Politicians From Scotland

"You don’t give a damn! You don’t give a damn, you don’t even know about the Palestinian families! You don’t even know that they exist! Tell me the name of one member of the seven members of the same family slaughtered on the beach in Gaza by an Israeli warship. You don’t even know their names! But you know the name of every Israeli soldier who has been taken prisoner in this conflict. Because you believe whether you know it or not that Israeli blood is more valuable than the blood of Lebanese or Palestinians. That’s the truth, and the discerning of your viewers already know it."

"What a silly question! What a silly person you are! Hezbollah is winning the war; you can see on the other half of the screen. Hezbollah is more popular today in Lebanon amongst Christians, amongst Sunnis, amongst Shiite, amongst all Arabs, amongst all Muslims that it has ever been. It’s Israel who’s lost the war, and Bush and Blair for politically organizing the war, who’ve lost politically. This is a defeat of Bush and Blair and Israel. Everybody but you can see it!"

"One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You are totally wrong in saying that in most people’s eyes Hezbollah are terrorists. In most people’s eyes Israel is a terrorist state. It’s the fact that you cannot comprehend that fact that leads to bias that runs through all of your reporting and every question that you’ve asked me in this interview!"

"Israel is invading Lebanon and has killed thirty times more Lebanese civilians than have died in Israel, so it’s you who should be justifying the evident bias which is written on every line on your face, and is in every nuance of your voice, and is loaded in every question that you ask."

"I would not support anyone seeking to assassinate the prime minister. That's why I said in the interview I would report to the authorities any such plot that I knew of. What I did make abundantly clear to Piers Morgan in the GQ interview is that I would like to see Tony Blair in front of a war crimes tribunal for sending this country to war illegally and for the appalling human consequences which resulted. That's what I will continue to press for."

"[Q:] Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber - if there were no other casualties - be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq? [...] [A:] Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it - but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq - as Blair did."

"As for Gordon Brown - I've described him and Blair as two cheeks of the same arse."

"Only a fool has no regrets and I'm not a fool."

"I had three goals and all of them were met."

"Pipe down Mr Indignation. We'll see what the viewers thought of your double standards, your indignation about me and the aplomb with which you become a lying plutocrat in your gentleman's club."

"Now, would you like me to be the cat?"

"This murder of Hariri was deliberately planned and executed precisely to implicate Syria and to set in train the events which have unfolded."

"I travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women—some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece. And if the British public and BBC Scotland think that's of interest they are welcome to broadcast it."

"All faiths must be prepared to be as rigorously tested as each other and none can expect a special hiding place behind the law."

"Conservative Back Bench Members have an unseemly and shabby desire to rubbish and eventually smash a section of the British work force that has served this country well. ... There are few less pleasant sights than to see well-upholstered, sleek and wealthy Conservative Members insulting a body of men who work hard for a living and who have done so for many centuries."

"You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice."

"Why don't you go and take some more drugs, you druggie?"

"Oona King voted to kill a lot of women in the last few years. Many of them had much darker skins than her."

"If I had lost I would have been homeless, I would have had everything I possess taken from me and would have been bankrupted and forced out of public office. In those circumstances I don't feel in any way happy about the award of £150,000."

"The people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered more than a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war will burn in Hell in the hell-fires, and their name in history will be branded as killers and war criminals for all time. Fallujah is a Guernica, Falluajah is a Stalingrad, and Iraq is in flames as a result of the actions of these criminals."

"How can you have a real election with hundreds of thousands of Crusader soldiers occupying the country, drawing up the electoral law, deciding who is allowed to take part in the elections, and utterly dominating the political life of the country?"

"I'm strongly against abortion. I believe life begins at conception, and therefore unborn babies have rights. I think abortion is immoral."

"[Referring to the The Christian Science Monitor] This newspaper published on its front page in every country in the world that I had taken $10m from Saddam Hussein. That was a grave and serious libel...Of course the documents were a forgery and a newspaper of that importance ought to have made the effort, both morally and legally, to establish the authenticity of those documents before they published them."

"[On David Blunkett] By a mile, it is the most illiberal, vindictive, biliously foaming Home Secretary of modern times. He has done more to destroy the concept of Labour being a party of equality and fairness than any other person... I hope his guide dog savages his ankles."

"The wolves are Bush and Blair, not the soldiers. The soldiers are lions led by donkeys, sent to kill and be killed."

"[On Tony Blair and George W. Bush] They have lied to the British air force and navy when they said the battle of Iraq would be very quick and easy. They attacked Iraq like wolves. They attacked civilians. It is better for Blair and Bush to stop this crime and this catastrophe. It is time for them to return to the UN security council and give diplomacy a chance."

"If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life."

"I am on the anti-imperialist left."

"We are being asked to sell the banner which has flown in Scotland with great success, a banner which is showing no sign of becoming unpopular."

"Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem."

"The Tories and their friends are laughing all the way to the bank at the disunity in Scotland. We must extend the hand of friendship to the SNP."

"I'm arguing this should not be published, not because of the threats but because of the offence that it has caused to the majority of Muslims. They have a right to expect some genuflection towards what they feel. To publish a paperback would cause an unnecessary distress to a large and significant and vulnerable section of our society."

"The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified.""

