11 May 2007

Reflections On The End Of Blair

- The BBC coverage of Blair's resignation, on the 10pm news, included his clip from Comic Relief with Catherine Tate ... but no visuals of Dr. David Kelly.

- Gordon Brown, in an interview this month with Time magazine, said, "I take responsibility, as does the whole of the cabinet, for decisions we made on Iraq. There will be no sense in which we seek to walk away from decisions we made." Great new start, Gordon. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg described the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging" of a war of aggression as the "supreme international crime." Until Brown faces up to his role as the war and occupation's paymaster, it will be hard to re-establish trust in Labour leadership, especially about international threats to Britain.

- Finally, have they learnt nothing about public antipathy towards spin? Each of these items were released on the day of Tony Blair's resignation, as good a day to "bury bad news" as it gets.

* A report on the soaring bill for ID cards: figures published by John Reid disclosed that the cost of the scheme has risen by £840m in just six months.

* The Department for Work and Pensions announced the closure of three debt centres with the loss of 380 jobs.

* The number of under-16s whose genetic information has been added to the national DNA database has passed 500,000

* Patients are still being treated on mixed-sex wards in nearly 20 per cent of hospital trusts, 10 years after the Government promised to abolish this

* Record numbers of people were declared bankrupt in the first three months of 2007

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