Cameron set to become the worst ever PM?

Well come back brother

lol :)

It certainly looks like your brothers will be regaining some of their lost power under the Lisbon Treaty, Lampus.

Muqbil,
At least you have acknowledged it early on.

After ten years of Blair some were still falling for the wishy washy soundbites, and the PR man's presentation.

Two peas in a pod IMO.

Agreed. Maggie won the economics and Blair copied it (albeit watered down with dingo urine) and then Labour won the social and smiling side which Cameron has copied. Sadly it's what people want, but the Tories are so middle-of-the-road now, I have no will to vote for them. I could just as easily put Labour as my second choice than the Tories, it would make little difference.

He's only a temporary measure to rid us of Brown, I'm reasonably certain I'll only vote for him once. Hopefully a proper right wing party - and before the usual boneheads start shouting racist and fascist - will emerge, hopefully led by an attractive lady in her 40's called Margaret.

All a bunch of wasters,the lot of them..Clueless..

Any fool can sell assets.

True, but only Gordon can sell them for a pittance.

I'm doing a deal today that will give me 100k in cash and and guarantee me a further 5k in my pocket for life.

You moving in with Mandelson?

Blowing up the Tamer bridge for the CRA imo

No.

I am going to sell my house,and save on annual running costs.

So that's £105k. Hardly buying the gold from Gordon is it...

Cameron has always been a shocker. Hague and David Davis are a distance clear of Cameron imo.

labour had to lose sometime, i can't think of a better person to ensure the tories only last 5 years, he will be a disaster

any PM will be a disaster in the next 5 years (and beyond) - the country's up sh1t creek

He wont be the worst ever, nobody can beat Brown to that, but he'll certainly be the most unpopular.

He's only a wishy washy stopgap anyway, within 10 years UKIP will wipe the floor with his wet bunch

The thought of David Cameron being PM is very scary, smoke and mirrors, will cabinet meetings be broadcast on you tube? Will he become a judge on Britain's got Talent because he's so in touch with the people?

Possibly alf, Cameron's lead is more to do with Brown's uselessness than anything.

We'll have a proper left v right scrap in a few years time, no poncy carpetbaggers running labour and no silly PR ponces running the tories. All the BNP supporters are ex labour so it'll be fascinating.

FFS

Cameron'll have to go some to be worse than the present incumbent.

We've already bottomed out with the last two.

cameron peaked to soon, last year it looked like he was leading the tories to a landslide, not anymore

Blackburn , it is just a lie to say all the BNP supporters are ex labour, plenty of them are ex National Front apart fom anything else.

Brown is a hard act to follow for Cameron. Brown has made so many terrible political blunders, many of which he has had to retreat from.

However Cameron may be worse I guess, particularly as he and his side kick the truly greasy Osborne, are already so mired in sleaze you can smell them even on the telly!

In any event Thatcher was so utterly destructive of so much I doubt we will ever see another PM as evil or awful as her in anyone's lifetime.

Hope not for all our sakes.

Without doubt Baroness Thatcher was the greatest PM this country has ever had, or will ever have.

Quite how anyone can say otherwise is a complete mystery and a nonesense.

Brown has been a grave disappointment to me after welcoming him to replace the great delusionist and warmonger. Promising to clean up politics and doing the opposite. Cameron MUST be better than this,please God !!!!

Nasty maggie got us the mess we are in now 1979 - 2009 R.I.P the British people

Is there actually a human bean behind this lampoon lampus character?

No Ivor.
Lampus is a figment of his own imagination.

Cameron reminds me of a manager we had at work. After his address to the workforce most people came out of the meeting saying how impressive his speech was.

An hour later some of us asked our colleagues what he had actually put forward as his ideas for the future. Most people couldn't come up with anything of substance. This is how I feel after listening to Cameron, he speaks at length, quite eloquently, but there is actually nothing of any value in what he says.

I think he appeals to people who don't, or are incapable of thinking too deeply, hence his attraction to some of the right wing bigots on this forum.

^ leftwing looney ^

He'd be a fool to try and win the next election imo.With the state the country's in,he's on a hiding to nothing.
That said,he will win and all the loony left on here and elsewhere will call the Tory's blind for what they HAVE to do.

maggie fans tend to be either very young and naive, or dim witted. Look at the legacy. Look at her evil foreign policies. An amazingly evil and quite stupid person. Many have died because of her, and died in utter misery.
As I say Cameron (despite being cute in the botty department) is a sleazy swine but less than likely to be worse than Thatcher.

Lampus. Your view is concise and as usual quite correct. I wish I could offer some thanks for your enlightened views personally.

Ruth 19 Nov 20:37
maggie fans tend to be either very young and naive, or dim witted. Look at the legacy.

Indeed, smashed the unions strangelhold on the country...to smithereeens.

