rebarbarised

Wait a hundred years for a collapse, and then avert it

John Kay writes of the financial crisis of 2008,

The political left offered no diagnosis or new ideas, and it gained no electoral advantage. Instead, across Europe, the parties that had waited a century for capitalism to collapse under its own contradictions congratulated themselves that such collapse had been averted by the injection of incredible amounts—trillions of dollars—of taxpayer funds into the banking system.

in Prospect, Issue 186, August 2011.

A salutary lesson pithily expressed, don't you think?

Noel Gallagher attacks Blair's 'record'...

... according to this BBC story.

I think Tony Blair should respond with his assessment of Oasis's record since 1997.

I wonder who would be left looking like they'd pissed all over their own legacy.

We may not all know it yet, but we're going to miss him when he's gone

I agree with J.G. Ballard in the New Statesman:

I suspect that we will miss Tony Blair when he is gone. The boyish charm is fraying but still intact. The exhaustion, the desperate need to convince everyone of the truth of his own delusions, the raw emotions worn as a kind of exoskeleton, all show one of the great actor-managers in heroic decline... He is the beaten husband, still in charge of the car keys and the TV remote, but aware that the rest of the household despises him and is impatient for him to bring down the curtain. He jokes and winces, and makes fun of his own despair.

I don't feel comfortable with many of the decisions Tony Blair has taken in our name, but, if you asked me to name a politician who has even a tiny hope of being PM with whom I would feel more comfortable, I couldn't. How quickly Labour supporters seem to have forgotten those 18 grim years. The last nine have been so much better. And, as Ballard says, "Will we be happy with [Gordon Brown]? I seriously doubt it."