Tony Blair's daughter in suicide bid

[mickyv]

Apparently not the majority view on this thread, and with some trepidation I state that my point of view is that in a Democracy we should not have news suppressed about anybody in Public Office, including their private & family life, simply because of the following reasons;


1) It is surely in the Public Interest, that we as voters should be aware our prime Minister’s state of mind (especially of a megalomaniac who insists that his own personal view overrides the advice of professionals). Also the true moral character is always reflected in he/she’s private life, including how stable is the family life. Further seeing as the suicide bid is alleged to have resulted from being bullied at school over her father’s decision to invade Iraq, we should be aware of any factors that may have an influence of decisions taken by our Prime Minister be it foreign affairs such as the Iraq War or domestic affairs such as the issue of bullying.

2) When the media becomes so compliant to do the Government’s bidding, corruption will inevitably occur as politicians will be able to use their influence to bypass rules and regulations without fear of the general public finding out. It is serious nail in the concept of a democratic free press that it engages in kow-towing to protect the image of the Government and/or its Ministers.

3) Yes although this is an extreme case as it does concern the privacy of a clearly vulnerable adolescent, all Politicians through the choice of holding Public Office, have already decided that the privacy of their family life will be second to their career choice, such is the de facto reality of our society, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous, indeed many actively use the image of their family life to further their careers (such as Cameroon installing) webcams in his home. By seeking Public Office the professional politician has sentenced his family to inevitable public & media scrutiny, which may well result in the more vulnerable members being driven to extremes, (as in this case), it is a calculated risk that is a conscious career choice, which is why many able people would never pursue Public Office.

4) Also there is also the risk of being being blackmailed, as if a damaging fact is kept out of the public domain, the person involved is clearly open to pressure to do what he/she might not wish to do, by anybody who discovers the secret.

[eefanincan]

Some good points, micky. I don't agree with them all, but that's the whole point of this site... we can discuss our opinions.

[mickyv]

Thanks eefanincan, I appreciate your comment & sentiment.

Just as a matter of interest & only if you wish to discuss further, I would like to know which points you don’t feel are valid & why so.

[Mandy]

[faceless]

[Mandy]

Faceless, I believe people who pomote / justify pro-bush / pro-blair / pro-trident policies are worse than freedomlover.

freedomlover's other postings are :
http://couchtripper.com/forum2/search.php?search_author=freedomlover

[faceless]

this is my site gg_fan - I run it as I see fit.

[Mandy]

I know.

[faceless]

well don't get involved in my (or other admins') decisions then - if you knew the shite that goes on in the background you'd not.

[Lucky Lucan]

Micky you make some well argued points, but why should Blair's daughter have to expose her private life to the world, as far as I am aware she has never sought public office or celebrity status, it's not her fault that her father is the prime minister, I believe she deserves the same right to privacy as me you or Karl from Plaidstow, not that i think that it should not be spoken of, but I don't think it would be fair to splash it all over the tabloids who could hardly be trusted to treat the matter with any sensitivity.

[Karl]

David Kelly's murder/suicide was splashed all over the tabloids. Not very sensitive for his kids and family. I could give you many examples of where the media has wayed in on someone but i wont bother. I will just stick to one.
Remember that lovely, freindly 8 year old boy who they wanted to take away from his family because he was overweight? What did he do to deserve the media circus that surrounded him and the public debate about was his mum who obviuosly loved him and cared for him was guilty of child abuse. Politicians came on tv to talk about it, every channel on tv, every newspaper all week long.
You might agree with me that episode was all wrong. Fine.
But Butcher Blair and his family when they chose public office, while they buy their five house's at the expense of me and you the taxpayers are all in the public domain. Blair's son when he was out boozing and smoking weed was widely reported. But that was in the early days. New Labours control of all the media now has become like Orwell's ministry of truth.
I deplore the treatment at the hands of the media of that 8 year old innocent child. And i believe Katherine Blair should have been reported as news. sympathetically. why should the rich and powerful be private citizens and a poor single parent from up north be cannon fodder for the media.

I mean look what happened today. Taxes went UP but the media all say TAX CUT it is an absolute joke the media today. I repeat Orwell's ministry of truth.

