are you watching bbc? they did some clever camera work so they avoided showing any of the military familys against the war protesters at the end of downing street when blair left!
I saw that, yes! You could hear them alright, though. He was stood there like such a twat, grinning and waving and pretending he couldn't hear the deafening shouts of "war criminal!" from down the road.
Friends and foes bid premier a fond farewell GERRI PEEV
www.scotsman.com
AFTER a decade centre stage, the least they could do was rise to their feet to give the man known as 'The Actor' a round of applause. MPs from around the Commons clapped the outgoing Prime Minister as he finished what was a somewhat awkward session of Prime Minister's Questions. Except for a gang of defiant Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the press who staged a "sit in", the House of Commons took the unusual decision to applaud one of its own. Not since Robin Cook stood down from the Cabinet in 2003 over the war in Iraq had this happened. And yesterday, the same respect was, ironically, afforded to the man who led them into that war. One Labour MP, who grudgingly clapped, said: "I thought it would be all right as long as he didn't interpret this as a call for an encore."
But it was his political opponents who paid the warmest tribute. Those who had been quickest to hurl insults were now smothering him with kind words. A hushed silence descended over the House when Rev Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland's new First Minister, rose slowly to his feet. When Paisley speaks, his every word is imbued with meaning. There were times during talks on the future of Northern Ireland that the Prime Minister had been "angry ... and perhaps even lost his temper". Mr Paisley said he "fully understood the exasperation" Mr Blair felt during meetings with him. "But I want to say that he treated me with the greatest of courtesy. I had many things that I disagreed with him on, but we faced them," he added. He said the premier was now entering into "another colossal task" in the Middle East. He added: "I hope that what happened in Northern Ireland will be repeated."
Later, on the lawn by Parliament Square that was now littered with marquees for the press circus, George Galloway, who was expelled by Mr Blair from the Labour Party, was less gracious. He said appointing Mr Blair as Middle East envoy - was "like appointing Count Dracula as chief of the blood transfusion service".
Outside the Chamber, senior MPs were seen weeping, including at least one Cabinet minister. Given that the minister had not been a natural Blairite, there was suspicion it was more because they were tipped to be axed by Gordon Brown. According to Mr Blair's aide at that morning's Lobby briefing, it had it started as an unremarkable day. He said: "On a day like today your refuge is work, you just throw yourself into it."
With the world's cameras trained on the door of No 10, the removal men had no choice but to bundle out the Blairs' possessions into a van. The treadmill looked particularly heavy, but it is perhaps an explanation of how at 53, Mr Blair has managed to maintain a trim figure. He left in his official Jaguar car for Prime Minister's Questions with 45 minutes to spare, while anti-war protesters were unusually allowed inside the security gates at No 10. "Scumbag!" shouted Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed three years ago in Iraq.
For his final session as Prime Minister, Mr Blair admitted to the Commons that while he had not spent a lot of time in the Chamber, he was always nervous before Prime Minister's Questions and felt "fear and respect" for his colleagues. As has become the custom since March 2003, Mr Blair opened PMQs by paying tribute to the soldiers who had lost their lives in Iraq. This time, he added that he wanted to say "truly sorry" for the dangers troops faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he stressed he did not think their sacrifice was "in vain".
Run of the mill tributes flowed from David Cameron, the Tory leader, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, who may one day play a role in a coalition Cabinet with Mr Blair's successor. The Conservative leader praised his service and the patience of the Blair family. A fuschia-clad Cherie Blair, who watched the event from the special gallery with three of her children, nodded and shot him a grateful look. "That's nice" she said, touching the shoulder of her son, Euan, seated next to her. The Tory leader later waved his troops to their feet, in a gesture that seemed to shout: "This is what we would do for the departing house master at Eton. On your feet boys!"
The session took a lighter turn as Mr Blair unveiled an important piece of mail he received that morning. It said: "Details of employee leaving work. Surname: 'Blair'; first name: 'T'. It said actually: 'Mr, Mrs, Miss or other'. This form is important to you, take good care of it, P45." The youngest Blair, five-year-old Leo squirmed in his seat, desperately bored. After it was all over, Mr Blair appeared on the steps of Number 10 with his family for one last family photo for the press. "We're not going to miss you," jibed Mrs Blair, who often felt the press had unduly picked on her.
