We need to kick out the old guard!

Having watched QT on VoD I thought that Vince missed the point on extraordinary rendition.

The problem is that this Government is so rooted in old thinking and old systems (almost psychological orthodoxies) that they didn’t think to look at Diego Garcia as a crafty move by the US. Not only that it’s not as if they’re jumping up and down about it.

We are the fourth/fifth largest economy in the World – if we had done this to the US there would be an outcry there. Thus I raise three points:

1. This current administration simply doesn’t have the mindset to question the relationship we have with the US. Blairism has simply set in a lazy psychological framework for them that they can’t even use Britain’s power to tell them where it’s at publically. As Diane Abbott rightfully said on TW `we didn’t go looking for the answers`. There seems to have ministers who have an automatic reflex action to kow-tow to the US.

2. One of the reasons we don’t do this is because the Brown govt doesn’t acknowledge that what Governments can do without borrowing heavily isn’t as much as they say it is. Certainly not under the way they think of economic systems.

If they were to say they haven’t got as much power as they made out they had people would be more questioning of the point of a Labour govt. If they say that they do then people will blame them when the chips are down.

3. On NR – easy to blame them fully but what’s really important is that they could have made the system more rigorous beforehand. There lies Gordon’s credibility as the great chancellor. I believe he has such self-belief that he didn’t think that there was a need for such a thing – new Labour would provide. What arrogance! The narrative we could use is to say that this is all the old mens brigade (FSA, PM, BoE) let’s sweep in something new.