Saved tens of thousands of people from dying mserable horrible deaths from lung disease having been forced to follow their fathers down the pit.

Those type of things?

Tell us about her evil foreign policies Ruth - me being young naive and dim-witted I'm sure you can help me?
(psst - don't mention Iraq and Afghan Stan)

Like the teenage suicides, the waste lands of misery created across the North of England and Scotland and Wales, the slaughter of Argentinian boys on a boat sailing away from a war zone, & the mass murders committed by the Kymer Rouge, Maggie's allies in the East.

no - I still don't see what her eveil foreign policies were. I do recall, however that the Argies invaded British territory but neither the Iraqi's or Afghans did.

you did miss the bit about maggie supporting Pol Pot and the Kymer Rouge then. A sad fact and a terrible fact about our quite recent foreign policy under Maggie.

I remember her saying that there were some Khmer Rouge that were "not so bad" in an interview. These must have been the Khmer Rouge that only killed the women and men but spared the children

Face it. she was an evil cow.

Yours is an incredible view of the world. She was the best PM we've ever had and unlikely to be matched in my lifetime. The ONLY thing she got wrong was the implementaion of Poll Tax - right policy, poorly executed.

Ivor,

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Oh I see the foreign policy stuff is now ignored as a minor blip. Supporting a man with such crazy ideas and behaviour that made Stalin would look like a Sunday school teacher is best ignored I suppose.

Your poll tax recollection is a bit wild too actually.

When the tories finally kicked her out, every single Tory leadership candidate promised to abolish it and Major actually did so, when he found time to climb off Edwina.

The poll tax was an utter disgrace that spoke a lot about Thatcher. She believed that a man with a 50 room mansion producing a zillion tons of rubbish and earning (or rather receiving) a zillion pounds a second should pay no more in local tax than one of his hard up tenants who swept the streets for £30 per week.

the poll tax produced mass riots and huge protests from people who never ever protested but who had at least some sense of fairness. Your defense of such a stupid and unfair tax says a lot about you, and not a lot of good things I'm afraid.

Never mind. I feel sure you are happy at least.

WHAT foreign policy stuff - you haven't told us any?
Explain your Khmer Rouge Polpot stuff - I clearly need to read up on that.

'Mansions' and 'zillions of tons' tells a lot about yoursef also I'm afraid. The only problem was the sudden jump in costs to the poorer and sudden reductions to the better off. It SHOULD have been introduced in stages. Perfectly sensible that I pay more in a house of four than a single person next door. (unles he produces zillions of tons of course).

Gordon Brown has set a good standard for Cameron to follow to become the worst PM ever.

Okay Ivor

lets cut out the rhetoric for a minute.

Mrs Thatcher supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after the killing fields and after the mass murder of many millions of civilians. This is fact. Look it up all you like its the truth.

The background to the facts are that Cambiodia, under Pol Pot, were in conflict with the Vietnamese, who, sickened by the bloodshed and the threat to their borders, ended up getting rid of the Khmer Rouge. Maggie sided with Pol Pot and even supplied him with arms. Unbelievable now, but perfectly true.

In Maggie's defense (why do I bother?), she was playing her power games in the days of the cold war. Vietnam had recently kicked out the yanks and Maggie supported anyone who the yanks told her to. It didn't matter that the people she supported in Cambodia were maybe as evil as the German nazis of course and its a poor defense of a policy that history will certainly mark down as one of the most shameful in British history.

But there you go. That's the truth of it.

If you do a googl search of British support of the Kymer Rouge you will find out the history for yourself I would imagine.

I will, but not tonight, and I suspect I'll find opposing views to yours.
I also note that subsequent governments talk to the yanks and take steps that suit them at the time but can be found unsavoury afterwards - as history will show of this labour administration.

Give over Ivor,you cant win with such prejudiced minds. Leave Ruth to her hatred,it will fester on.

3.15pm OCtober 16th.1990 - PM's Questions (the days when the PM did actuallly answer the questions)

Mr. Madden
May I ask the Prime Minister a question of which I gave her office notice earlier today? Will she take this opportunity to condemn Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for the mass murder of more than 1 million innocent Cambodians; and will she tell the House what action she and the Government are taking to stop Pol Pot and his allies marching back to power so that they can murder still more millions of innocent Cambodians?

The Prime Minister
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. We have repeatedly made clear our utter abhorrence for the Khmer Rouge and all that it stands for. We have never given support of any kind to the Khmer Rough. Our aim over many years has been to prevent a return to the atrocities of the Pol Pot years, and, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, we are working to achieve that through a comprehensive political settlement.

2 years of cameron and co and the labour years will seem like the golden years

Ivor 19 Nov 21:24
She was the best PM we've ever had and unlikely to be matched in my lifetime. The ONLY thing she got wrong was the implementaion of Poll Tax - right policy, poorly executed.

