Actually, I think his stance on Iraq is an act that is greatly endangering his job. While I don’t agree with his position, I at least admire his willingness to stand up for what he believes in when it may well cost him his job.
Lobsang, you have an extremely valid point but Blair seems to take this kind of behaviour to a higher level.
I have met/seen one or two politicians that reject this way of working but they are generally from political parties that haven’t got a hope in hell of ever getting into power.
Heh, Blair is the quintessential oily politician. Otherwise I couldn’t tell you, I haven’t read much about Margaret Thatcher and I would really only be reflecting my particular strata of society if I commented on her.
Well Major was pretty much a non-entity in my book, but I wasn’t paying as much attention then either. I only started paying attention to politics really around 99, and really deeply in 2000 after I married an Israeli.
Erek
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I’ve had a couple of talks/briefs with Blair and he’s completely the opposite of how the media presents him - the two things that made him stand out to me where:
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He treated my like an equal.
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I quickly worked out that i couldn’t bullsh*t him by doing the “techie” act. First time thats ever happened to me. I’d hate to be that guy’s mechanic.
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Blair- toadying sycophant who has ignored his election promises and isolated the British Left.
Major- contributed alot to the Irish peace process, grey man, grey suit. didn’t do alot.
Thatcher- From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
Heath- has the blood of thirteen innocent people on his hands and thats just to start.
Looking through that list and comparing it with their US counterparts, the only time the Pommy PM was overshadowed on the world stage was Major v Clinton.
I think **Tony Blair ** has major boinkability.
It’s true that she may not have been as inherently evil as the others on your list, but nonetheless she is fully deserving of all the hate and bile on view in this thread, and a whole lot more. Thatcher vigorously and mercilessly pursued an extreme (and unsuccessful) economic agenda which consigned millions of ordinary working people to the scrapheap. The real cost of her frankly insane pursuit of some faddish economic precepts were to rob millions of men and women, hundreds of towns and communities, of their livelihood, their self-respect and their dignity. She engineered sky-high unemployment with a ruthless disregard for what this meant to real people, and while fully aware that the blunt threat of unemployment was a good way of keeping people ‘obedient’. She was, and remains, dangerously extremist, callous, oblivious to the pain and suffering and misery that she caused, and utterly without sympathy for the ‘scum’ working class she despises so much, in spite of her own relatively modest origins. As far as she was concerned, if a few million wasted, unemployed men and women were the price we (as a nation) had to pay for her economic principles, well… so be it. Public services were run down and basically left to rot, on the callous and calculated assumption that if people couldn’t pay for their education and medical care, they were probably not worth educating or taking care of.
She was in power for so long not because she had any special merits, but because the Labour party for so long failed to offer any adequate opposition. Fielding Michael Foot against her in a general election was about as egregious an error as any political party could have made at the time.
She lied to us about the Belgrano. She lied to us about Westland. She lied to us about the unemployment figures. She sent young men to die in the Falklands, and then when some of them came back maimed and wounded, she banned them from the ‘victory’ parade in Whitehall becaus they wouldn’t present the right ‘image’.
An ethical problem that religious people often debate is ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’. In similar vein, the fact that Thatcher was not ravaged by scores of horribly painful, lingering and disfiguring diseases for the past 30 years of her life is damn near proof that either there is no God, or he doesn’t belive in justice.
Blair: I hew to the conventional wisdom about him, ie that he is unusually slick and unprincipled, even for a politician. I am open to evidence to the contrary though…I remember having some warm feelings for him right after 9/11.
Major: No strong feelings about him.
Thatcher: I take delight in holding a view of her that is diametrically opposed to the overwhelming consensus in this thread. I have a deep admiration for her.
I am unfamiliar with the other three, but I think Churchill may have been the greatest statesman of this century.
The fact that those are the people you choose to compare her favourably to is something I find very interesting.
Blair: I know (or have read) that he is the Clinton of Great Britian, but darn it, I like him. I can’t really comment as to his domestic record, but when it comes to foreign policy, he seems spot-on.
Thatcher: God bless her. The Iron Lady is the sort of leader that nations get far too infrequently, and rarely appreciate until well after. The Reagan of Britian.
Thatcher: Interminable domestic policy, good foreign policy, inadvertently (I hope) destroyed the Tories by driving the wets out.
Major: Kind of a non-entity. Douglas Hurd or Michael Heseltine would have made a better PM. Spend the last two years of his PMship brawling with John Redwood.
Blair: Not bad, but he would probably be more tolerable if he had a lower margin in the Commons (though that’s mainly due to William Hague’s ineptness).
Callaghan was a slot-filler, and I don’t know enough about Heath, Wilson, or his predecessors (though I’m partial to MacMillan) to comment.
It does seems strange that we’re the only country in the western world to have ever had the first Jewish Prime minister and Female Prime Minister.
Heath may have the blood of 13 on his hands but Wilson has the blood of 3500. It was his express refusal to intervene before the violence began which ensured that it would.
Blair? Floating above a sea of cess. Unfortunately his balloon has a leak.
Major? Minimus.
Thatcher? The best peace-time PM of the 20th Century. She turned the UK around, defeated agression both inside the UK and outside, and played a major part in the fall of the Soviet Union. Her only mistake was the Poll Tax: she refused to admit it and it brought her down.
Callaghan? Non-entity.
Wilson? Don’t know
Heath? Idiot. He let the unions defeat him.
In 100 years, history will pick out Churchill and Thatcher; the rest will be footnotes.
Best Prime Minister: Churchill (First term)
Best Prime Minister Since 1950: MacMillian
Worst Prime Minister: Callaghan
Best Politician never to be Prime Minister: Roy Jenkins, Rab Butler, Kenneth Clarke, and Paddy Ashdown all come to mind.
Worst Party Leader: Michael Foot (Labor), William Hague (Tory), and all Liberal leaders from the mid-1930’s to Jeremy Thorpe.
Israel’s Golda Meir was Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974. A woman and a Jew!
Speaking as an American relatively ignorant of the domestic policies of the PMs in question:
I find it odd that Blair is decried as the ultimate oily politician at the same time as he’s being denounced for holding firm to an extremely unpopular position. Thatcher struck me as heartless, although not as aggressively evil as some have implied.
As for ____ having XX innocent blood on his or hands, I think this is true of most world leaders. Without knowing the details, this isn’t really a compelling indictment. To take an extreme example, the nations that actively fought the Nazis sacrificed innocent lives to do so.
Speaking of which, we learned in history class that Chamberlain was a coward and Churchill was a hero.
Hey, why don’t prime ministers have stereotypically British names like Neville or Winston anymore? How about a Nigel next time?
It’s debatable whether Israel counts as “the western world”, but let’s not open that can of worms shall we? For the record, this site gives a list of female PMs since Mrs Bandaranaike. The Jewish PM was Benjamin Disraeli, but he’d converted to Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) long before he entered politics, so maybe he doesn’t count either.
History has told us that Chamberlain’s policy was wrong, not that he was a coward – it’s people’s misunderstanding of history and general laziness of thinking that can’t tell the difference IMHO.
I don’t think of Winston as a typically British name, in fact I’d be surprised if anyone can think of another outside of the Churchill family apart from those named after him.
I know it’s the wrong forum, but can I get a cite on that? Remembering that Disraeli was an Anglican (and, in fact, Jews were forbidden from sitting in the House at the time), I wasn’t aware that the UK had had a Jewish PM.
I thought that the first Jewish PM was Izzy Isaacs, in Australia.