Kick Blair in the Ballots!
Today I stepped into a polling booth and left for the first time in my life having not voted for the Labour Party.
Since the Iraq War I have told myself that I would not vote for Labour as long as Blair remained party leader, however, when push came to shove during a General Election I somehow felt as if I was being churlish, risking four years of the Tories simply to prove to myself that I held anti-war credentials.
Especially as the Tories supported Blair's position for the war. Indeed, had the Tories behaved like a proper party of opposition, Blair would have lost the vote to the biggest backbench rebellion ever recorded in the history of Parliament, Blair would have stood down, the next leader would have had to explain to Bush that Britain joining the US in Iraq was now officially off the table.
How different things would be had the Tories taken that stance.
However, after a glance at this morning's paper I finally felt the bile rise and thought, bugger it, I'll vote for the Independent for no other reason than he came to my door and asked me for my vote. He wants to concentrate on local issues and, as it's a local election, I thought fine, "Let's kick Blair in the Ballots".
There were several things in today's paper that swayed me, but foremost in my mind was Clarke's proclamation that all overseas nationals who are in jail would face deportation at the end of their sentence.
US readers might remember I talked here about the trouble that Clarke had got himself into. Brief recap:
The charge against the Home Secretary is that he allowed 1,023 foreign prisoners, including murderers, rapists and sex offenders, to walk free when legislation demanded that deportation be considered.So Clarke's response has been to move even further to the right, now calling for expulsion for ALL overseas nationals jailed for ANY offence. Imprisonable offences in this country include shoplifting, owning a dog which is dangerously out of control, stealing electricity, giving a false name on train if travelling without a ticket and others too ludicrous to ever contemplate that they could possibly warrant someone's deportation.
His problems were compounded when it was revealed that 288 of them were released after the Home Office was alerted to the problem.
For a Labour Party playing to the middle ground (in Britain this actually means playing to the right wing, slobbering readers of the Daily Mail) this has the potential to be catastrophic. Nothing incites the Mail readers more than the subject of immigration; and when it's immigrants who have committed crimes the Mail readers become incandescent in their outrage.
Now Clarke has been trying to make up for lost time by rounding up anyone that he thinks he perhaps should have previously been considered for deportation and the stories this action produces do not make happy reading:
Ernesto Leal was just 13 when he arrived in Britain in 1977 as a refugee from the persecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime.
Along with his four siblings, the teenager was brought up and educated in Scotland, integrated into UK culture and, with his passport stamped "indefinite leave to stay", he regarded himself as British.
About three years ago, Ernesto Leal was sentenced to 30 months in prison for grievous bodily harm with intent, after a brawl in a pub that he maintains was the result of a racial incident.
On the judge's advice, he served 18 months of his sentence, mostly in an open prison and was eventually released several months ago on probation.
All that changed on Monday when, more than a year after his release from prison, he was arrested by 30 police officers at his London home and taken to Belmarsh detention centre where he was issued with a deportation order to Jamaica because it was stated he was "a threat to the public".
"Why he is being sent to Jamaica nobody knows," said his sister Sonia Leal, 36, yesterday.
If these are the kind of people Clarke is sending out of the country then he should resign. He's fucking about with real people's lives with no more noble motive than taking the heat off his own fat arse.
That such actions can be being taken by a Labour Home Secretary fills me with shame.
The article I've linked to describes a man who's lived here since the age of thirteen, who's father was persecuted by Pinochet for Christ's sake, who was brought to this country by United Nations and who was sponsored by the National Union of Mineworkers as the Labour movements sympathetic response to his persecution.
And now we have a Labour Home Secretary who wants to kick him out the country because he got into a fight in a pub?
These people are frauds in Labour clothing. They share neither our values nor our instincts.
Even Michael Howard, the most repressive Home Secretary I can think of, would have blanched at taking such a course of action.
But Blair cares more about the opinions of the Daily Mail readers than he does about the rights of the children who suffered under Pinochet.
Fuck him. I hope he gets slaughtered at the polls.
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