Just when you though the poster boy for numpty could sink no lower : David Blunkett as reported in The Guardian today :

"I have no desire to take children from their parents and put them in care unless it is an absolute last resort. I did not come into politics to be the King Herod of the Labour party."

My response to which is that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – it’s a duck. If DB doesn’t want to be known as a creepy alienating crypto-fascist (I can’t believe I just used the word crypto-fascist for real) then he should stop attempting to lock people up, take away their civil liberties and/or invade their countries. The sheer cheek of the man. When it was pointed out to him that taking children into care can only be done in the child’s best interests, and that doing so for any other reason is in fact illegal his response was :-

"Our obligations to the welfare of the child are paramount which means they would have to be taken into care if they were likely to suffer as a result."

When he says suffer here what he means is that the child’s parents have no benefits because they have been denied benefit on the orders of Blunkett, D and Blair, T. Sorry David, it just doesn’t work like that. The correct logic goes something like this: I wish to deny this person benefit, however, were I to do so their children would be likely to suffer to such an extent that a local government care order would have to be made, therefore I cannot deprive them of benefit. What DB is saying loud and clear to immigrants is “Fuck off home or I’ll take away your kids.” It’s beyond sick. Even Michael Howard won’t countenance it. This is a pandering on a massive level. Don’t believe me? It goes on :

Mr Blunkett says that the fact that more failed asylum seekers have been removed from the country than ever before is "good news for the left".

But he warns that unless the "necessary medicine" is swallowed and the backlogs and delays in asylum appeals and deportations are sorted out by the next general election then the BNP and the anti-immigration groups will "rub their hands with glee".

First, threatening the public in this way is despicable, ie saying “Come along with us for a little bit of light fascism or look what you might get instead. Whoooooh. Scary Nazis. Whoooh.” Second it is clear from the context that the “necessary medicine” is designed to appease those who might otherwise vote for the BNP! How desperate is new Labour to hold onto power? Is there any price they won’t pay? David, you are a Labour Home Secretary. It is not your place to be appeasing BNP wannabes. It is your place to tell them to stuff their hateful rubbish up their arses and fuck off while they’re doing it. And it’s all so unnecessary because Labour will win the next election easily anyway. Outside of the right wing scandal rags (cf Sun Mail Express), their more demented readers who would never vote labour anyway, Julie Burchill and a few coastal and northern towns no-one gives a stuff about asylum seekers. It’s so not the potential Chappaquiddick they seem to think it is. If you’d told me in 1997 that 6 years later I’d be writing this I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s New Labour all over - 6 years on and none of us can believe it.

Alright - laying Gulf2 on DB’s shoulders seems a tad excessive, but he’s been perfectly happy to go along with it – in fact him and Tone are practically joined at the hip. It seems impossible to imagine these days that pre 1997 Robin Cook was the third most important person in New Labour and where is he now? Cast out and ridiculed because he couldn’t stomach the appalling river of shite issuing forth from No 10 and had the balls to say so.

In fact TB seems to be showing dangerous signs of Stalinisation, not including his desire to rule forever. Tony’s Loyalty Test seems to consist of coming up with ever more extreme, right wing and ideological nonsense, announcing it as essential policy and waiting to see what happens. Anyone who then dares to criticise whatever bobbins he’s come out with is hauled off to the Lubyanka and the most toadying slavish arse lickers are rewarded post haste. Let’s face it – there is simply no other explanation for the excressence known as ‘Dr’ John Reid is there?

I don’t want to get too carried away because lets face it, they’re not all bad, and there are quite a few members who still seem to have their wits about them, although obviously they have to disguise this as much as possible. However TB has to go. He just has to go. He’s lost the plot completely and I really do think it’s time for an early tea and up the wooden hill to The House of Lords. Actually I don’t think the House of Lords will be with us much longer. Tone has managed to get rid of all the crusty old Tory buffers (aka the Hereditary Peers) and filled the place up with his grim faced cast-offs. Given that the place is possibly now even less democratic than it ever was (working on the principle that some peers presumably owned estates & factories and tried to represent these interests both personally and in terms of their employees) which is quite a triumph for authoritarianism. As a result I don’t think he’ll have much trouble arguing that all it is now is an un-elected and unnecessary quango and can be disbanded once and for all.