Shame on You, Mr Blair!

A Journey is the title of the self-serving piece of narcissistic trash churned out by Tony Blair, like so many other lies, for the "rabble" to feast upon. Clearly, Mr Blair is not content with the Medal of Freedom from George Bush, the £20 million he has amassed since he left office or his cushy job as Peace Envoy to the Middle East. No, it is not enough for him, he must play a part in crafting his own legacy. Blair can't help himself, he must distort the truth further for the sake of self-glorification. Mr Blair would prefer it if we, the people he despises, were to remember him as a "progressive" for implementing the minimum wage, working tax-credits, repealing Section 28 and devolving power to Scotland and Wales. These were just tokens, symbolic gestures, Blair threw to the "rabble" to look like a "progressive". Blair is less proud of banning fox hunting, which he boasts of sabotaging in his book, and coming up with the Freedom of Information act, because it enables journalists to ask annoying questions.

The donation Blair has made to British troops is also a token, a symbolic gesture of caring to help the image. Of course, in donating the proceeds to soldiers Blair does not absolve him of the role he played in engineering a blood bath in the Middle East. There is no compensation for the 1 million-plus Iraqis slaughtered and the 4 million displaced because of the decision made under him. If we lived in a civilised society the Blair cabinet and the Bush administration would be in the Hague. He would rather we forgot about Iraq and Afghanistan, rather we remember him as a great man for bringing peace to Ireland and the Balkans. But we the people, whom he harbours such contempt for, should not forget him as the neoconservative who opposed tighter regulations of banking whilst supporting a campaign of violence in the Middle East.

In 2007 Blair was driven out of office, he was succeeded by the much loathed Gordon Brown, just one year short of meeting Thatcher's record of 11 years in power - a goal so petty we know it must have consumed him. In retrospect it was sad to see Blair leave office so prematurely, as we were denied the pleasure of his downfall and had to "make-do" with Brown. He has only resurfaced recently to peddle copies of his mediocre book, which Richard Seymour described as "Blair's fat little compendium of pseudo-revelations, attacks on personal acquaintances and colleagues, self-justifying circumlocutions, political polemic, and narcissistic reflections, comes with its own self-destruct button." In which Blair compares himself to Lady Diana, as she was as manipulative as he is apparently, and remarks that he felt "armoured and able to float above the demonic rabble tethering at his limbs."

Recently, when being interviewed by Andrew Marr, Blair appeared glib as always. He was keen to come across as the maker of right decisions and humble enough to admit a few faults. The "right decision" being the invasion of Iraq, the "fault" being the ban on fox hunting. But it would be a gross understatement to say that Blair is "out-of-touch". As the old Poodle is now to the Right of Nick Clegg on foreign policy and to the Right of David Cameron on ID cards, civil liberties and immigration. Blair even claims that Brown lost the election because he deviated from the "New Labour programme" and insisted that the Labour Party has to be open to "successful people", like himself obviously. This Poodle has even gone so far as to back the Con-Dem Coalition in the cuts agenda they are pursuing, further demonstrating that his loyalty to the Labour Party is little more than a shallow tribal instinct. The only thing "red" about Tony Blair is the blood under his fingernails.

Whether he likes it or not, Tony Blair will go down in history for his part in the illegal invasion of Iraq and the shameful way in which he aligned himself with the Bush administration. He claims that aligning himself with the Bushites brought him closer to the American people, even though Bush was anointed by the US Supreme Court not the American people and out of a populace of over 300 million people only 50 million people voted for Bush. We should not forget that 'George the Anointed' and his policies only really benefited around 1% of Americans. It was the richest 1% of the population which gained $1.6 trillion under the Bush tax-cuts. So the invasion of Iraq, an act of aggression which would be condemned under the Nuremberg principles, is certainly not a crime perpetrated by the majority of the American people - the same is true of Britain. The responsibility lies on the members of the Blair cabinet and the Bush administration. To call these people "liars" would be to presuppose the false notion that they can even tell the truth.

In the Andrew Marr interview Blair proclaimed that it is moral to overthrow tyrants because they are tyrants. Though he was keen to point out exceptions, such as Mugabe, exceptions made along "pragmatic grounds". Of course King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Hosni Mubarak, dictators backed by Britain and America, were not examples of his choice. This is the principle which is supposed to vindicate Mr Blair of the illegal invasion of Iraq and the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis. Though he still claims that the invasion was down to Saddam's violations of UN resolutions over weapons of mass-destruction. Blair has backed away from a previous statement in which he "revealed" that he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known that Saddam did not have WMD. After realising that this is an indefensible position which leaves him vulnerable to even more criticism Blair backed away from it.

The Poodle also claimed that the invasion of Iraq was not for America, it was for Britain. The truth is that it was not for a country at all. The no-bid reconstruction contracts handed over to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel via executive agreements are evidence of this. It's been estimated that 80% of Iraqi oil has been seized by American and British energy corporations. Not only that, the economy of Iraq has been transformed - for the worst - with the public sector being decimated by a series of economic reforms known as "shock therapy". These policies were not the result of a "fledgling democracy" but were imposed through the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was made up of Americans and Brits. It was "shock therapy", which slashed the corporation tax down from 40% to 15% and has allowed multinational corporations to transfer 100% of their profits out of Iraq tax-free. The war Blair embarked on for Britain, was more like an armed looting spree by corporations.


Blair is not the first to bring out a book to set the record "straight", and he will not be the last either. George W Bush will be releasing his book Decision Points in November of this year. As Michael Moore once said, we live in fictitious times in which we have fictitious election results and fictitious governments who send the poor off to kill other poor people for fictitious reasons. Shame on you, Mr Blair! Though it is no surprise that these people are now attempting to sway and distort history in their favour. Let's hope that New Labour and its "noble lies" are dead now, the only way forward for the Labour Party is a return to its heritage of working-class radicalism. Nothing short of a trial in the Hague would be a moral end to this chapter in 21st Century politics. Sadly the chapter may outlive Blair and Bush, as the extremities of the past decade will reverberate throughout government for years to come.