In his prime, Blair was charismatic, just high enough in the social pecking order to be aspirational but not so much that he alienated you. Certainly some of the allusions to him being ordinary were clumsy but certainly every politician attempts this 'reach across the divide'. Politicians, eh, making you feel better that they listen to Oasis as they close your public services.
Well, I thought, sure he's another politician and he got them into power with his third way politics, which made them attractive to rich people who dimly believed that a true socialist government would steal the money that they worked so hard to inherit and it was all gravy from there, wasn't it?
So civil liberties got stripped away and, as a country, we went to war on a lie. The rich continued to get richer, and although there were a lot of good things available to alleviate some of the pain in being poor or low waged in this country, I grew to resent Blair. In particular, when we went to war.
Now the hijackers were of Saudi descent, so why did we go to Iraq? Certainly the idea of pursuing a diplomatic investigation would have been sensible but no, Bush wanted a war with someone, anyone and Iraq was there for the taking. That evidence had to be fabricated and that Blair maintained his belief in the dossier throughout was meant to be him showing he could roll with the big boys on the global battlefield, that we could war as well as the Americans.
Excuse me, but fuck that.
It isn't the Prime Minister or the minister or the political journalist who goes to war, its that man or woman you went to school with, who you went out with a summer, your cousin who's struggled to find work where you live, the man who wanted to get out of the town where he was born - those are the people who get sent to war. Sometimes they don't come back, or they don't come back in one piece - mentally or physically. So it stands to reason that we send them into harm's way without a genuine reason and with the necessary equipment, to defend against a threat against the people of their country, not to prove a point or massage a political ego. The heartening thing is that people went out to protest, even if the cabinet did not listen - which I put down to the arrogance that perhaps is necessary to run for and win leadership, to a certain degree.
That he led a government that participated in the deaths of between 97 and 106,000 civilians, that entertained torture and extraordinary rendition(kidnapping someone and taking them to a country where it is legal to torture them), that radicalised certain elements of fundamentalist Islam and made the world more unstable for all of us, and then refuses to entertain the idea of an apology. Blair's vision is a poisoned chalice, a Faustian pact whereupon we gained a glimpse at a fairer world and in return we allowed the gap between rich and poor to increase, but the poor got a few more crumbs from the table and we got MPs who were/are devoted and passionate about social justice.
It is a price that I am uncomfortable to have paid, as a voter and a Labour Party member and I hope that we can learn from Blair - it is telling that he has accrued vast personal wealth(although he has not been vulgar with it) and then gone onto a high profile as an ambassador for Middle Eastern peace(oops there) and an interfaith ambassador, so he might yet do some good - one can only hope. I am unlikely to buy his book, even though he made the gesture of donating the advance to the armed forces, seeing as his informed decision has maimed and killed so many of them.
I enjoy the benefits of a great many of Labour's policies, but I cannot reconcile those gains with the fact that we denied chemotherapy drugs to Iraqi children, that we displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes, that we made things worse for the Iraqi people in so many ways that we advanced the idea of private enterprise in a combat scenario, that the world is an angrier and more volatile place for the actions of these people, that they proceeded to war in violation of international law, the very best advice and evidence from experts in all fields and I did my part in it during my time of naval service, enforcing the sanctions that deprived children of food and water, to allegedly punish a man and his family who sat in their solid gold mansion, fed their zoo animals and played their games whilst his people starved and suffered.
There is hope, however. We can get a leader who will best represent the ideals that Blair alluded to, and hopefully won't sell us down the river, David carries too much of the New Labour ideal about him and I do not believe that experiment bears resurrection, my vote will be for Ed Miliband and I would encourage anyone with a vote, either via trade union or party membership to do so. Let us leave Blair with his demons, he has to sleep at night with the deaths of thousands on his conscience and that is far more punishment than any court, man or country can inflict.
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