Awol

Damn you 29! Please delete or merge MODs.

Ta.

'President' Blair waits on voters of Ireland

Tony Blair is in line to be proclaimed Europe’s first president within weeks if the Irish vote “yes” in today’s referendum.

Senior British sources have told The Times that President Sarkozy has decided that Mr Blair is the best candidate and that Angela Merkel has softened her opposition.

The former Prime Minister could be ushered into the European Union’s top post at a summit on October 29.

Ms Merkel, the German Chancellor, was opposed to Mr Blair because she believed that the post should go to a country that had adopted the euro but British sources said that she may now be “biddable” if Germany and France get plum posts in the new European Commission.

German sources insisted that it was far from clear that Ms Merkel had changed her mind and there were suggestions in Paris that Mr Sarkozy was happy to be seen to be backing Mr Blair because he knew that Ms Merkel would scupper the appointment.

Mr Blair, whose claims are being advanced by ministers in London, will not enter the race unless he is certain of winning. He is wary of giving up his many other commitments, spanning business, the Middle East, climate change and his Faith Foundation.

If the Irish ratify the Lisbon treaty — the result will be declared tomorrow — only the signatures of the Polish and Czech presidents will be needed for full ratification. Warsaw is expected to come on board swiftly. President Klaus is harder to predict but diplomatic sources expect him to agree quickly, possibly after receiving a sweetener from Germany.

The decision presents a dilemma for the Conservatives, whose conference takes place next week. David Cameron remains committed to a referendum on the treaty. He has declined to say what he would do if the treaty were ratified before the general election.

Despite pressure from Eurosceptics, he would be unlikely to hold a referendum if he came to power after ratification, which would mean renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU, but a Europe with Mr Blair at its head would worry Tories even more.

Ms Merkel has touted Jean-Claude Juncker, of Luxembourg, for the role, but the backroom dealer would hardly set European pulses racing. It is understood that President Sarkozy proposed Felipe González, of Spain, privately to Ms Merkel, but that she was suspicious of endorsing the Socialist.

If this Treaty/Constitution gets ratified it will end the culture of democratic accountability that all European nations are built on. The acid test for a democracy is whether or not you can remove the politicians above you via the ballot box. That right ends with Lisbon and the appointment of an unaccountable European elite that will forever be beyond our control.

So VT'ers what are your views? If your Irish then please let us know how or if you voted and why.

This thread has given me new confidence in my pulling skills. I hit three figures by 21 and stopped counting.

Edit: The vast majority were utter slags though.

well the poll does say people ..but how many would it be if you only counted the women :winkold:

Ah.

At a guess between 140 and 160, but it is a guess.

This thread has given me new confidence in my pulling skills. I hit three figures by 21 and stopped counting.

Edit: The vast majority were utter slags though.

Economic Left/Right: -4.88

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.56

Surprised myself with that.

Centre left.

You see, i'd have gone for that too Ash, but it's not an option.

EDIT: done that gag to death. Have put a tick in the centre left box too. That hasn't changed for 20 years, although if anything i'm getting further left the older i get, which is not meant to happen, is it?

It's meant to be the other way around, AFAIK?

Well Mr Churchill said:

If you aren't a liberal aged 20, you haven't got a heart, if you aren't a conservative aged 40, you haven't got a head.

It's fair to say he's a little biased though :winkold:

Not represented. The left-right scale is intellectually bankrupt.

Political Compass provides an alternative typology.

Thank you for the threadjacking

I voted Centre Right but I guess I'm a bit of a mix really. More to Left parties over Health and Education, to the Right on Crime, Judiciary and Europe, towards the Liberals on Drug Policy and the Greens on the Environment.

Basically there is no one I can vote for who represents the majority of my opinions.

Nice pic Rev, and to all the people who have dealt with an Indian girl, I am truly jealous. I want to make it clear it's not a fetish, I'm just attracted to them. Off to Ilford I go >>>>>

I'm not sure if they've started their Heathrow service yet but if you ever take an internal flight in India fly with Kingfisher. The stewardesses are the finest women I've ever seen so if you've got a thing for Indian chicks, you'll be in heaven.