As his children, Euan, Kathryn, Nicky and Leo went back into the house, Mr and Mrs Blair got into his car to take the short trip to Buckingham Palace, travelling up Whitehall and along the Mall. Minutes later, Mr Blair was ushered into Buckingham Palace via the King's Door for his final audience with the Queen as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was the person he once said he trusted the most - apart from his wife.
He then made the less salubrious trip, by train, to his Sedgefield constituency where last night he announced he was standing down as their MP. It was a journey that would have proved impossible had the former Labour leader tried it 24 hours earlier, as the line had been closed by torrential floods. But Mr Blair knows better than most that, in politics, timing is everything. His parting shot to MPs in the Commons could not have been more fitting: "I wish everyone, friend or foe, well, and that is that. The end."
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He wishes everyone 'well'? I'm sure that's with the unspoken condition of 'no matter what shit I've caused you or your family, or global population, and for that matter the planet!'
it was sickening the media coverage, i totally agree with you faceless, blair is a cunt i'm a very peacefull chilled person normally, but blair - he really gets to me. i wish i was religious at least then you got the comfort that he'll pay for this one day
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The great deception continues - as must the effort to expose and indict the guilty
And so, the end of the Blairite decade. Tributes, applause and a standing ovation at PM’s Question Time. Gushing reflections from fellow politicians and sundry acolytes. And, of course, the whole panoply of deferential BBC coverage replete with helicopter ‘reportage’ of official cars going to and from the Palace.
How abjectly depressing, yet revealing, that so many people, so many institutions, can participate in this mass charade. How intellectually and morally bereft of our political and media ‘guardians’ to observe the constitutional etiquette while the slaughter goes on in Iraq.
Was there ever a more graphic illustration of collective deceit. Not conspiracy. Rather, a more disturbing acceptance, internalisation and amelioration of a gross lie.
And, now that the crime has been denied and mitigated by our servile media, the lie itself can be laundered and ‘cleansed’ through new hypocritical gestures. Wolfowitz to the World Bank, Bolton to the UN. And now Blair’s endorsement as the Quartet’s Envoy to the Middle East. Just when we thought we’d seen it all.
Again, the institutional self-deceit: how can the UN, who told Blair that his actions against Iraq were illegal, now propose him as a political dove? Unlike the Nazi war criminals who sat-out the remainder of their poisoned existence in remote bolt-holes, the modern war criminal now ‘hides’ in public; a more effective form of junta protection. Blair might, like Wolfowitz and Bolton, ultimately see his own public ‘fall from grace’ and removal from the Quartet’s office. But even that would be part of the convenient mask to deflect proper attention from his high war crimes. In the meantime, his pretence of ‘honest broker’ will be dutifully acknowledged and safely contextualised: irrespective of Blair’s past, they will say, he has the ‘standing’ and ‘determination’ to pursue peaceful resolutions between Israel and the Palestinians.
Here we see the vital task of the liberal media: to make that appointment a plausible reality; to encourage us to think the unthinkable, and bring us to a safe version of the thinkable, while cautiously observing the obvious objections. Hence, the safety-zone gesturings of Huw Edwards, live at Number 10, noting the token ‘doubt’ over Blair’s suitability for the post, and his casual dismissal of its actual importance: “That’s a debate for another day.”
Yes, let’s not spoil this mystical observance of the powerful with such inconvenient discussion. Never mind that such an appointment is equivalent in its obscenity to Henry Kissinger getting the Nobel Peace Prize. Never mind that approaching one million Iraqis lie dead at the behest of Blair and the murderers in suits. Never mind the four million Iraqis displaced from their homes as despairing refugees. Never mind the knock-on catastrophe across the Middle East and the prospect of generational misery to come.
How the establishment looks after its own. Even its psychopathic own – reflecting, one might reasonably conclude, its own collective psychopathic nature.
Today, as the handover of power between Britain’s two main prima facie war criminals is completed, with a complicit media indulging, par excellence, in its shocking awe, we have witnessed another historic crime take place in this institutional effort to shield the guilty and pervert the course of moral justice.
