Blair's Watergate?

[marmar]

from the LA Times, via Truthout:


Tim Luckhurst | Blair's Watergate?
By Tim Luckhurst
The Los Angeles Times

Friday 02 February 2007

A parliamentary scandal stalks Britain's prime minister in his waning days in office.
"I got fed up with all the sex and sleaze ... of rock 'n' roll," Tony Blair said before he was elected, "so I went into politics." Yet today he stands accused of bringing sleaze closer to the center of British democracy than any leader since the dawn of universal suffrage.

Last Friday, for the second time in three months, Blair was interrogated at 10 Downing Street by police investigating a scandal that is fast growing to resemble Watergate. The controversy began last March when healthcare entrepreneur Chai Patel was denied a seat in Britain's unelected upper house of Parliament, the House of Lords. Days later, news broke that Patel, who had been nominated by Blair, also had loaned the prime minister's Labor Party 1.5 million pounds - almost $3 million - to fund its 2005 election campaign.

In the days that followed, it emerged that Blair had nominated three more party benefactors to seats in the House of Lords. Opponents accused the party of selling nominations. Scotland Yard opened an investigation, and last month an aide to Blair was arrested, as was a top Labor Party fundraiser earlier this week. Nobody has been charged, but the taint of corruption is hanging over Downing Street like heavy fog.

Blair, who has already announced that he will leave office this year, now seems almost certain to spend his final months in disgrace, his efforts to drive policy submerged beneath a rising tide of sleaze. Some colleagues are urging him to resign before Labor's electoral prospects are damaged irretrievably. But whenever he goes, Blair will have ample opportunity to reflect on the root cause of his disgrace: his failure to thoroughly reform the bizarre anachronism that is the House of Lords.

Britain's upper house, which scrutinizes and revises laws passed by the elected House of Commons, plays a valuable constitutional role. It can block and delay government legislation, and it serves as the country's Supreme Court. But it is scarcely more democratic than North Korea's National Defense Council. Its membership of 732 lords consists of party appointees, Church of England bishops and hereditary aristocrats. No British voter elects any of them. .....(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020307G.shtml

[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. Who would have thought that Bush's jock strap holder could

be guilty of unethical actions. :sarcasm: I'm sure there is a logical explanation -- give them some to time to manufacture it.

[Benhurst]

2. With all its faults, The House of Lords has done a better job of

protecting British subjects from assaults on traditional rights by War Criminal Blair and Company than the House of Commons.

"New" Labour. What a joke.

:hurts:

[marmar]

3. Agreed. Sometimes I wish we had a parliamentary form of government.

n/t