Labour Party Scandals Under Blair/Brown

[RowlingStone]

I was only a teenager in the early naughties and yet I remember so many Labour scandals so I often feel surprised that they never get mentioned here in the political threads.

The ones I remember are David Kelly, weapons of mass destruction/Iraq war generally, A-level results falsely marked down to prevent grade inflation (Estelle Morris took the fall for that), PFI, extensive hospital waiting lists, cash for honours, something to do with Peter Mandelson, Carole Caplin and some dodgy flats, Labour offspring getting into fee paying or selective schools, Two Jags Prescott and lots of sex scandals (Blunkett, Prescott, maybe more).

I suppose it’s always given me this sense that regardless of the colour of their rosettes all politicians are ultimately the same (self-serving hypocrites).

I was curious whether everyone else just had very short term memories or those scandals weren’t as big a deal at the time as some of the current ones.

100%this !! You have an amazing memory OP if you can recall all that info from your teenage years .Also teenagers ,particularly early teens would have other interests rather than political news ,unless surname is Rees Mogg!

@Southwestten please listen to The Rest is Politics podcast where Alistair Campbell comes over as a very honest and likeable man who has also been very open about his mental health problems.

When Blair was elected, I was initially delighted after 18 years of the Tories, but then he stuck to many of the Tories' policies, including keeping essential services as private companies, and I think that was a mistake. He had a huge majority and could have pushed through some really radical stuff, but he took the view, probably rightly from an electoral point of view, that Labour could only get elected and then re-elected by appealing to the centre as well as to the left, so he had stay very centrist in what they did and not rock the boat too much.

He did leave a very toxic legacy by carrying on with, and in fact massively extending, the use of PFI to finance projects like rebuilding schools and hospitals. Private companies are making a mint out of those contracts now and they don't represent good value for money for the taxpayer in the long run.

Also, I'm prepared to be told I'm wrong, but Labour improved things for working families by bringing in the working tax credits and pushing up child benefit. They did also bring in the national minimum wage, but what was really needed was strong employment legislation to protect workers' rights to a living wage, decent pension provision, sick leave, maternity leave and so on. People in work should not have to rely on benefits to top up what they earn to what they need to live on.

And of course the other area they totally failed to regulate was housing. House prices and rents are now extortionate. Tenancies are insecure, which is a particular nightmare for families. Rural housing is a huge problem. And so on.

Finally, no government in my lifetime has had the courage to tell the electorate that we have to take a long, hard look at the NHS. Free health care at the point of need is one of the greatest things this country has to offer, but the standard of care is far too patchy, and the delays in getting access to care are totally unacceptable. We also need a rational and humane way of looking after very old people and people with chronic health issues and disabilities that meshes with the NHS and ensures that NHS beds are for critical care and not social care.

<soapbox away now>

😀

but the iraq war is mentioned on virtually every thread about labour….and the tories

someone says something Bad the tories did and within about 5 posts someone says the words ‘iraq war’

so I don’t know how on earth youve missed that

The right bring up the 2008 global crash as an argument against a labour government even now, but very rarely is Iraq mentioned

Well, the right have very good reason not to bring Iraq up since they were absolutely balls deep in it at the time. The Tories were much, much more pro invasion than Labour and if they'd voted against invading rather than for, the vote in Parliament would actually have failed. So naturally, they want to say as little as possible!

MPs were given a dossier of all the evidence as to why they should vote for war. But that dossier was full of incorrect information and actual lies. And Blair knew that. Even the secret services warned him against using the information. So when MPs voted, they voted on the basis that they'd been told the truth about Sadam's capabilities. That was the scandal. That Blair lied in order to persuade MPs to vote for war.

Meh. Tory sleaze in the run up to the Blair years.

Fuck sake, posters here have forgotten how and why Boris Johnson went and that was only June of this year.🤷‍♀️

Two of the worst scandals were Cyril Smith's paedophilic abuse and the Jeremy Thorpe debacle. Both Liberals

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal
And this. A stain on all political administrations. Similar abuse still ongoing

Its even worse, File on 4 had the case of a victim, trafficked as a child, despite Police and SS, still trafficked now as an older teen, moved around the country freely, thought to have been raped over 1000 times.

