Tag Archives: David Cameron

Tony Blair jeered by students

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This video from the USA says about itself:

Rupert Murdoch Pressured Tony Blair Over Iraq

Jun 18, 2012 by TheYoungTurks

“Rupert Murdoch joined in an “over-crude” attempt by US Republicans to force Tony Blair to accelerate British involvement in the Iraq war a week before a crucial House of Commons vote in 2003, according to the final volumes of Alastair Campbell’s government diaries. In another blow to the media mogul, who told the Leveson inquiry that he had never tried to influence any prime minister, Campbell’s diary says Murdoch warned Blair in a phone call of the dangers of a delay in Iraq…”.* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

Read more here from Nicholas Watt in The Guardian.

Britain: Labour MP Chris Bryant vowed today to hunt Prime Minister David Cameron relentlessly until he reveals all his links with the Murdoch empire: here.

Anti-Blair demonstrators in London

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Tony Blair jeered by UCL students before speech

The former prime minister is greeted with chants of “war criminal” as he arrives at the London university

Ashley Cowburn

Tuesday 13 November 2012 17.33 GMT

Tony Blair was jeered by anti-war protesters as he arrived to deliver a speech at University College London (UCL) this morning.

Students and campaigners from the Stop the War Coalition used the occasion to reiterate their demand that the former primer minister be tried for war crimes and criticised the university for hosting the event.

Blair was speaking at the launch of the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies (ISRS) – a research institute which is independent from UCL – alongside former defence secretary John Reid and education secretary Michael Gove.

But students say the event-organisers behaved in an underhand manner by failing to advertise the speech, which was open only to guests who paid £700 for tickets.

Chris Nineham, vice chair of Stop the War Coalition, which organised the protest says: “It is completely insane for a man who lied to parliament to be speaking at a conference supported by one of Britain’s premier educational institutions. It is an absolutely mad situation.”

UCL student Ollie Sutherland, one of dozens who protested, agreed that Blair was not welcome on campus: “Universities need to make the world a better place and inviting people like Tony Blair runs contrary to that.”

…

Earlier this week, Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell said they were “appalled” by the news that Blair was to appear at the event, and called on UCL to “reconsider its position in hosting this institution and instead protect its own academic independence.”

See also here.

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Shelley poems about war

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This video is about Percy Bysshe Shelley – his poem The Mask of Anarchy.

The Stop NATO blog in the USA has a section Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts.

In it, there is a link to a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley about war (certainly not Shelley’s only poem on this).

And an excerpt from Shelley’s 1813 poem, Queen Mab, about war:

There an inhuman and uncultured race
Howled hideous praises to their Demon-God;
They rushed to war, tore from the mother’s womb
The unborn child – old age and infancy
Promiscuous perished; their victorious arms
Left not a soul to breathe. Oh! they were fiends!
But what was he who taught them that the God
Of Nature and benevolence had given
A special sanction to the trade of blood?
His name and theirs are fading, and the tales
Of this barbarian nation, which imposture
Recites till terror credits, are pursuing
Itself into forgetfulness.

…

Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?
Whence that unnatural line of drones who heap
Toil and unvanquishable penury
On those who build their palaces and bring
Their daily bread? – From vice, black loathsome vice;
From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong;
From all that genders misery, and makes
Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust,
Revenge, and murder. – And when reason’s voice,
Loud as the voice of Nature, shall have waked
The nations; and mankind perceive that vice
Is discord, war and misery; that virtue
Is peace and happiness and harmony;
When man’s maturer nature shall disdain
The playthings of its childhood; – kingly glare
Will lose its power to dazzle, its authority
Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne
Shall stand unnoticed in the regal hall,
Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood’s trade
Shall be as hateful and unprofitable
As that of truth is now.

Where is the fame
Which the vain-glorious mighty of the earth
Seek to eternize? Oh! the faintest sound
From time’s light footfall, the minutest wave
That swells the flood of ages, whelms in nothing
The unsubstantial bubble. Ay! to-day
Stern is the tyrant’s mandate, red the gaze
That flashes desolation, strong the arm
That scatters multitudes. To-morrow comes!
That mandate is a thunder-peal that died
In ages past; that gaze, a transient flash
On which the midnight closed; and on that arm
The worm has made his meal.