[eefanincan]

[mickyv]

Yes it seems like a reasonable & fair proposition that the private lives of the relatives or friends of Public Figures should be respected, but as we know, due to the nature of our society , and to our nature as human beings, this almost never happens. The reasons for this can appear to be superficial, gossip, nosiness, digging up dirt to bring people down, etc…, however I believe that there are subconscious safeguards built into us, and which are reflected by our Society, that compel us to want to know as much as possible about Public Figures, which extends to their private lives, and to the private lives of their friends & relatives. Public Figures, be they political leaders or even Celebrities, have power over us, political leaders have the legal power that we gave by electing them, and Celebrities have the influencing power that fame has given them. Although it may appear that we may look up to people with power over us, we all have buried within us the cynical knowledge that power can corrupt, because we know our own human nature, and we are also subconsciously aware that people with power can hurt us, intentionally or unintentionally. To reassure ourselves and to determine if a public figure can be trusted with such potentially harmful power, we seek to know all that we can about such a person, and this is normally labelled as “idle gossip” as reported by the media in our society. However every piece of information we can obtain goes to shaping our opinion on whetever we can trust the said public figure with the power that they have over us. Of course we judge on what is obviously available at first, such as how this person acts in public, how they appear, what they do, what they say, how they say what they say, their official past record, etc… , but we also realize that a truer reflection of the character of this person, is to be found in their private lives , which includes what they do in private, what sort of family life they lead, what sort of friends they kept, etc.. Further because of the obvious influence family members or close friends can have on this person with power over us, we seek to know also about these people.

The above is probably unnecessarily laboured and abstract, as I seem to have made heavy work of explaining something quite simple, so I will give a relevant but off the top of my head example to illustrate;

Say that tomorrow the Government suddenly announced a tough new policy aimed at tacking bullying at school. We would like to think that any Government initiative has been a long time in the making, and was the result of specialist study groups, and the final measures were ratified by a collective cabinet decision. However as our current Prime Minister has proven several times now, he is the sole decider of what happens, and normally rides roughshod or even counter to specialist advice. So we wake up tomorrow with a new law that state that every child deemed to have bullied any other, is to be removed from school and placed in prison type school for the rest of their school life. Now our first reaction maybe to suspect that this may be an overreaction, but then concede that Blair is a very clever man and so must know what he is doing. However as time passes and it slowly becomes clear that this draconian policy is resulting in tens of thousands of children being socially damaged by being removed from normal schooling and being locked-up in prison type environments, and perhaps that even most of them only did as little as name calling, as children normally do, but because of the PM’s personal zealous drive and direction for this policy, all were classed as bullies and removed. Surely it would then dawn on us that it was a very bad policy, and was an overreaction from the beginning, but which we just didn’t realized, as we had no reason to suspect that Blair would be so unreasonable on the issue of bullying.

But now imagine going back to that day that this new policy came into law, and that in the press & media a few days before, we had read about the attempted suicide of Blair’s young daughter due to being bullied at school. Would we not instantly have thought the new policy as an absurd overreaction ? But not only thought so, but also realized exactly why. We would have realize that it was a bad law bought into being as a knee-jerk reaction of an emotionally affected parent, who just happen to be the PM and so could push the bad policy into law. We would have protested and fought to get the law scrapped before it damaged many children.

In short we cannot allow those closely associated to Public Figures the decency of privacy, because our greater good as a society needs the safeguard of knowing everything that can influence or motivate a said person with power over us. Sounds callous, but so are all other things that are sacrificed for the Greater Good.

(Eefanincan, I have just seen that you have replied, for which I thank you for. However after this long reply to Lucky Lucan, my bed is calling me, so I will respond tomorrow).

[eefanincan]

[Karl]

personally i am ready to agree with much of the above.
It is interesting though considering this.
Blair has announced anti-bullying campaigns.
Which with hindsight may have stemmed from his daughter.

Moving on david Blunkett iniated many new laws and used several of them himself when he sued for paternity. And i have noticed many labour ministers have brought in laws and most have personally benefited from them.
Blair bringing in the european human rights act when his wife was the owner of the only firm of barrasters that specialised in the law. The public are being taken for mugs by the new labour mafia.
Think back to what you and i regard as news.
Blair a former member of CND. Now a rabid warmonger.
George Bush charged and tried for rape. Still president.
John Reid former communist. Now right wing fascist.
The green party formerly environmentalists now in favour of everything new labour including nuclear.

ps if anyone thinks i am making up the george bush rape story or has not heard of it due to media censorship.

Margie Schoedinger of Missouri City, Texas filed charges on December 2, 2002 accusing George W. Bush of rape and other crimes. On September 22, 2003, at the age of 38, she died of a 'gunshot wound to the head', and her death was officially registered as 'suicide' by the Harris County Examiners Office.

Now call me a sceptic but i think that is a story that should have been HUGE
you see a pattern emerging?