.
Bootnote
Readers with a particular aversion to the Dave Blunkett's volunatry/compulsory ID card scheme will be delighted to learn that Reg e-commerce tentacle Cash'n'Carrion is now carrying the campaigning NO2ID t-shirt, fighting the good fight on behalf of www.no2id.net. You can have a snoop here.
( SEE ALSO: http://big-blunkett.blogspot.com/)
FEATURE INFO:
British Show A Creative Variety of Atrocious Behaviour
Harpers magazine , Jan. 2002, p 13; “Readings.” - From a speech given October, 2002 by Sir Michael Howard
[ The behavior of the UK and the Blair administration highlight the slide into lawlessness, violence and deceipt (bordering on treason) that the West now relies on since it has lost its moral position and sacrificed its integrity for short term political and economic glory.]
“The use of force is no longer seen as a last resort, to be avoided if humanly possible, but as the first, and the sooner the better…. Any suggestion that the best strategy is not to use military force at all but more subtle if less heroic means of destroying the adversary is dismissed as “appeasement” by politicians whose knowledge of history is about on a par with their skill at political management… [The Bush administration and the right in the UK in justifying unjust wars] are rather like the drunk who lost his watch {his sense}in a dark alley but looked for it under a lamppost because there was more light there..
[Facing cuts in the British air force after WWI] The commander of the air force, Sir Hugh Trenchard, bet everything on one card: The Mad Mullah of Somaliland… [who] had long been a thorn in the British lion’s paw.. Trenchard proposed to fix the Mullah from the air, with 12 airplanes and a maximum of 250 men. Squadron 221, which would soon bomb Tsaritsyn – later Stalingrad – on behalf of the British Empire, was first sent to Somaliland.
Mohammed [the Mad mullah] had never seen an airplane, much less a bomb. He gave no evidence of fear. He did what he usually did when he had unexpected visitors: he dressed in his finest clothes and presented himself, surrounded by his most respected counselors, in front of his house under a white canopy that was used on ceremonial occasions. There he awaited the arrival of the foreign emissaries.
The first bomb almost put an end to the war. It killed Mohammed’s counselors, and he himself had his clothes singed by the explosion. The next bombardment killed his sister and several of his immediate family members. Then for two days the British bombers attacked Mohammed and his family while they fled across through the desert like hunted animals. Finally, they were forced to give up. Total time required: a week instead of a year [that ground forces would have required] Total cost: L77,000.
[ Further Notes on this war ]
Somalia, Mohammed Abdulla Hasan (1899-1920): 100 000 - Mad Mullah Jihad
According to the Library of Congress [ http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sotoc.html], this war caused the deaths of about one third of the northern Somali population. The 1911 Britannica estimates 300,000 people in British Somaliland, so the death toll might have been something like 100-150,000. (depending on whether the 300000 was estimated before or after the one-third had died) By summing the battle casualties in the campaigns that are descibed in the OnWar.com essay for the 1899-1905 phase of the war, I determined that the dervishes suffered some 11,700 casualties (K+W) fighting the British, which would come to around 3,000 KIA, plus another 1,000 killed in battle with the Abyssinians. The British lost something over 200 KIA.]
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat6.htm
[Harpers contiued]
Curchill persuaded the government to maintain the air force out of purely economic considerations. Then he offered the RAF l 6 million to take over from the army control of the Iraq operation, which has cost 18 million thus far.
“The British had already bombed restless natives in their territories for years. It began with the Pathans on India’s northwest border in 1915. It didn’t help much just to destroy their villages. But if their irrigation ditches were bombed their water supply would be emptied and the topsoil washed away from the terraces. Then they got the message. The British bombed revolutionaries in Egypt and the rebellious Sultan of Darfur in 1916. Dacca, Jalalabad and Kabul were bombed by a British squadron chief named Arthur Harris.In his memoirs he writes that the war was won by a single strike with a one-kiloton bomb on the Afghani king’s palace…. In 1920 the city of Enzeli in Iran was bombed in an attempt to create a British puppet state and in Trans-Jordan the British put down an uprising with bombs that killed 200.
“What are the rules for this kind of cricket?” asked the newly appointed chief for India’s Northwest Province, Sir John Maffey. The air force headquarters for India answered that international law did not apply “against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilized warfare.”
A 1922 RAF memorandum lists a series of available means of terror: timed bombs; phosphorus bombs; “crows feet,” which maimed humans and livestock; whistling arrows; crude oil used to pollute drinking water; and “liquid fire” a forerunner to napalm.
A brief search of the WWW will yield a wide variety of British atrocities, war crimes and perpetual scheming.
[ On the Congo and UK atrocities] http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob73.html
At other villages which I visited, I found the tax to consist of baskets, which the inhabitants had to make and deliver weekly as well as, always, a certain amount of foodstuffs. (The natives) were frequently flogged for delay or inability to complete the tally of these baskets, or the weekly supply of food. Several men, including a Chief of one town, showed broad weals across their buttocks, which were evidently recent. One, a lad of 15 o so, removing his cloth, showed several scars across his thighs, which he and others around him said had formed part of a weekly payment for a recent shortage in their supply of food.
. . . A careful investigation of the conditions of native life around (Lake Mantumba) confirmed the truth of the statements made to me--that the great decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence of goats, sheep, or fowls--once very plentiful in this country--were to be attributed above all else to the continued effort made during many years to compel the natives to work india-rubber.
--- How interesting that just as the Bush-USA has lost all moral credibility the UK-Blair has lost all integrity. Lies and High Crimes are still the order of the day.