"UK’s Prime Minister Tony Blair should hang with the U.S. gang, but who is calling for this? How much longer will the necessary prosecutions wait? Till after these international war-criminals have all gone honored to their graves? Although the International Criminal Court considered and dismissed possible criminal charges against Tony Blair’s UK Government regarding the invasion and military occupation of Iraq, the actual crime, of invading and militarily occupying a country which had posed no threat to the national security of the invader, was ignored, and the conclusion was that “the situation did not appear to meet the required threshold of the Statute” (which was only “Willful killing or inhuman treatment of civilians” and which ignored the real crime, which was “aggressive war” or “the crime of aggression” — the crime for which Nazis had been hanged at Nuremberg)... We... now have internationally a lawless world (or “World Order”) in which “Might makes right,” and in which there is really no effective international law, at all."

"In the early days of his government, Tony Blair liked to paraphrase the famous joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian ('All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?') in order ironically to disarm his critics: 'They betrayed socialism. True, they brought more social security, they did a lot for healthcare and education, and so on, but, in spite of all that, they betrayed socialism.' As it is clear today, it is, rather, the reverse which applies: 'We remain socialists. True, we practice Thatcherism in economics, we attack asylum-seekers, beggars and single mothers, we made a deal with Murdoch, and so on, but, none the less, we're still socialists.'"

"Tony Blair, a passionate Christian, has expressed his conviction that WMDs will be found in almost directly religious terms of credo quia absurdum: despite the lack of evidence, he personally is deeply convinced that they will be found. ... The only appropriate answer to this conundrum is not the boring liberal plea for innocence until guilt is proved but, rather, the point made succintly by 'Rachel from Scotland' on the BBC website in September 2003: 'We know he had weapons; we sold him some of them.' This is the direction a serious investigation should have taken."

"Among the many challenges you faced with great courage, may I just mention two. You stayed close to our American ally in difficult times. And because of you we saw an end to the horrors of genocide in the Balkans."

"Blair likes to say that his party is best when it is bold. So is he--and when he has an unconflicted view of the right and wrong of an issue... Blair is not at his best when his vision of what is right is blurred."

"I view him as the kind of air guitarist of political rhetoric. I don't think he's debased political debate because he lies, I actually sadly think he believes a lot of what he says, that's what's so depressing about it, for people who stand outside of politics. So my rather bizarre viewpoint — should he go? — it feels like he left a long time ago, leaving this Tony Blair shaped hole that carries on talking.""

"What can we do? We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. We can turn the war on Iraq into a fishbowl of the U.S. government's excesses. We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair-and their allies for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are."

"I believe Tony Blair is an out-and-out rascal, terminally untrustworthy and close to being unhinged. I said from the start that there was something wrong in his head, and each passing year convinces me more strongly that this man is a pathological confidence-trickster. To the extent that he even believes what he says, he is delusional. To the extent that he does not, he is an actor whose first invention — himself — has been his only interesting role."

"Somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish."

"Like millions of others, I now bitterly resent that a prime minister could use such a farrago of lies and manipulation to deceive us and to take the nation to war so dishonestly."

"Few talk or think about Iraq these days; the media ignores this important but demolished nation. Iraq, let us recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, and financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia... We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil being extracted by big US oil firms since 2003."

"In November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had his only meeting with independent British experts. “We all pretty much said the same thing,” said George Joffe, a Middle East specialist from Cambridge University. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” Blair did not appear interested in this analysis and focused instead on Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” The experts tried to explain that thirty years of Hussein’s dictatorship had ground down Iraq’s civil society to the point that there were virtually no independent organized forces to serve as allies for the coalition. Blair remained uninterested. The Foreign Office showed no more interest in taking advantage of their considerable knowledge and expertise. A little more than five years later, in January 2008, the U.K. Ministry of Defence issued a report that was severely critical of the way in which British soldiers were prepared to serve in Iraq. There had been, the report said, a lack of information about the context the soldiers would be operating in and uncertainty about how the Iraqis might react to an invasion. The military, the report went on, failed to anticipate differences between Iraq and the Balkans and Northern Ireland where British forces had gained a great deal of their recent experience. In other words, they had not looked at the history of Iraq."

"The righteous will evidently never tire of the pelting and taunting of Tony Blair, and perhaps those like him who choose to join the Roman choir of extreme unctuousness must expect their meed of abuse. But I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history."

"Tony Blair had his finger on the modernising pulse of Britain in the 90s, identifying the UK as a country that was increasingly progressive and outward-looking, and with little time for passing judgement on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or disability. And it was this analysis which caught the public mood and helped sweep Labour to its historic landslide victory on 1 May 1997. As a party with equality at its core, the new government was eager to get on with advancing the fairness agenda and building on the work done by pioneers such as Barbara Castle."

"Like anyone else who knows anything about the Middle East, you just pray that this man will shut the fuck up."

"Don’t be shameless, Mr Blair. Don’t be immoral, Mr. Blair. You are one of those who have no morals. You are not one who has the right to criticize anyone about the rules of the international community. You are an imperialist pawn who attempts to curry favor with Danger Bush-Hitler, the number one mass murderer and assassin there is on the planet. Go straight to hell, Mr. Blair."

"Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's failures are still writ large on the public imagination – the Iraq War for example, or the racking up of astonishing national debt. But what is less well recognised is the last Labour government’s extraordinary success in using seemingly mundane pieces of legislation to profoundly – and, for conservatives, detrimentally – transform the culture of the United Kingdom. In its 2005 manifesto, the Labour Party pledged to bring forward a new Equality Bill, to "modernise and simplify" equality laws. A bland aim perhaps, but the resulting Equality Act 2010 became a flagship piece of New Labour legislation that would embed leftist identity politics into our public institutions, paving the way for the ideological capture of our schools, civil service and NHS."