Not oft we agree, but that would be me exact summary too, Ivor.

NEARCTIC 20 Nov 09:59


2 years of cameron and co and the labour years will seem like the golden years

Seem like? You and crippen never tired of telling us they were golden years.

It wasn't an illusion was it neo?

This is one of many articles readily available in respect to mre Thatchers support for one of the most evil men the planet has ever produced, and one of the most shameful foreign policies Britain has ever been involved with. The fact that the Thatch denied her evil in the house of commons just showes that she was not just an evil woman but an utterly dishonest one too.

Case rested Ivor.





How Thatcher gave Pol Pot a hand
John Pilger
Published 17 April 2000

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Almost two million Cambodians died as a result of Year Zero. John Pilgerargues that, without the complicity of the US and Britain, it may never have happened
On 17 April, it is 25 years since Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. In the calendar of fanaticism, this was Year Zero; as many as two million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were to die as a consequence. To mark the anniversary, the evil of Pol Pot will be recalled, almost as a ritual act for voyeurs of the politically dark and inexplicable. For the managers of western power, no true lessons will be drawn, because no connections will be made to them and to their predecessors, who were Pol Pot's Faustian partners. Yet, without the complicity of the west, Year Zero might never have happened, nor the threat of its return maintained for so long.

Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. "They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda," the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of young men. Residents say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes." In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society, Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half a million people. Year Zero began, in effect, with them; the bombing was a catalyst for the rise of a small sectarian group, the Khmer Rouge, whose combination of Maoism and medievalism had no popular base.

After two and a half years in power, the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese on Christmas Day, 1978. In the months and years that followed, the US and China and their allies, notably the Thatcher government, backed Pol Pot in exile in Thailand. He was the enemy of their enemy: Vietnam, whose liberation of Cambodia could never be recognised because it had come from the wrong side of the cold war. For the Americans, now backing Beijing against Moscow, there was also a score to be settled for their humiliation on the rooftops of Saigon.

To this end, the United Nations was abused by the powerful. Although the Khmer Rouge government ("Democratic Kampuchea") had ceased to exist in January 1979, its representatives were allowed to continue occupying Cambodia's seat at the UN; indeed, the US, China and Britain insisted on it. Meanwhile, a Security Council embargo on Cambodia compounded the suffering of a traumatised nation, while the Khmer Rouge in exile got almost everything it wanted. In 1981, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said: "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot." The US, he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge.

In fact, the US had been secretly funding Pol Pot in exile since January 1980. The extent of this support - $85m from 1980 to 1986 - was revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. On the Thai border with Cambodia, the CIA and other intelligence agencies set up the Kampuchea Emergency Group, which ensured that humanitarian aid went to Khmer Rouge enclaves in the refugee camps and across the border. Two American aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote: "The US government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed . . . the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation." Under American pressure, the World Food Programme handed over $12m in food to the Thai army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge; "20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerillas benefited," wrote Richard Holbrooke, the then US assistant secretary of state.

I witnessed this. Travelling with a UN convoy of 40 trucks, I drove to a Khmer Rouge operations base at Phnom Chat. The base commander was the infamous Nam Phann, known to relief workers as "The Butcher" and Pol Pot's Himmler. After the supplies had been unloaded, literally at his feet, he said: "Thank you very much, and we wish for more."

In November of that year, 1980, direct contact was made between the White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, made a secret visit to a Khmer Rouge operational headquarters. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-elect Reagan's transitional team. By 1981, a number of governments had become decidedly uneasy about the charade of the UN's continuing recognition of the defunct Pol Pot regime. Something had to be done. The following year, the US and China invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was neither a coalition nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea (Cambodia). It was what the CIA calls "a master illusion". Prince Norodom Sihanouk was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The two "non-communist" members, the Sihanoukists, led by the Prince's son, Norodom Ranariddh, and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, were dominated, diplomatically and militarily, by the Khmer Rouge. One of Pol Pot's closet cronies, Thaoun Prasith, ran the office at the UN in New York.

In Bangkok, the Americans provided the "coalition" with battle plans, uniforms, money and satellite intelligence; arms came direct from China and from the west, via Singapore. The non-communist fig leaf allowed Congress - spurred on by a cold-war zealot Stephen Solarz, a powerful committee chairman - to approve $24m in aid to the "resistance".

Until 1989, the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first reports appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, written by Simon O'Dwyer-Russell, a diplomatic and defence correspondent with close professional and family contacts with the SAS. He revealed that the SAS was training the Pol Pot-led force. Soon afterwards, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that the British training for the "non-communist" members of the "coalition" had been going on "at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years". The instructors were from the SAS, "all serving military personnel, all veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain".

