Blears Busted
February 6th, 2009
Views: 1565
Posted by ChrisG at 12:08 pm
Hazel Blears in today’s Graun, whilst attacking cultures of cynicism, the elitist commentariat, blah blah blah, in the name of her oppressed colleagues, lays into George Monbiot:
Then he turns his fire on consultations (which he claims are rigged) and citizens’ juries (which he says “are used to lend a sheen of retrospective legitimacy to decisions already taken”). Rigged consultations and faked citizens’ juries? Surely this would be the stuff of front-page exclusives, if only there was any evidence to back it up.
Actually, Hazel, it’s more the stuff of legal judgements, e.g. this one [PDF] concerning your government’s 2006 consultation on nuclear power, an exercise for which Mr Justice Sullivan considered “rigged” to be a too-generous description:
For the reasons set out above, the consultation exercise was very seriously flawed. Adopting the test put forward by Mr Drabble, “something has gone clearly and radically wrong.” The purpose of the 2006 Consultation Document as part of the process of “the fullest public consultation” was unclear. It gave every appearance of being an issues paper, which was to be followed by a consultation paper containing proposals on which the public would be able to make informed comment. As an issues paper it was perfectly adequate. As the consultation paper on an issue of such importance and complexity it was manifestly inadequate. It contained no proposals as such, and even if it had, the information given to consultees was wholly insufficient to enable them to make “an intelligent response”.
This legal judgement on the “rigging” of this consultation was, in fact, the reason the Government undertook another – and arguably equally inadequate – consultation in 2007. Perhaps the next piece Hazel writes will complain about how exposure to corrosive miasmas of cynicism is making her lose her memory.
UPDATE (10/02): Monbiot responds, leaving behind nothing but a smoking pile of ashes with a ginger wig atop it.
[...] Smokewriting – Blears busted – Are the corrosive miasmas of cynicism rotting Hazel's mind? [...]
Nice work. Hazel Blears is a cretinous little gobshite. Gwyneth Dunwoody knew it:
“But I have rarely seen a decision such as this, taken with such cynicism and with so little respect for the interests of the average voter. When the Secretary of State [Blears] was seeking office as the deputy leader of the Labour party, she said that people frequently become disaffected with their own Government because they 
feel that no one is listening to them. Wherever could they have got that idea from? She also made it clear – she told us constantly – that she would listen.”
http://punkscientist.blogspot.com/search/label/Hazel%20Blears%20is%20a%20cockweasel