Airstrip One

Clinton bashes IDS

The wages of sin are death, and the wages of trusting New Labour are a neat stab in the kidneys. Iain Duncan Smith has been loyally following the government line on all things foreign. Does he get thanks from a beleagured Blair? Of course not. While IDS suspends politics as usual, Blair - through his attack dog Clinton - goes in for the kill. Some of the relevant extracts from that Clinton speech (all of which would have been vetted by Alistair Campbell):

On the Tories:

That is the importance of politics of choices. I understand now that your Tories are calling themselves compassionate Conservatives (laughter). I admire a good phrase (Laughter). I respect as a matter of professional art adroit rhetoric, and I know that all politics is a combination of rhetoric and reality. Here is what I want you to know. The rhetoric is compassionate, the Conservative is the reality.

I saw Gordon Brown's speech which thoroughly and for ever disabused the Conservatives of the notion that the centre left cannot be troubled or trusted to manage the economy.

On the Republicans:

This is a delicate matter but I think this whole Iraq issue is made more difficult for some of you because of the differences you have with the Conservatives in America over other matters, over the criminal court and the Kyoto Treaty and the comprehensive test ban treaty. I don't agree with that either, plus I disagree with them on nearly everything, on budget policy, tax policy , on education policy. On education policy, on environmental policy, on health care policy. I have a world of disagreements with them.

All good knocking copy, but wasn't he bought on to win over the war doubters? Well, it does help to bash the Tories on prime time television.

And here's one for all the American war bloggers who believe that Blair is a reliable ally:

It is also fun to be in a place where our crowd is still in office.

What was also worrying was the globalist implications behind the left wing support for war. Here are three disjointed paragraphs:

We have only really had a chance to make them work for a little over a decade. The European Union is not what most people think and at least I hope it will be in five, 10 or 20 years; it is becoming. The United Nations is not what I hope it will be in five, 10 or 20 years. There are still people who vote in the United Nations based on the sort of old fashioned national self-interest views they held in the cold war or even long before, so that not every vote reflects the clear and present interests of the world and the direction we are going.

Yet the prospect for a truly global community of people working together in peace with shared responsibilities for a shared future was not institutionalised until a little less than 60 years ago with the creation of the United Nations and the issuance of the universal declaration of human rights. Such a community did not even become a possibility until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Of course we have to stand against weapons of mass destruction but if we can we have to do it in the context of building the international institutions that in the end we will have to depend upon to guarantee the peace and security of the world and the human rights of all people everywhere.

Let's face it chaps, loyalty to New Labour has been a failure. It's time to stop worrying about what the Sun says and start bashing this government for its abject disregard of the national interest.