UNLESS THERE IS AN AWAKING - IN A FEW DAYS A DISCREDITED TONY BLAIR - WILL RETURN TO No 10.
DAILY MAIL
SATURDAY ESSAY
by MAX HASTINGS *
THE KING OF DUPLICITY
* Like millions,
Max Hastings Welcomed New Labour’s victory eight years ago. TODAY He argues that Tony Blair has been Corrupted by power In a way UNMATCHED By any premier of modern
times SO What does this say ABOUT A NATION SET TO RE-ELECT
HIM? * ALDOUS
HUXLEY’S Brave New World, written in 1932, is now an unfashionable
novel. But this election campaign puts
it into mind. In Huxley’s nightmare
universe of the future, human discontent is kept at bay by doses of the drug ‘soma’,
which lulls all cares. Huxley’s
robotically-conditioned characters talked of going on ‘soma holidays’, narcotic escapes from reality. Back in our own
times, much of the British electorate
seem astonishingly willing to continue their long political ‘soma holidays’
through next Thursday.
Content with material well-being, they appear unwilling to think about anything save they are enjoying life, still some thousands off their credit limits and the garden is looking nice for the time of the year, thank you very much. They will thus re-elect Tony Blair. This week’s revelations about Blair’s shameless distortion of the legal advice about the war in Iraq completes a prosecution case that was already devastating. He
has performed actions as Britain’s prime minister, which if transferred to any
other sphere of life, would cost him a custodial sentence for FRAUD. Those voters satisfied that the economy prospers, and there is lots of money about, refuse to heed the fact that Labour’s leader has been exposed as a serial deceiver. Put
this point to Mr Jones in Bristol or Sheffield and he might glance up from the
telly and shrug: ‘What do you expect?
All politicians are the same. It wouldn’t
be any different under Howard or Kennedy.’ Mr Jones believes that under the Tories or LibDems, petrol prices would stay high, council tax would go up, Rover would go down, asylum seekers would come in, serial offenders would be let out and -under Michael Howard anyway-British troops would be committed to Texan adventurers abroad. Of
course, it is true that all the parties at all elections conduct auctions of
promises, most of which go unfulfilled.
But after eight years of any government, it is right to judge its
history, not its aspirations. It was because the Tory record had become so tarnished that the country ejected John Major in 1997. I
was among those who thought that a just verdict. Tha Government’s refusal to address the plight of the public
services had become shameful. Civil war
on Europe paralysed. It
was settlement day for years of failures and fiascos-the early Nineties
recession prominent among them. Tories had run out of steam and ideas. Today, however, it is Tony Blair’s
turn to face a similar reckoning which invites an equally harsh verdict. This is the Blair who said at the
beginning: ‘We in government have to be purer than pure.’ Some
of us really did believe that he was a man of
integrity as well as rhetoric, of honesty as well as moderation. The
process of discovering otherwise has been long and painful. The Prime Minister
offering himself for re-election next Thursday looks a different man from the
one who stood like John the Baptist on the doorstep of Downing Street the
morning after his 1997 poll triumph. Today’s Tony Blair is the man who accepted cash for his
party for continuing to allow tobacco advertising on racing cars, whose
government has consistently deceived the public about NHS waiting lists, who
pardons and promotes his personal Iagos (Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell)
even when the stage is strewn with the flotsam of their deceits. Here is
the Blair who promised more open government, yet goes to ever more ruthless
lengths to conceal its secrets; who has seized more power than any in history
for Whitehall, and for appointed advisers and quangos at the expense of elected
representatives. * Britain
has become less a democracy than an elected dictatorship Here is a leader who claims
to respect our Armed Forces yet has cut their numbers and who exposes to
criminal prosecution the soldiers whom he sent to Iraq. He has subverted public institutions-not least among
them the National Statistical Office-for partisan political purposes. HE
IDENTIFIES the interests of the State with those of his own party,
and demands that the Civil Service should do likewise. He claims to support
personal freedoms, yet he banned fox-hunting. He professes to support commercial enterprise, yet has loaded it
with new taxation and regulation. He has achieved some
improvement in health care at stupendous cost to the taxpayer, without
addressing structural reform. Whatever promises Labour’s
manifesto makes for the future, the party has shrunk from any attempt to address
the vital issue of pensions. Educational standards
have fallen, and no one is fooled by the cynical manipulation of
standards to make this seem otherwise.
