May 02, 2005
Leak shows 'Blair set on Iraq war a year before invasion' By Michael Evans
... It was alleged yesterday that Tony Blair had decided on war with Iraq nearly a year before the invasion, according to leaked Downing Street documents.
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It's not all tears. There is a real appreciation, for the first time in my life, that the state is an enemy, the "illusory community".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/05/02/do0202 .xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/05/02/ixopinion.html
"I was in France last month, campaigning against the EU constitution. Our neighbours were in one of their periodic grumps. Yes, they were against the treaty; but largely because they associated it with their detested ruling caste. On doorstep after doorstep, people spoke of their own ministers as if of an occupying power. If they end up rejecting the constitution, it will in many ways be a rejection of the political class by everyone else - of the pays légal by the pays réel, as they say in France.
I came back feeling smug in a very English sort of way. ... Five weeks later, every ounce of smugness has been knocked out of me. Tramping around my Home Counties constituency, I have come across a degree of anti-politician hostility that I have not encountered in 17 years of door-knocking. All politicians, I keep being told, are conmen. ... never has the mood been so widespread - not, at any rate, in Britain. Think of the way the party leaders were booed when they appeared on Question Time last Thursday. Ponder this newspaper's poll the following day, indicating that 79 per cent of people believe that most or all MPs habitually lie."
The author of this article, being an ass Tory politician, then draws the most absurd conclusion about why this state of affairs has arisen. But what he saw is how it is. There is a collapse in trust in the bourgeois political order several Western European countries.
Now if this is not a key moment for the left to intervene, I don't know what is.
Richard.