But, as millions of rational people around the world are still very capable of seeing, none of this ornamentation, deception and spin can obscure these resilient, enduring realities:
That Blair fronted and sold the lie of 'necessary war' in Iraq.
That Brown wrote the cheques for that aggression and continues, as PM, to defend the crime.
That the BBC and its peer media are grossly complicit in that catalogue of lies and protection of the warmongers.
Even with the institutional enterprise of the perpetrators and their media apologists, none of these inconvenient truths can be expunged from the historical record. No time should be lost in pursuing, exposing and indicting those concerned.
Strange, isn't it? When I woke up on the morning after Blair was first elected, it felt like I was waking up in a different country. Likewise, when Thatcher went, my friends and I threw a party to celebrate. Even though the Tories were still in power, we were naïve and young enough to believe that at least something would change, that we would feel different, somehow.
Today, I feel absolutely nothing. Blair has gone and three British soldiers have been blown to bits in Iraq. It feels exactly the same to me. Looking at Mr Brown's candidates for potential cabinet posts just fills me with despair. I mean, Ed Balls? Come on. Just another bunch of chancers eager to get their noses in the trough as quickly as possible. Get in, get their wives/husbands/children/chums from university on the payroll, sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. Some say give Mr Brown a chance. I say, bollocks. This is the man who wrote the cheques for Blair's war, this is the man whose tax loopholes allow the richest people in this country to pay a smaller proportion of their income as tax than the poor sods who clean their offices. And he's proud of it!
check the bit about brown and ... henry fucking kissinger! so he's got the people in from walmart to help with his globalisation stuff and now hes mates with kissinger?! blair as middle east peace envoy ... could it get any worse?!
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Craig Murray: Exit Tony, Enter Gordon
I spent most of a fun day outside Downing St shouting "Boo!", and giving a lot of interviews to foreign television media. One very pretty Spanish television journalist interviewed me under the impression I was John Major. I expect some Spaniards tomorrow might be puzzled by Major's radical views. I rather enjoyed aspects of this. She asked me "What was it like when you left Downing Street, Prime Minister Major" and I replied "I think it was sunny, oh yes." She looked very confused.
Arriving back home I did a very good, long documentary interview for ITV, this time as me again, then watched the TV. Adam Bolton on Sky News gave a remarkable bit of information - Gordon Brown has been a personal friend of Henry Kissinger for a long time, and the last time Kissinger came to London, Brown and Kissinger spent two hours alone together in 11 Downing St discussing Kissinger's latest book. That should disillusion those daft enough to believe that Brown's five year support for Bush's wars was a aberration forced upon him by circumstance.
Meanwhile Blair, for whom the House of Commons was never more than a vehicle for personal interest, has quit it even sooner than decently possible, so not a penny of the tens of millions of pounds about to flow his way from corporate America will have to be declared in the register of member's interests.
Beyond satire is Blair's appointment as Middle East envoy. Blair is the most wholehearted Zionist ever to lead a major British political party - including Balfour. He is at one with the religious right in the United States in having a gut Zionism perversely engendered by fundamentalist Christian beliefs.
Remember, Blair is leaving today because he was forced to announce his departure last summer. Even the eternally supine Labour Party revolted over Blair's support for the Israeli attack on the Lebanon. Blair is going because he sacrificed his last remaining political capital to block a UN call for a ceasefire. He did this, knowingly and deliberately, to give the Israelis another two weeks to devastate Southern Lebanon from the air.
This is the man who, in the Rose Garden, moved the UK away from the EU consensus and lined us up uncritically with George Bush's professedly pro-Israeli policies. All that is without counting the buckets of Iraqi arab blood on Blair's hands. No self-respecting Palestinian representative, of any party or group, should have any truck with Tony Blair.
Blair is the most famous liar in the World, since the Iraqi WMD debacle. Why should anybody trust him as an envoy?
As Tony Blair’s political obituaries proliferate across the media, there is a danger that these will form the first drafts, not of history, but of a hagiographic mythology. In spite of the heavy political weather that has cast a shadow over the latter half of the Blair premiership, there exists across the spectrum of mainstream political discourse something approaching a personality cult where the departing British prime minister is concerned, based primarily on two widespread views of Blair: firstly, as a uniquely gifted politician, and, secondly, as a crusader for liberal values on the world stage.
