Peter (my Lord) Mandelson is running Britain, not from the Houses of Parliament but from Lord Rothschild’s villa in Corfu. Nice job if you can get it! I suppose the response to this would be the same as the Tory MP criticised for his expenses claim retorted that we were all jealous. Maybe.
The sad thing is we’re talking about New Labour, a party hijacked by Mandelson and the likes which came into being to represent working people. At every opportunity Mandelson has very publicly shown his love for an opulent life style. He borrowed rather a lot of money for his London home from a very wealthy fellow MP then he was shown cavorting with wealthy and possibly very corrupt Russian businessmen, people who cashed in on the demise of the socialist state. We learn from the Independent report that it was Nat Rothschild, a friend of Mandy, who introduced him and Osborne to the Russian Deripaska.
During the Blair period questions were continually raised about the close links with the wealthy, people like Bernie Eccleston. Scandal was on the horizon. Mandelson needs to decide whether he wants to take running Britain seriously and stop playing the fool. Regrettably this is just another example of how our political elite demonstrate that self-gratification takes precedence over representing the people.
Now there is talk of Peter replacing Brown, if he hasn’t already done so. The Blairites didn’t leave when Blair did and as we have seen Mandy conferred with Blair before coming back into government. He had been in exile in Europe occasionally coming into the public eye. We only glimpsed what he was up to then. One thing that came to light was his part in the European fisheries legislation which would have an extremely adverse effect on African countries dependent on fishing. George Monbiot likened it to Britain in the nineteenth century when millions of Indians died due to British policy of exporting food. But they say Mandelson is the New Labour politician most feared by the Tories. You can see why.
The only thing that stops you, like the Government, being laughable is the tragedy and the fact that we are approaching the culmination of the damage that the Blair project has done to the entire Labour movement. You were the one that told me on this board a couple of years back ‘not to worry’ about Mandelson being back in any position of influence. That was a little before you posted that you felt that that the imminent Glasgow East by election could be ‘the turning point’. Now we have a visibly under-occupied Labour Party conference applauding the unelected, twice disgraced ‘Lord’ Mandelson to the rafters. How sad, how tawdry, how truly tragic.I’m so glad that I had the dignity and self respect some time ago to make sure that I’m not part of all this – you really are the proverbial toast and none of you on the inside seem the slighest bit aware of just how bad the party’s position nopw is… by the way meantime we tonight have yet another TV documentary on greedy MPs shafting the rest of us taxpayers to pay for their overseas junkets.