So much for "modern slavery" more like "a sleep at the wheel"

Personally, i do not blame any political party as such, it is the Police's failure to act on criminality... doubtless blaming the victim, judging by how the Met behave.

But it is down to the Govt & Parliament to then act against the Police if they fail in their duties (and provid the funding) & they aren't doing this... so you can't undo the past but we can prevent future abuse.

twitter.com/allisonpearson/status/1217375946568847360?lang=en-GB
Gordon Brown's govt 2008 ordered police not to investigate

Well apart from the small matter of the Iraq war because of non existent weapons of mass destruction.

There was a very long and independent inquiry by Chillcot, Blair was found not to have lied.

The USA was going to war with or without the UK, we provided very little military hardware, the terrible loss of life, destruction & instability was always going to happen, Bush did not need the UK/Blair.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/02/how-paedophiles-infiltrated-the-left-harriet-harman-patricia-hewitt
Also I believe that in 20 years or so the physical mutilation of children through transition will be viewed as a scandal.
Also the lockdown rules which shut down schools which led to the abuse and in extreme cases murder of children eg Arthur L-H.

The older you get, the more you realise they are all as bad as each other. I used to think my FIL was dense for thinking this. I now realise it is a realistic mature viewpoint. There really is no Left = good, right = bad.

And the Iraq war/WMD rightly ended Blair. If it had been Boris he’d have scratched his head, made some joke about the big pow pows, claimed he couldn’t remember what he actually said and then reminded us all of his 80 seat majority and ability to get Brexit done before telling us that the British people wanted him to move on and focus on the big issues.

OP - you and your studded collar have been rumbled. Nice try though 👏

Oh don't be ridiculous there was nothing like the dishonesty, incompetence and nastiness that we have seen since 2019.

Seemed terrible at the time but turned out to be mild compared to 'cash for questions' etc. As aforesaid they are all as bad as each other, especially where extra-marital affairs are concerned.

So what did Saddam use on the Kurds? killing over 5000.

President Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) pursued the most extensive chemical program during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), when he waged chemical warfare against his foe. He also used chemicals in 1988 in the Al-Anfal Campaign against his civilian Kurdish population and during a popular uprising in the south in 1991

Then there is the terrible genocide against the Marsh Arabs, he killed 10s of 1000s of them & completely destroyed their way of life by draining the marshes, causing untold environmental damage too.

But thats all ok, let him do this.

@sosolongago exactly and people who always vote for one party no matter how much that party has changed etc don't help
You need to be voting for here and now and what someone is offering not Labour because you and family always has or conservatives because you like maggie thatcher etc

Sorry not cash for questions, the MPs' expenses scandal over moat cleaning etc

Oh come off it, saying it was the end of Blair is some serious revisionism.

Iraq was invaded in 2003, Blair was pm until 2007

Chilcott was highly condemning of Blair and careful with his words. But it's part of the findings that the secret services told Blair that evidence thar he was including came ftom unreliable sources and Blair ignored them. Just as its in evidence that the govt knew that the newspapers were conflating facts from the dossier and wrongky reporting information, but as it was helpful to their cause, they never corrected the info. Just as it's in evidence that part of the evidence was an American student's thesis which Blair then plagiarised and altered so that it sounded like received intelligence rather than some hypothetical essay. The US then took that plagiarised evidence and reported it a solid evidence to support war.

Bush didn't go to war and destabilise the middle east alone, though. Blair did that in cahoots with him. In fact Blair later said he felt it was important to stand side by side with Bush. The scandal of the Iraq war has nothing to do with the US, in fact nothing to do with the war, it's to do with what Blair and Campbell did to get us to that war.

Don't be silly. Teenagers aren't a Borg. I used to read Private Eye in the '90s as a teen - mainly for the comics, but the articles too, if they looked juicy. As a result, I was quite well up on politics at the time, and I can still remember quite a bit about '90s political figures and what went on. My own teens do the same now with our Private Eye subscription.

Oh, and I went to uni in 1997 and had part grant, part loan. They were just phasing out grants then, I think. I graduated in 2002 and still owe about £12k in student loans.