Prime Ministers On Postage Stamps

[grumpy01]

Have just read that Royal Mail are issuing eight stamps containing the faces of British Prime Ministers.Winston Churchill,Gladstone, Margaret Thatcher and Clement Attlee are there but no sign of teflon Tony,he must be gutted.

[ToraToraTora]

I'm no fan of Blair/Labour new or old but Blair was elected in 1997 because the public wanted change, in the end politics gets overridden by a desire for something different. That is not to say that His Tonyness didn't offer something new, he did. He had the Bottle to continue the process started by the WWB and slaughtered the sacred cows of sociaism, clause 4 for example, he and others in his team recognised that the public would never trust socialism again and thus set about, to some extent, out torying the Tories and I'm sure many will recognise Tory thinking in the first Blair governement. Indeed, who did TB have a 1-1 with as soon as he got into no 10? Yes I'm afraid so mikey! ditto Brown! Every now and again the electorate yearn for change, but not at any cost. MrsT in 1979 offered it, as did Blair in 1997. Blair did have some good stuff but a lot was over shadowed by being Bush's poodle in Iraq etc and also by the mess they made of education and filling the town halls with various "consultants" for problems we didn't even realise we had! labour have always been softer on immigration and may well pick up some votes that way but I don't think it's a primary reason for them getting elected. Though the 600,000 town hall non jobs were probably mostly Labour voters.

[mikey4444]

Reasonably summed up TTT ! We must have a beer or two together some time !

One of the big factors in Blairs first win in 1997 was that the Tories had become unelectable under Major.

If Heseltine ( a Swansea boy by the way ! ) had won the Leadership after Mrs Voldemort said that she didn't have the heart to continue, then the events of 1997 might have been a little closer. I think Blair would still have won the day of course,"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" and all that, but the Tories might not have taken so long to bounce back. Who knows though ?

[anotheoldgit]

Gromit

/// We have to try. ISIS are a different proposition and are very very dangerous. They need to be stopped. ///

And don't you think that Saddam, was very very dangerous towards some of his people, he was even condemned for committing crimes against humanity?

http://history1900s.about.com/od/saddamhussein/a/husseincrimes.htm

/// They were included in the war on terrorism because Saddam had plotted to kill Bush Senior. ///

And where did you get that piece of 'conspiracy theory' information from?

[mikey4444]

AOG, and others. Nobody seriously suggests that Saddam wasn't a horrible, cruel dictator, but what we in the West were supposed to do about him is up for debate. We imposed a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds, but it wasn't enough. Perhaps we should just have continued to ask him nicely to stop killing people, but I fail to see how that would have worked.

What is happening in Iraq to the Yazidi peoples and the Iraqi Christians is truly awful...much in the manner of Srebrenica massacre and we failed to act on that, to our lasting shame.

I am not sure what we can do but to sit around watching this happening is not acceptable.

[retrocop]

mikey 1358 post
Heseltine (being a Swansea boy by the way) does the Welsh no credit.
My father was a Swansea boy (Caerau nr Maesteg) The difference was my father was a life long Tory voter NOT a Tory back stabber. Not dissimilar to the woman you so admire.Baroness Warsi also a back stabber.As you said on another post. Strange she was a Tory,like Heseltine they would both serve the labour party well. More U turns than a lost driver.

[DTCwordfan]

Tony was the commensurate fool - along with GB - if they had gone in pleading that Hussein was practising genocide, the Halabja case (rightfully or wrongly), other Kurds in the Anfal slaughter, the pursuit of Shiites in the Al 'Amarah and Hawr Al marshes that indiscriminately killed the marsh tribes, etc, then they would have much better justified the case for action.

But they didn't....and then they even missed a second chance for the genocide argument after mass graves were discovered outside Basra at the start of the Allies going in.... Ijiuts they were...

Why didn't they go for this option is therefore the question. Because there was a cover up by the Americans from Reagan days to their support of Saddam in the Iraqi-Iran war and they would have been seen as complicit (and suppliers of agents) in the support the Iraqi use of chemical gassing.

[mikey4444]

Retro...slight improvement in space bar use, which is to be welcomed. Not quite there yet though.

Caerau, near Maesteg is nowhere near Swansea but that is by the by I suppose. But if your Dad was a Tory voter in Caerau, he must have been the only one !

[retrocop]

Only a horse and cart ride with his father to the Swansea fish market and back to Caerau to sell the fish in the surrounding villages.All in a days work for him as a 14year old.Yes he probably was the only Tory supporter in Caerau and,apart from the rest of his family,the only Rat Catchers as well.But he could see through that hypocrisy and after flooring the Parish Priest for disrespect at his mothers funeral he left the Rat catchers and Wales to better himself.

[scooping]

I shall buy several sets of the Thatcher stamps just to pi-s off Lefties.

[retrocop]

Me to scooping.

[scooping]

Good man Retrocop

[retrocop]

I would buy a double set of Sir Winston Churchill to.