The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after the "Irangate" arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986. "If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indo-China, let alone with Pol Pot," a Ministry of Defence source told O'Dwyer-Russell, "the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements." Moreover, Margaret Thatcher had let slip, to the consternation of the Foreign Office, that "the more reasonable ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in a future government". In 1991, I interviewed a member of "R" (reserve) Squadron of the SAS, who had served on the border. "We trained the KR in a lot of technical stuff - a lot about mines," he said. "We used mines that came originally from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt with marking changed . . . We even gave them psychological training. At first, they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them how to go easy . . ."

The Foreign Office response was to lie. "Britain does not give military aid in any form to the Cambodian factions," stated a parliamentary reply. The then prime minister, Thatcher, wrote to Neil Kinnock: "I confirm that there is no British government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them." On 25 June 1991, after two years of denials, the government finally admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the "resistance" since 1983. A report by Asia Watch filled in the detail: the SAS had taught "the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay devices". The author of the report, Rae McGrath (who shared a joint Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign on landmines), wrote in the Guardian that "the SAS training was a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy".

When a UN "peacekeeping force" finally arrived in Cambodia in 1992, the Faustian pact was never clearer. Declared merely a "warring faction", the Khmer Rouge was welcomed back to Phnom Penh by UN officials, if not the people. The western politician who claimed credit for the "peace process", Gareth Evans (then Australia's foreign minister), set the tone by calling for an "even-handed" approach to the Khmer Rouge and questioning whether calling it genocidal was "a specific stumbling block".

Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's prime minister during the years of genocide, took the salute of UN troops with their commander, the Australian general John Sanderson, at his side. Eric Falt, the UN spokesman in Cambodia, told me: "The peace process was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge] to gain respectability."

The consequence of the UN's involvement was the unofficial ceding of at least a quarter of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge (according to UN military maps), the continuation of a low-level civil war and the election of a government impossibly divided between "two prime ministers":**Sen and Norodom Ranariddh.

The**Sen government has since won a second election outright. Authoritarian and at times brutal, yet by Cambodian standards extraordinarily stable, the government led by a former Khmer Rouge dissident,**Sen, who fled to Vietnam in the 1970s, has since done deals with leading figures of the Pol Pot era, notably the breakaway faction of Ieng Sary, while denying others immunity from prosecution.

Once the Phnom Penh government and the UN can agree on its form, an international war crimes tribunal seems likely to go ahead. The Americans want the Cambodians to play virtually no part; their understandable concern is that not only the Khmer Rouge will be indicted.

The Cambodian lawyer defending Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge military leader captured last year, has said: "All the foreigners involved have to be called to court, and there will be no exceptions . . . Madeleine Albright, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush . . . we are going to invite them to tell the world why they supported the Khmer Rouge."

It is an important principle, of which those in Washington and Whitehall currently sustaining bloodstained tyrannies elsewhere might take note.

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This article was originally published on 17 April 2000 in the issue The New Statesman Essay - The rise of the ergonarchy

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Before anyone replies to this piece, please do read it. It is an amazing insight into how we played our parts in rehabilitating Pol Pot, supplying him, supporting him at the UN, and sending the SAS to train his butchers. Not a happy story I'm afraid.

I suppose it's similar to us supporting a currupt regime in Iraq and Afghaniston.

I suppose it's similar to us supporting a currupt regime in Iraq and Afghaniston.

So in short, it might be bad, but compared the the armageddon scenario he's faced with (no one thought Labour could top Callaghan's and Healy's mess, but...) he'll look quite good in sober analysis. Keeping the trend alive of inheriting a pigsty and turning it around.

cast iron hug a hoodie dave is changing tack again now over the economy

blackburn 20 Nov 10:59
NEARCTIC 20 Nov 09:59


2 years of cameron and co and the labour years will seem like the golden years




I have had three "golden years", sadly the bank manager wants me to sell the holiday home, sell the racehorse, and clear the overdrafts....golden as in fools gold.

Fascinating stuff, Ruth.
I have never understood this undying loyalty people (including on here) have to the evil old witch either. Not just what you've underlined but; arms deal commission in the millions for her son, privatising and selling off most of our wealth to friends and family, a total disregard for ordinary people (which so many on here do not realise they mostly are).

Major, then Blair continued her work - lets face it THEY did OK out of it, like she did. Brown, whilst not an attractive PM in any sense of the word is floundering in the inevitable mess, and has no way of fixing it. Cameron will be as clueless as he is smarmy.

And to respond to mrcombustibles' ridiculous post earlier in the thread.
The fact is Labour, historically, is the party which has made things a little better for many people who then become more righteous and superior, and consider themselves 'Tories' now, so vote conservative and so it starts again. Not what you said.

I'm not ordinary.