Watch “The Trial of Tony Blair”

This Channel 4 program has been posted online.

Crooks and Liars has a spoiling review here:

The Trial of Tony Blair’ was written by Alistair Beaton, whose previous feature-length satire, ‘A Very Social Secretary’ focused on the real-life affair between former Labour minister David Blunkett and his American lover, Kimberly Quinn. In this comedy-drama, ‘The Trial of Tony Blair’, Robert Lindsay reprises his role as Blair which this time concentrates on a future where Blair has retired from politics, and is facing indictment for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in the Hague. But where ‘A Very Social Secretary’ was a wickedly funny romp, ‘The Trial of Tony Blair’ has a biting edge that never quite lapses into outright satire. This comedy carries a message with a quite serious intent behind it, blurring the line between what is fiction and what might end up being prediction.

Speaking to the Brit press, Writer Alistair Beaton said:

“That would be terrific if I’d contributed to the public perception of Blair having done something he must pay a price for.

“I did set out, however, from the position of Blair as being fundamentally a man who cares but whose decisions have backfired and he is struggling to live with that.”

The linchpin is Blair’s famous-over-there religiosity. The treatment of Bush is also a appropriately handled. He winds up in rehab.

Managed Politics in Russia

There is a new kind of state emerging in the former Soviet Union: the overtly managed democracy. This October 31, 2006 article in the St. Petersburg Times posits that the creation of an opposition party party to support the head of state is “possibly” unprecedented. The article goes on to state:

The new party, Just Russia: Motherland, Pensioners, Life, is to play the role of the center-left opposition. Its rival is to be the established, center-right United Russia.

“If United Russia is the party of power, we will become the party of the people,” said Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, who was elected Just Russia’s leader Saturday.

“We will follow the course of President Vladimir Putin and will not allow anyone to veer from it after Putin leaves his post in 2008,” Mironov said.

Mironov’s comments came at a convention creating Just Russia.

The qualification is in reference to the unmanaged US two-party system or Japan’s one-and-a-half party system, which must be the model. The goal of the new system, as for its somewhat more unconciously operated models, is stability and concensus, charitably put, in a political order that will not challenge the State or its economic underpinnings.

The Greens and Unity08

The Atlantic is running an article on the Unity08 independent campaign for president, which concentrates on the veteran Democratic [Jerry Rafshoon and Hamilton Jordan] and Republican [John Deardourff and Doug Bailey] party consultants that are attempting to gin up a Ross Perot type insurgency. The initiative is a sign of the generally held perception in this country that something has gone seriously wrong with the political system. The disfunctionality is commonly, and wrongly in my opinion, attributed to “partisanship” and “lobbying” as if the complete abandonment of principle would somehow negate political patronage and bribery. Unity08 seems to be founded on the perception that the two major parties connection to the mass of voters through broad constituencies of race class and income is now mainly historical. By appealing to voters directly as individuals, in an online primary, they hope to create a cheap alternative to the current $2 billion horse race.

The creators of Unity08 believe that the answer is to open the process to the Internet masses, causing a tectonic shift powerful enough to disrupt the two-party system. They have not, however, lost faith in that system—merely in its power to correct itself. “The two-party system has worked well for 200 years and can continue to do so,” Bailey says, “but only when elections are fought over the middle. Our goal is to jolt the two parties into recognizing this, by drawing them into a fight over the middle rather than allowing them to keep maximizing the appeal to their bases at the extremes.”

The Trial of Tony Blair

On January 15, BBC 4 is running a special drama/comedy “The Trial of Tony Blair” which imagines the British PM’s life after office ending in a war crimes tribunal. The trailer is on Youtube and we are free to image what kind of freaked out combination of an Afterschool Special and 1941 that a U.S. network would come up with given the American scenario. The production team is responsible for a more lighthearted treatment of David Blunkett, one of Blair’s flunkies you probably haven’t heard of. This new peice seems to be appropriately grim and it seems like a good time to reasses Blair’s legacy, since he’s more or less promised to get out by the end of this year. The pro-Labour media will treat the departure as is if the historical record is yet to be written. Some people in the UK anyway will want to believe this tripe for reasons of national pride if nothing else. Bush’s decision to kick up the war a notch pretty much drops his latest round of justifications. Where does that leave Blair, Bush’s hanger-on? Not where this earnest Guardian reader thinks it does.