The first of these views – that of Blair as a political magician – is based on his having led the Labour Party to three successive election victories. However, a review of the statistical evidence exposes this view of Blair’s powers as having only a limited grounding in reality.
Until very recently, Blair’s main opposition had been a Conservative party beset with corruption and incompetence, retreating into its base on the xenophobic right and actively detested by much of the electorate. As a result, the Tories flatlined at around 30% in the polls for over a decade. To overcome such flaccid competition was perhaps a less than awe-inspiring achievement. And yet, as political writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft has pointed out, Blair’s popularity with the electorate, even when opposed only by a crippled Tory party (and the mostly irrelevant Liberal Democrats), has been rather less than emphatic.(1)
Blair’s first election victory in 1997 was won with only 44 per cent of the popular vote; and fewer individual votes were cast for New Labour that year than were cast for John Major’s decidedly unpopular Tories when the latter narrowly won their surprise victory in 1992. That Blair owed his 1997 win more to anti-Tory sentiment than any appetite for his “third-way” revolution was further evidenced by the fact that between 1992 and 1997 the Tory vote collapsed by an massive 4 million.
Major’s 1992 victory had come in the wake of a recession and the disastrous implementation of the “poll tax”, and Labour’s failure to secure victory even in these favourable circumstances provided much of the justification for the party’s subsequent lurch to the right under Blair. Yet in his 2001 election victory, after 4 years of relative economic stability and a near total-absence of effective political opposition from the Conservatives, Blair won fewer popular votes than Neil Kinnock had won in the 1992 defeat. And the trend continued. In 2005, Blair won fewer popular votes than the Tories had in their seminal 1997 meltdown.
The shallowness of Blair’s electoral success is further demonstrated by the recent rejuvenation of a newly “centrist” Conservative Party under David Cameron. As soon as the Tories were able to find a plausible human being to field as party leader - with policies that, unlike those of his immediate predecessors, didn’t resemble the teenage fantasies of some home counties closet-fascist – Labour’s lead in the polls evaporated.
Between 1997 and 2005, the Labour vote plunged by nearly 4 million, just as the Tory vote had done during the living death of the Major years. As Wheatcroft points out, this is “what statisticians call a trend line”. Put bluntly, the more the British public experienced of Prime Minister Blair, the less of them were inclined to support him (and that support was limited and shallow to begin with).
The long-term evisceration of Labour’s popular support under Blair’s leadership gives us the true measure of his alleged political genius. His real talent has been an ability to play the system so as to remain in power for ten years, in defiance of widespread and sharply increasing unpopularity. For Wheatcroft, “Blair has not only carried out a kind of imposture, he has hugely benefited from grave systemic faults and deformations in our political culture”.
The second major aspect of the Blair myth is that of Blair the crusading liberal internationalist. Even the harshest of Blair’s mainstream critics see the Iraq war as an error of judgement that sullied the record of an enlightened world statesman dedicated to the energetic promotion of humanitarian values. It was NATO’s 1999 intervention over Kosovo that first properly established this view in the prevailing narrative. But again, the image is unsupported by the evidence.
In 1999 Blair announced, to wide acclaim, “a new internationalism where the brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated”. Less noted was the fact that, in the contemporaneous cases of Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds and Indonesia’s treatment of East Timor, Blair’s government not only “tolerated” the “brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”, but provided material support in the form of arms sales (2). In these cases, New Labour intervened on the side of governments committing atrocities every bit as shocking as those committed by Serbia against the Kosovar Albanians. Yet for the myth-makers, Blair’s opposition to Serb atrocities is a definitive factor in the judgement of his humanitarian credentials, whilst his support for similar Turkish and Indonesian atrocities is apparently irrelevant. In fact, even Britain’s humanitarian role in the Kosovo episode is highly questionable.