It doesn't irritate me at all, the opposite in fact. I particularly like re-reading threads that involve making predictions about stuff. There are some canny folks on here.

it's no worse than going for a big dump.

Strangely, I always feel a sense of well being and satisfaction after a serious jobbie.

Don't listen to all the bollocks about shoving things down your japs eye, it's all pain free and over in minutes

:shock:

The GU nurse obviously took a dislike to me then. Not an experience I'd like to repeat, ever.

Mandy won't oust him until after the Irish have voted for the EU treaty, so he's got a few weeks yet.

I said the same on here months ago, pushing through the removal of British national independence is Fondlebum's only political purpose.

I hereby propose changing your movement from burn it all down to string them all up.

Well the lies are unravelling now..

Libya paid for medical advice that helped Lockerbie bomber's release

Medical evidence that helped Megrahi, 57, to be released was paid for by the Libyan government, which encouraged three doctors to say he had only three months to live.

The life expectancy of Megrahi was crucial because, under Scottish rules, prisoners can be freed on compassionate grounds only if they are considered to have this amount of time, or less, to live.

Meanwhile..

Gordon Brown vetoes Libyan payout to IRA victims

GORDON BROWN personally vetoed an attempt to force Colonel Muammar Gadaffi to compensate IRA bomb victims because it might have jeopardised British oil deals with Libya.

Documents passed to The Sunday Times reveal how the prime minister took a close interest in a campaign to secure payouts for the 2,500 families of those blown up by the Libyan-supplied Semtex explosive used by republican bombers.

However, Brown refused to help the victims because of government concerns that putting pressure on Gadaffi might lead to Libya withdrawing co-operation over trade and the war against Islamic terrorism.

The documents will cause embarrassment for Brown as he faces new questions over the early release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

There's more..

That's it. Gordon Brown isn't going to make it to the general election

I could hardly believe my ears when Jack Straw said yesterday that “I certainly didn’t talk to the PM. There is no paper trail to suggest he was involved at all” in the link between prisoner release negotations and trade relations with Libya, which Straw admits existed.

No paper trail? That’s Watergate language. And, just as with Watergate, the unravelling has been swift: it now appears that Straw wrote to Brown warning that the Libyans might block a BP oil deal unless the bomber was released. President Barack Obama will go nuts when he learns all this.

Anyone would think that Brown has actually gone a bit tonto. Oh, hang on..

Gordon Brown ‘on drugs to control depression’

"Brown has recently been given a "long list of forbidden foods". The civil servant, who works regularly with the PM, told Ward that Brown had been banned from eating and drinking several specific things "because of the drugs he's on".

Top of the list of foods that Brown can no longer touch, the source told Ward, were cheese, Chianti and over-ripe avocados - which immediately rang alarm bells for Ward. "Every doctor in Britain would recognise these contra-indications instantly: for they are the great verbotens for people taking MAOI drugs."

MAOIs - which stands for Mono Amine Oxidase Inhibitors - are generally a last line of treatment for major depression, when other anti-depressant drugs have failed. They can also be very effective in treating OCD. But they are potentially extremely dangerous. If the patient eats or drinks the wrong thing, they can result in death – hence the PM's "long list of forbidden foods".

Like any normal person I have sympathy with anyone suffering mental illness, however it's very clear to me that this man cannot be allowed to continue in post for much longer.

ESTABLISHMENT 'COLLUDING IN PLIGHT OF SICK MAN BROWN'

"The Prime Minister of Great Britain is a man too ill to be holding the Office." This was the conclusion last week of a senior civil servant liaising regularly with Gordon Brown. For reasons which will become clear, the person involved will not go public with the evidence for this conclusion. The same applies to a high-ranking Treasury official who told us "In both a physical and mental sense, the Prime Minister is a very sick man, seriously disabled." Three years ago, an Opposition MP told nby "He is on extremely heavy doses of cutting-edge anti-depressants, but so far they have made little difference". And during the last fortnight, another high-ranking government source claimed "He is now on pills which restrict the foods he can eat and what he can drink. He is losing the sight of his good eye quite rapidly. It's a mess, and nobody knows what to do".

