chickenfeet

Tony Blair's speech at the Labour Party conference shows once again that he is either entirely devoid of a sense of history or is convinced that he is so awesome that his abilities transcend it. Two aspects of the speech in particular are quite breathtaking in either their ignorance or their duplicity.

Let's look at the "alliance with America (sic)" that he sets so much store on. It's bunk of course. The United States doesn't have allies, it has clients and that's been the case since the country first emerged as a world power. When has Britain's "special relationship" yielded anything that was not directly in the USA's interests? Even in 1939 the USA was careful to ensure that Britain's gold and foreign currency reserves (not just the government's but also the overseas holdings of British companies) were exhausted before extending credit. Even after the United States entered the war a good deal of US strategy was devoted to ensuring the dismantling of the British Empire. Then of course there is the US based financing of the IRA's quarter century of terror which the US government never attempted to interfere with. So Blair can continue to send battle groups wherever the Americans need a "few good men" but he isn't going to get a damn thing in return.

And how about the criminal "justice" reforms he's promising. Apparently the British legal system is "Dickensian" and grossly biased in favour of the presumption of innocence. The evident contradiction in these two claims seems to have escaped him. Indeed his whole thrust seems to be to return at least the lower levels of the criminal justice system to, precisely, a Dickensian model. 150 years ago, of course, magistrates could be relied on to impose social conformity without too much regard for the letter or form of the law. It seems that that model is to be reimposed with the police taking on even more of the judicial role than they did in the days of the "Police Courts". One wonders how long such "Dickensian" (sic) inefficencies as defence counsel, disclosure of evidence and the like will survive?