The Poorhouse almost applauded Blair a few months ago in "daring" to come out against Saddam Hussein facing the death penalty, saying "We are against the death penalty, whether it's Saddam or anybody else". Yes, Hussein was an evil, evil tyrant who needed removing - if anyone should have faced the death penalty Hussein probably was it - but that doesn’t negate the dangerous wrongness of the death penalty in the first place. For a country who, via the Human Rights Act 1998, is party to the European Convention on Human Rights which forbids such a thing, it may seem normal that our leader should have something fairly condemnatory to say about it...but it sometimes seems there's nothing normal left in Blair-dom.

He of course largely negated his comments by not actually doing anything about the issue, the old "the Iraqis (sic) must decide" route, but nonetheless at least he said it. So when recently he got the chance to potentially walk the walk in a long movement towards global abolishment of the death penalty, what did he do? The Poorhouse is sad to report that he totally, 100%, undoubtedly poodled it.

Following pressure from civil rights campaigners, Romano Prodi, the Prime Minister of Italy, was getting it together to put such a proposal in front of the United Nations General Assembly. To increase the position of such an attitude, he sent his foreign minister Massimo D'Alema to an EU foreign ministers' meeting to gain continental agreement.

Guess who destroyed all hopes of such a motion succeeding? Yep, our fine British Government. Their "talk to the hand" attitude had to be motivated by some almost-impossibly unavoidably critical-to-humanity problem surely? Why yes, of course, as reported by the Independent:

British diplomats said privately that they did not wish to create difficulties for the United States at a delicate time

Say no more.