Do Labour MP's have the courage to put the country before their own petty ambitions? Maybe..

An October revolt is plotted. Brown's head is not safe yet

"When Westminster reassembles, everything will come down to three things. The first is Labour's collective state of mind. Today, after a week where Brown's enemies have pummelled him for his dismal equivocations over the Lockerbie bomber, the backbench verdict might be pretty close to YouGov's poll verdict in yesterday's Sun, with a mere 16% of voters thinking Brown is doing a good job. It would be "in the name of God, go" time. "

I thought Farage had one or two allegations levied against him over the years ?

He's claimed every penny of his MEP allowances but instead of pocketing them he put it into UKIP campaigning. If he was a good European he'd be using to to buy a farmhouse in Tuscany or similar, just like most other MEP's do.

Not heard about anything else allegation wise..

Farage as Speaker would be a stroke of genius. Despite being batshit crazy he wouldn't be in the pocket of any party and could have a genuine go at cleaning the place up.

Plus Bercow is a horrible little weasel so I'd love to see him thrown out, whether that's against Parliamentary Protocol or not.

Well tomorrow Darling will announce an increase of 11 billion in our donations to the IMF emergency fund.

That 11 billion we don't have so will have to borrow and pay interest on just to give it away again.

Is it any freaking wonder our country is broke? Tossers.

Churchill had a good line: "You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else."

Like.

maybe the US could cast their collective mind back to when they awarded medals to the commander and crew of the boat that shot down the iranian passenger flight killing 290.

US spies blamed Iran for Lockerbie bomb

[snip]American intelligence documents blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer expected to be freed this week, had instructed his lawyers to produce internal US intelligence communications unavailable to his defence team at his trial in 2000.

The cables, from the American Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), suggest that Iran was behind the attack on Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people in 1988, in response to the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner by the USS Vincennes, an American warship, five months earlier.

One document that the defence team had planned to produce was a memo from the DIA dated September 24, 1989. It states: “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar (Mohtashemi-Pur), the former Iranian minister of interior. [/snip]

From what Megrahi said in The Times interview I wouldn't like to bet that information isn't coming out anyway, leaving egg on the faces of us and the Americans. No wonder they were so against him being released.

The beach for both?

Lockerbie release casts dark shadow over Britain's ties with US

The release of the Lockerbie bomber is casting a long shadow over relations between Britain and the United States, where senior figures in the Obama Administration have expressed dismay over the Government’s failure to take a stand.

The controversy over the decision to let Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi go home to Libya was further stirred after Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, said in a Libyan television interview yesterday that his release was linked to negotiations over oil and gas contracts.

Downing Street insisted that the decision — condemned by the White House yesterday as “outrageous and disgusting” — was a matter solely for the SNP-led Scottish government. However, a senior US official told The Times last night: “We believe it was the wrong decision — I don’t know if the UK thinks so or not. It has been extraordinarily silent on this issue.”

The official suggested that it was disingenuous for the Government to claim that responsibility lay only with the devolved Scottish government because the release of al-Megrahi had wider foreign policy implications.

Although diplomats say that Washington understands the constitutional independence of the Scottish Justice Ministry, some US policymakers are known to believe that the Government has deliberately “walked by the other side of the street”, possibly in the hope of earning a vast trade pay-back from a country with the biggest proven oil reserves in Africa.

Shortly after the former Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to Libya to meet Colonel Gaddafi in 2007, BG Group, Shell and BP secured substantial contracts with Libya.

Yesterday David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, dismissed any suggestion that al-Megrahi’s release was linked to business deals as “a slur”. In the wake of Washington’s outrage, however, he warned that the way in which the Libyan Government acted over the next few days would be significant in determining how the rest of the world treated the former pariah state.

It was also disclosed that a visit to the country by the Duke of York next month could be cancelled.

Mr Miliband’s assertions were apparently contradicted in a Libyan television interview with Mr Gaddafi broadcast yesterday. Colonel Gaddafi’s son said that discussion of al-Megrahi’s release had always been tied up with the oil and gas business.