Rail infrastructure has effectively been re-nationalised, to paper over
disastrous ministerial bungling. Downing Street has
abused patronage and sold favours in the fashion that makes Lloyd George’s
sale of honours seem amateurish. The Prime Minister’s
political creatures control government information with a ruthlessness
that would command admiration in a Balkan dictatorship. It is sometimes suggested that the media
treat politicians too harshly. Tony
Blair, however, started his premiership with a honeymoon. Many of us treated him with respect and even
admiration. We wanted him to
succeed. We thought he was different. Blair has proved himself different all right, but not
remotely in the fashion we supposed. He has
become enthralled with power, and corrupted by it in a fashion unmatched by any
prime minister of modern times. Until the war, I continued to respect Labour’s management
of the economy, and to believe that this government had done some things that
need doing for Britain. Yet over the past three years Blair’s glittering showcase
of sincerity has been stripped bare, to reveal a storehouse stocked with DUPLICITY. It is
hard to imagine a graver
abuse of office than to take the nation to war on the basis of falsehoods. FOR
MANY voters like me the progressive exposure of the TRUTH about IRAQ has been
decisive in convincing us that Blair is unfit to continue as prime minister. Most of us try to rally round when Britain looks like going
to war. Yet through the summer of 2002,
my own doubts grew about what Blair was saying and doing, in thrall to an obviously
dangerous U.S. president. Almost weekly, Downing Street told Parliament and the British people that no decision had been made about committing troops to Iraq. I
wrote here in July 2002: ‘It is an extremely disturbing state of affairs
that the West appears to be advancing towards this campaign in a catatonic
stupor, without any real public debate about its objectives or their fulfilment.’ On September 24, just after the publication of Tony Blair’s
notorious dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), I wrote from
Washington: ‘Whatever Clare Short says, or the United Nations or Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all, America was going to invade Iraq and topple Saddam. The Blair dossier is not evidence presented to a jury. The British Cabinet will have no influence on events.’ I thought the invasion was a ghastly mistake, because it
was hard to see a happy post-war scenario.
Yet I believed what Blair said about WMD. I simply could not imagine that
a British government would be so explicit about the threat unless it was sure. I still accept Lord Hutton’s view that Blair did not explicitly
lie. He really believed that WMD
existed, as did the whole British defence establishment. The charge against Blair, which Hutton absurdly
ignored but which seemed equally grave, is that the WMD case was only ever a pretext
to persuade the British people to a course of action which Blair and Bush were
secretly committed anyway. When the nonsense of WMD was stripped bare after the fall of
Baghdad, when resigning Robin Cook was proved to have been right and the ruling
Prime Minister utterly wrong, Blair fell back on his defence for every mistake
he had made. He said that he was sincere; that he believed in WMD at the
time; that he was an honest man. Yet sincerity is a pitifully inadequate excuse for a
blinder as colossal as starting a war under false pretences. MEN
HAVE DIED- Iraqis in thousands, British soldiers in scores-because
Blair cherished a messianic conviction that it was his moral duty to join Bush’s
crusade against Saddam. Even when all this was
exposed, when it became clear that Alastair Campbell’s
presentation of the WMD case represented run-away inflation of the intelligence
provided to government, absolutely no one quit, or asked to do so. INDEED,
in a sublime act of hubris, Tony Blair promoted John Scarlett, the intelligence officer
most grievously tarnished by collusion with Campbell, to become
director of Britain’s Secret Service. Tony Blair forever forfeited the trust of the
British people by the false dealing over Iraq, the gravest of all his exercises
in public deceit. Yet today, he offers himself for re-election. There might be some logic in supporting Labour next Thursday
if this hopelessly tarred prime minister had been supplanted by Gordon
Brown. Then, at least, labour could
claim to have cleansed the stables, purged Blair’s sins. As it is, we are invited to support this government by the crudest nod and wink:
If we vote for tricky Tony next week, after a decent interval we will get