…

Look on yonder earth:
The golden harvests spring; the unfailing sun
Sheds light and life; the fruits, the flowers, the trees,
Arise in due succession; all things speak
Peace, harmony and love. The universe,
In Nature’s silent eloquence, declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy, -
All but the outcast, Man. He fabricates
The sword which stabs his peace; he cherisheth
The snakes that gnaw his heart; he raiseth up
The tyrant whose delight is in his woe,
Whose sport is in his agony.

…

Now swells the intermingling din; the jar
Frequent and frightful of the bursting bomb;
The falling beam, the shriek, the groan, the shout,
The ceaseless clangor, and the rush of men
Inebriate with rage: – loud and more loud
The discord grows; till pale Death shuts the scene
And o’er the conqueror and the conquered draws
His cold and bloody shroud. – Of all the men
Whom day’s departing beam saw blooming there
In proud and vigorous health; of all the hearts
That beat with anxious life at sunset there;
How few survive, how few are beating now!
All is deep silence, like the fearful calm
That slumbers in the storm’s portentous pause;
Save when the frantic wail of widowed love
Comes shuddering on the blast, or the faint moan
With which some soul bursts from the frame of clay
Wrapt round its struggling powers.

The gray morn
Dawns on the mournful scene; the sulphurous smoke
Before the icy wind slow rolls away,
And the bright beams of frosty morning dance
Along the spangling snow. There tracks of blood
Even to the forest’s depth, and scattered arms,
And lifeless warriors, whose hard lineaments
Death’s self could change not, mark the dreadful path
Of the outsallying victors; far behind
Black ashes note where their proud city stood.
Within yon forest is a gloomy glen -
Each tree which guards its darkness from the day,
Waves o’er a warrior’s tomb.

…

From kings and priests and statesmen war arose,
Whose safety is man’s deep unbettered woe,
Whose grandeur his debasement. Let the axe
Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall;
And where its venomed exhalations spread
Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay
Quenching the serpent’s famine, and their bones
Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast,
A garden shall arise, in loveliness
Surpassing fabled Eden.

Felicity Arbuthnot comments on this blog post:

David Cameron should be made to read this at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, 11.11.2012, as Obama and leaders across all Western countries taking part in their murderous, illegal assassinations, slaughters and ram raids. Thank you.

Reaction from Richard Rozoff to this comment:

Splendid idea.

School children in Britain, here in the U.S. and throughout the English-speaking world are given poems of Shelley’s like “Ode to the West Wind” (without having its true purport explained) or “Adonais” to read while passing over completely his major works like “Queen Mab,” “The Cenci,” “The Revolt of Islam,” “Hellas” and “Prometheus Unbound” as unfit for, politically speaking, virginibus puerisque.

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Thatcher’s Downing Street child abuse scandal

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This video from Britain is called Inquiry launched into Tory child abuse.

By Sadie Robinson in Britain:

Tue 6 Nov 2012

Child abuse scandal: the cover-up goes to the top

David Cameron has announced an investigation into allegations that senior Tories abused children during the 1970s and 1980s.

He was forced to make the move following claims that one senior Tory raped a child, Steve Messham, in north Wales “more than a dozen times”.

The senior Tory is said to have been a top ally of Margaret Thatcher.

The allegations are shocking enough. But more appalling is the fact that the establishment covered them up. Police dismissed victims as liars. An investigation into abuse in 2000 was limited to abuse that occurred inside children’s homes.

Those who had been driven elsewhere to be abused by others, including senior Tories, couldn’t give evidence about that. The final report protected the names of several alleged abusers—including two senior Tories.

A previous inquiry commissioned by Clwyd County Council was never published. Copies of it were pulped so that the local authority could maintain its insurance cover.

Politicians and the press are usually eager to denounce paedophiles and call for tougher sanctions for abusers. But when people in power abuse children, they turn a blind eye. It seems some abusers matter more than others.

Along with Cameron’s inquiry, the police investigation into allegations of child abuse in north Wales could also be reopened. Yet the entire establishment has failed victims of abuse time and time again as it has continued to protect people in power.

Sadly there’s no guarantee that fresh investigations will deliver truth or justice. This scandal doesn’t simply condemn individual Tories. It’s an indictment of the sick system they uphold.

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