Welcome

HOME | ARCHIVE | FACTS | QUOTES | COMMENT | CONTACT

12 SEPTEMBER 2006: “Point of order!” one of the delegates felt aggrieved at the surge of  interest for the prime minister’s speech. They'd been ignored by the media since they started and suddenly the place was busy with cameramen, photographers, producers, cable-carriers, boom-wielders and microphone-thrusters. “I came here to represent my members, not to be part of a sit-com or a media circus!”

Yes, where was all the attention for the motions, resolutions, composites and fraternal messages? Where indeed? I sat thinking of the little boy on the side of the Brighton bus: “I like to sit on top in the front,” he says (it’s an ad). “I pretend I’m the driver!” He’s not alone.

Tony Blair addressed them for the last time. It’s the start of his farewell tour. It can only get better. He didn’t charm them, josh them, lecture them or flog them. He didn’t inspire them or fill them revulsion. When he stood up to the microphone a few people lifted their Time To Go placards but the booing never took off; it sounded like gentle mooing. And he looked smaller than usual.

It wasn't a speech that had been worked on, much. He has been preoccupied, it's fair to say.

He said: “The real question is who has the answer to global change?” Whatever the real question was, it wasn’t that. He went on. And on. China. Accession countries. The OECD. Migrant workers. “Even if Turkey were to meet the accession criteria,” he said at one point and I thought what on earth is all this about?

He should have flogged them. Privatisation? Get used to it! There’s plenty more what that came from. There is no ideological block to private companies providing any services at all, and here’s why . . . It would have set Gordon Brown so well. 

There was very little reaction, considering. He finished with a quiet piece of quasi-spontaneous sincerity. "Reflect on this," he said. Was it better to go back to the old ways, and have a Labour leader came to address the conference only as leader of the opposition, and have a lot of motions, resolutions, composites and fraternal messages passed and ignored by the government? Or was it better to have a Labour leader who was prime minister come to the conference? Was it (to recap unfairly) better to have a Labour government doing things they didn't like, or a Tory government doing those same things?

When he finished there was a polite round of applause. There was a standing ovation but it consisted of one young man standing up with a placard asking for an end to the G-WoT. Ave atque vale. So it ends. Not with a bang, or a whimper but a polite round of applause.

12 September 2006: How annoying the TUC must be for Tony Blair. He doubled spending on the health service and they complain about spending cuts. A woman delegate sobbingly claimed staff are “putting their hearts and souls” into the NHS.

She didn’t mention their pay has gone up 30 per cent in real terms, that they have superior pension rights to the private sector and they can retire five years earlier! You might be one of Florence Nightingale’s angels in the NHS, but if you were a moaning, money-hungry private sector parasite you’d be happier in the public than the private sector.

A prison warder asked him the single most peculiar question of the year to date: "When are you going to stop putting people in prison for profit?" People call me cynical, but I'm Little Virginia in comparison with that one.