Before the Kosovo intervention, at the Rambouillet conference in March 1999 where Serbia rejected NATO’s terms, a senior US administration official told the media, “we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing and that’s what they are going to get”. Human rights groups criticised NATO’s conduct during the war, as indiscriminate cluster bombs were used and civilian infrastructure targeted. A sharp rise in Serbian atrocities was precipitated, not prevented by the action; an outcome that was widely predicted, even on the NATO side. NATO then failed to seriously counter Kosovar atrocities against Serbs in the war’s aftermath. (3)
NATO’s less-than-humanitarian conduct before, during and after the war, and its apparently contradictory behaviour in the cases of Turkey and Indonesia, raise obvious questions about the sincerity of the West’s purported humanitarian intentions. For all Blair’s lofty rhetoric, a more plausible interpretation of these events is that Kosovo was simply a case of business-as-usual for nation states in the international system. Turkey and Indonesia were supported in their “brutal repression of whole ethnic groups”, whilst similar behaviour on the part of Serbia was not “tolerated”, because the former were economic and military allies of the West, whilst the latter was not. Humanitarian concerns do not appear to have entered into the equation.
Unlike the mythology, this latter view has the advantage of being consistent with the facts. For example, we need not ask, counterfactually, what the UK’s reaction to events in Kosovo might have been if Serbia had not been resisting neo-liberal economic reform or NATO’s eastward expansion. The cases of Turkey and Indonesia provide us with our answer. This interpretive consistency contrasts with the difficult questions and inconsistencies raised by the claimed humanitarian motives for Blair’s “liberal interventionism”. (4)
Many other apparent contradictions, highlighted when contrasting Blair’s alleged humanitarianism with his actual policies, are rendered comprehensible by understanding his actions as those of a standard-variety politician serving classic state interests, as opposed to those of a liberal-humanitarian trying to “do the right thing”. Contrast Blair’s claimed concern for Third World Poverty with his ardent support for neo-liberal “reforms” that have so catastrophically failed developing countries, though amply serving Western economic interests. (5) Contrast Blair’s claimed support for democratisation in the Middle East with his actual support for the House of Saud, one of the most tyrannical regimes on the face of the planet. Contrast Blair’s claimed concern for the fate of the Iraqi people with New Labour’s attempt to rubbish a scientific survey that had estimated over 650,000 deaths caused by the US-UK invasion, even though government advisers had privately described the survey as “robust”.(6)
Was Blair’s foreign policy underpinned by a belief, however erroneous, that he was “doing the right thing”? Only Blair can know his own mind. The rest of us must rely on the evidence, and this does not allow us to casually assume the benign motivation described in the mythology, much less to characterise Blair’s policies in the moral light that he himself would choose. Of course it is plausible that, when helping to starve the population of the occupied Palestinian territories for voting the wrong way in a free election, or when blocking calls for a ceasefire during Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon last summer, Blair had satisfied himself that the actions he was taking were morally virtuous (7). In fact, given what we understand of human nature, this is not only possible but probable. It is also largely irrelevant. What is relevant, not least to the victims of Blair’s policies, is the objective facts; not what Blair claims he “thought was right”.
With Blair apparently poised to become the Quartet’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, it would appear that the world has, regrettably, not seen the last of his characteristic personal blend of cynical politicking shrouded in pious cant. But the above analysis has implications beyond those for Blair himself. Propagation of the Blair myth serves to distort our understanding, not only of one man’s career, but also of our governments’ role in the world. Above all, it encourages us to think uncritically about the behaviour of politicians; to accept their rhetoric as unproblematic descriptions of reality. Where Blair is concerned, it remains to be seen whether history will be written by the myth-makers, or by those concerned with the facts.
David Wearing is the author of the website The Democrat’s Diary.
Notes
(1) “It really should be easier to get rid of an unwanted prime minister”, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Guardian, 30 August 2006
(2) A New Generation Draws The Line, Noam Chomsky, Verso Books, 2001. Web of Deceit, Mark Curtis, Vintage, 2003
(3) Curtis
(4) For more on these questions, see my “Kosovo and its Implications”, 29 May 2007, The Democrat’s Diary.
(5) Curtis
(6) “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’”, Owen Bennett-Jones, BBC World Service, 26 March 2007
(7) See my “Still Strangling Palestine”, 20 April 2007, ukwatch.net, and “Britain’s Role in the Israeli-Hezbollah War”, 7 September 2006, The Democrat’s Diary.
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i'm a very peacefull chilled person normally, but blair - he really gets to me. i wish i was religious at least then you got the comfort that he'll pay for this one day
so my dream never come true that he would come out of number 10 in handcuffs the fight goes on