“In all commercial contracts, for oil and gas with Britain, [al-Megrahi] was always on the negotiating table,” he said on the Libyan channel Al Mutawassit. Tony Blair raised al-Megrahi’s case each time he visited Libya as Prime Minister, he added. “All British interests were linked to the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi.”

Downing Street also released details of a letter that Gordon Brown had written to Colonel Gaddafi, urging him to treat the return of the terminally-ill bomber with “sensitivity”.

David Cameron pressed Mr Brown yesterday on whether he supported the decision by Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary, to free al-Megrahi after he had served less than eight years of his 27-year sentence.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Cameron pointed out that Mr Gaddafi had publicly thanked the Scottish authorities and the British Government for their stance, raising questions about London’s role.

“The fact that the decision to release him was taken by the Scottish Justice Secretary does not preclude you, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, from now expressing your opinion on a subject that is of great public concern,” the Conservative leader said.

“The public are entitled to know what you think of the decision.”

Mr Blair was accused by a former Cabinet minister of paving the way for the early release on his visit to Libya two years ago. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was Scottish Secretary when Pam Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988, alleged that the release stemmed from the prisoner transfer agreement that the former Prime Minister negotiated with Colonel Gaddafi.

Sir Malcolm told The Times: “When Tony Blair negotiated the transfer option he knew that al-Megrahi would benefit. That was the starting point for his release.” A spokesman for Mr Blair, who is travelling in China, declined to comment.

It also emerged that Mr Miliband was informed of Scotland’s desire to release the Lockerbie bomber well before the decision was made public this week.

Mr MacAskill is understood to have sought advice from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about whether there was any legal impediment to releasing al-Megrahi from Greenock prison on compassionate grounds. According to a Downing Street source, Mr Miliband was “kept in the loop”.

P. J. Crowley, the US State Department spokesman, has confirmed that Washington repeatedly sought Downing Street’s views on the matter. “Going back literally months, we have been deeply engaged with both the Scottish government, Scottish authorities, and the British Government on this question,” he said.

“We have raised it in a variety of venues with a variety of officials at the highest levels of all governments and we expressed our firm conviction that this individual should serve out his time in jail.”

FWIW I think the government has done the right thing for the country, even if that doesn't square with justice.

At home with the Lockerbie bomber

Al-Megrahi promised that before he died he would present new evidence through his Scottish lawyers that would exonerate him. “My message to the British and Scottish communities is that I will put out the evidence and ask them to be the jury,” he said. He refused to elaborate. Asked who, then, was responsible for the deaths of 270 people who died in the Lockerbie bombing, al-Megrahi smiled. “It’s a very good question but I’m not the right person to ask.” He insisted that it was not Libya and would not be drawn on suggestions that it was Syria, Iran or the Palestinians.

.......

He appealed for the families’ understanding. “They believe I’m guilty which in reality I’m not. One day the truth won’t be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: ‘The truth never dies’.”

I reckon this might unfold in a way that hasn’t been anticipated by our glorious rulers. If he drops any evidence of Syrian involvement that will completely bugger the ongoing US/UK efforts to bring them in from the cold.

It'll make our Justice System look a bit toss too.

I and embarassed and ashamed by this decision. I am sorry USA.

It's realpolitik mate, Libya has unexploited fossil fuels worth a mint and we're now in the driving seat to mine/drill them. Blair set the scene for this in 2004 and we've been working towards it ever since.

The idea that we are showing mercy to the alleged perpetrator of the biggest terrorist attack on British soil is laughable. We need natural gas in massive quantities if we are to avoid getting blackmailed by Russia as Europe has during most recent winters. Along with Qatar (which is already tied into a long term deal with us) Libyan exports will form a large part of our national energy strategy.

It might sound harsh but I think the main reason the US Administration is so pissed off is because we got in there first.

Hopefully, this won't be the end of it in terms of finding out the truth.

Afraid not, the appeals had to be dropped to enable compassionate release.

Case closed.

He would never have lived to see an appeal through anyway.

True but they could legally have continued despite the appellants death in order to clear his name. Not anymore.

Hopefully, this won't be the end of it in terms of finding out the truth.

Afraid not, the appeals had to be dropped to enable compassionate release.

Case closed.