honest Gordon. Labour is conducting this election campaign like a marathon
runner assisting round the course a man with a broken leg, or rather a
shattered image. By an extraordinary twist of fate, the leader who was
Labour’s asset in 1997 has today become its overwhelming liability. Yet
it is this liability who stands to re-enter Downing Street and retain power to
govern us all for a further five years, unless whim dispatches him on a
pilgrimage to Lourdes or to make himself Archbishop of Canterbury. If Labour achieves the victory the polls predict, the British people will give a wretched signal to the world: we do not care what lies we have been told, what sins have been committed by this prime minister WE
CARE only that the sun shines, interest rates are low, and it will soon be
time to take the boat out. Think of the host of
ministers forced from office in recent years: Mandelson for his personal
lies. Byers for mismanaging
the railways. Blunkett over his lover’s
nanny’s passport. Estelle Morris for
finding education too much for her. How
trivial their failures appear alongside those of their leader? If a man expects to go to prison for issuing a fraudulent
prospective for a mere City company, what should be the judgement on one who
launched a nation on a fraudulent war? [IMPEACHMENT
-THE PENALTY FOR TREASON TO
COUNTRY] From the dock, Blair cannot even claim personal penitence
in mitigation. He regrets NOTHING because
he is confident it is all-OK with God. This is a sorry story, and its threatened outcome reflects sorry truths about the British electorate. The man who has made fools of 60 million people is
confident we shall re-elect him, without even needing to dose us with ‘ soma’. And
unless there is a dramatic awakening in the next few days the British people
will return a wholly discredited prime minister to Downing Street. * * * [Font
altered-bolding & underlining used-comments in brackets] APRIL/05
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The abolition of Britain * Veteran parliamentarian TONY BENN speaks of the absolute necessity of a REFERENDUM HEAR HIM ON http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o0I-ZdvQz1o * * 13th October,2007
So You Want Out Of The EU
THEN WHY NOT SIGN THE RENUNCIATION of EU CITIZENSHIP http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/OptoutDetails from petition creator With the signing of the Maastricht Treaty the people of Britain were given DUAL CITIZENSHIP -both EUROPEAN and BRITISH The extra tier of citizenship was thrust upon the people without their consent -and in many cases knowledge. The PEOPLE of GREAT BRITAIN should be allowed the option of opting out of the EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP if they so wish. The GOVERNMENT will then be able to provide those who have opted out with BRITISH DOCUMENTATION -only such as British (not EU) passports, driving licences and other national documents. EU laws will also NOT APPLY to those who HAVE OPTED OUT OF EUROPEAN CITIZENSHIP
[PETITION OPEN UNTIL OCTOBER 08]
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Daniel Hannan - Forming an OPPOSITION to the EU
* GORDON BROWN WANTS TRUST-BUT WHY WON'T HE TRUST YOU? * 67% want powers back from EU-ICM poll-June 21-2007-95% of British people want a REFERENDUM * FOR A REFERENDUM SIGN TODAY ON LINE * July 18-2007 ALSO JOIN THE 10 DOWNING STREET PROTEST Readers can add their support to the growing clamour for a REFERENDUM on the '"REFORM TREATY" by signing up to a 10 Downing Street 0n-line petition http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/EU-treaty-NON/
The Petition reads as follows: "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to guarantee that the British people will be permitted a binding REFERENDUM on any and all attempts to resurrect the EU " CONSTITUTION" (and any or all of its content) regardless of nomenclature." Deadline for the PETITION is 31st January,2008 Eurofacts 27th July 2007. * 'The Spirit of England' by In London on St.George's Day -1953 *
VOTE -2007
WITH THE ONLY PARTY WITH A MANDATE TO SET YOU FREE
THE UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY THE QUESTION THAT THE VOTER MUST ANSWER
‘DO YOU WISH TO BE GOVERNED BY YOUR OWN PEOPLE, LAW AND CUSTOM OR BY THE CORRUPT ,EXPENSIVE UNACCOUNTABLE AND CORRUPT ALIEN BUSYBODY BRUSSELS’
-SIMPLE IS IT NOT?
TO RECLAIM YOUR DEMOCRACY DON'T VOTE FOR THE TRIPARTITE PARTIES IN WESTMINSTER BUT SMALL PARTIES THAT SPEAK THEIR MINDS WITHOUT SPIN AND LIES. *
ONLY WILL BRING DEMOCRACY BACK TO THE ENGLISH PEOPLE *
SCOTLAND -ITS PARLIAMENT -WALES-ITS ASSEMBLY-ENGLAND-STILL AWAITS ITS PARLIAMENT-WHY?
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