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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 11:56 pm Post subject: channel 4 political awards |
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| Quote: | The shortlist is in and it's now time to vote for most inspiring political personality of the last decade.
Tony Blair
Tony Blair is without question the most successful and influential Westminster politician of the decade.
Measured simply in terms of electoral success, his achievements are enormous. He was the first Labour prime minister to win three general elections, and ninth in the all-time list of long serving prime ministers.
His governments brought about many changes which will still be felt long after he is gone: devolved government in London, Scotland and Wales; a successful intervention in Kosovo; a mayor for London; and doubled spending on the NHS.
For many, though, his enduring legacy will not be his domestic achievements but the invasion of Iraq - leading to years of chaos and hundreds of thousands of deaths.
He clearly inspired the British public to vote for him in massive numbers on 1 May 1997. But did he continue to inspire them as the decade wore on?
Will history remember him as a great reformer? Or has the Blair era seen, as his critics would argue, a sustained failure to deliver on the promise of those early years?
Alex Salmond
Devolution is one of the most enduring political legacies of the Blair era, and no-one has played a more prominent role in the nationalist cause than Alex Salmond.
Though he lead the Scottish Nationalist Party in the first ever elections to the devolved assembly in Holyrood, he stepped down as party leader in 2000, and spent the middle part of the decade on the sidelines of Scottish politics - only returning to the fray in 2004.
During that absence, he concentrated his energies on Westminster, playing a role in the parliamentary opposition to the Iraq war, and supporting attempts to impeach Tony Blair over the decision to invade.
But the single event for which he will doubtless be best remembered happened last year, when he became the first ever Nationalist to be first minister of a devolved Scottish Assembly.
But how much was this achievement a tribute to Salmond's own efforts to sell the nationalist message and inspire the people of Scotland? Or was he just the beneficiary of popular frustration with the Labour administrations in London and Edinburgh?
Everyone who marched against the Iraq war
The police said 750,000. The organisers said over two million. But both agreed it was the biggest single popular protest in British history.
On 15 February 2003, demonstrators in London, Glasgow and Belfast took to the streets to voice their opposition to the imminent invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain, the march was the first outpouring of sustained popular anger against an unpopular war.
Ultimately, it was popular anger about the war which lead to Blair's departure from Downing Street earlier than he had planned.
But the march didn't succeed in its aims; the invasion went ahead as planned, and many of the fears of the marchers were realised as Iraq slipped into anarchy and bloodshed.
So was the commitment of the people who turned out that day inspiring despite their failure?
Ken Livingstone
The former leader of the GLC was notorious leftwing firebrand in his eighties heyday, but when the decade began he was just a backbench MP - an old Labour relic in a New Labour era.
When the post for the first London mayor came up, he was denied the official nomination by party leaders fearful that he would return to his old trouble-making ways.
But he ran as an Independent, and no-one had the muscle to stop the charismatic newt-lover who still enjoyed considerable popularity among left-wing Londoners.
His 2000 victory brought him the largest electoral personal mandate ever enjoyed by a British politician. And despite Labour fears, he has been surprisingly moderate in office.
His biggest achievement is the congestion charge - a measure which could have been hugely unpopular, which he pushed through partly by promising to put the proceeds into the bus network.
He is shortlisted partly as a representative of the green movement - the most influential political movement of the past 10 years, which has nonetheless failed to produce any outstandingly inspiring individual leaders.
But has the man who brought bendy busses to London really inspired people across the nation enough to win this award?
Ian Paisley Senior and Martin McGuinness
Few political changes this decade can outrank the coming of peace in Northern Ireland. Mo Mowlam and Tony Blair both played a role, along with many other politicians and officials. John Hume and David Trimble won the Nobel Peace Prize for their contribution.
But while the moderates laid some of the groundwork with the Good Friday agreement in 1998, power sharing could not be made to work until the extremes could bury the hatchet too.
So last year's deal between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party, which paved the way for the return of a power-sharing assembly, was the step which really took Northern Ireland to the brink of normality.
A few years before it would have been impossible to imagine the famously intransigent Paisley sitting down with a former commander of the IRA.
But in May, they took up positions as first minister and deputy first minister of the new devolved assembly at Stormont. They even seem to be enjoying the experience - so much so that they've become known as the Chuckle Brothers.
It's an extraordinary turnaround and a great achievement. But has their inspiration really been so positive over the whole of the past decade?
Are they really the great peacemakers of Ulster - or obstructionists who stood in the way of peace for a decade?
The Countryside Alliance
Of all the serious issues facing Tony Blair on his arrival at Number 10, fox hunting must have seemed one of the least pressing.
But 10 months later, 250,000 people joined a march on Trafalgar Square to defend what they felt was their ancient freedom, and an essential part of the rural way of life.
The Countryside Alliance, which organised this event, became far more than a single-issue pressure group. The fight to save foxhunting was ultimately unsuccessful - it was banned in 2005 - but the alliance became a voice for rural people who felt their plight was being ignored by mainstream politicians.
Most notably, they were one of the groups which organised the 2000 fuel protests - one of the few moment before the Iraq war were Tony Blair felt he was not in control of events.
To some commentators, they were a more effective opposition to the government than the Conservative Party.
They are nominated for their success in inspiring people who were not part of the mainstream of Westminster politics.
But have they really achieved any permanent change? Or are they merely a howl of protest which is doomed to go unheard in an increasingly urban Britain? |
from http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/political+awards+how+to+vote/1300447
check the site for links or telephone numbers to vote
brian haw won last year  jamie oliver the year before ( for his school dinners thing ) ... who will win this year?
of course i'm voting the anti war movement, but alex salmond would be up there as well.
i wonder how they will fit all of us into the studio when we win though ... |
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Salim201
Joined: 12 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 3:59 pm Post subject: |
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looks like george galloway will be accepting it as the head of the anti-war movement, or is it tony benn that's president? either way they'll have a few words to say on the podium!!!  |
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