Hey everyone It is my opinion and I have to say I am by no means alone in holding it that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has long since become an embarrassment to the party he used to lead. Since leaving office the former Labour PM has been given every chance to feed his ego on world tours where he will gladly pontificate on every subject under the sun as long as the price is right. These topics include three things he knows less about than contestants in your average beauty pageant namely Scotland, with particular reference to nationalism and defacto to what he has the nerve to claim are the caveman of the SNP.
The other topics which expose Tony’s intellectual vacuum are socialism, and world peace.If I can look at these subjects in reverse order I will illustrate just how out of touch the former Prime Minister of these islands actually is with a world which has moved on in the eight years since his resignation whilst he has continued to stand still and admire the view in the mirror.
Let us start with world peace This is something for which Blair is ludicrously lauded. This goes back to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 which brokered the peace between Irish Republicans and the British minded Unionist community bringing to and an end almost three decades of violence between the rival communites and brought about the setting up of the Northern Ireland Assembly on a power sharing basis. Whilst Blair does deserve some credit for getting the unionists to the table, It was American President Bill Clinton who was the prime mover to get this off the ground and unlike Blair, Clinton had creadibility with the Republican community. One faultline still runs through this process and could derail it at any time and that is a Blair issue not a Clinton one it is of course the contentious topic of parades as by giving the hardline unionists of the Loyal Orange Order permission to march too close to Republican areas Blair will be judged whether he likes it or not as the man who threw flame throwers in to the peace and allowed the least desirable of all British citizens a chance to parade their bowler hats, buckfast and bigotry too close to nationalist areas. This could be seen by Republicans as an attempt by a very British minded unionist Prime Minister to give his allies the chance to lord it over innocent civilians who just wanted to get on with their lives.
If the Good Friday Agreement was Blair’s greatest success there can be no doubt that the rest of his overseas military adventures were a catastrophic failure. From his wanderings in to the battlefields of Kosovo which the Former First Minister of Scotland and now SNP foreign affairs spokesman Alex Salmond described at the time as an act of unpardonable folly to the disasters of Afghanistan and more especially of an Iraq war in which he all too gladly sent British troops to their death disobeying the will of the British public, the United Kingdom parliament and the United Nations to do so. This made his appointment as a UN middle east peace envoy both laughable to those of us in western democracies and insulting and offensive to the entire Islamic world. When you add to the infamous deal in the desert to free the Lockerbie bomber to this list of crimes you can see that the role of international statesman is one Tony can only play until the alarm clock gives him his early morning wake up call.
Now let me move on to another topic which the bold Tony knows nothing about that word is socialism. Now when you consider he was the leader of The Labour Party which is supposed to be the closest thing Britain has to a socialist or social democratic party there is I suggest a delicious irony in this as the man who led Labour to three election victories in a row did so on very Conservative terms. Indeed former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once described Blair who I regard as her political son as a better Conservative than the man who succeeded her as Tory leader John Major. Now far be it for me to agree with a woman have always disliked but this statement shows that no matter you thought of her Thatcher was a far more astute political operation than the vacuous self serving Blair.
There is of course a reason for this which is based round political principles. You see whilst Thatcher believed in Conservatism with every fibre of her being Blair in total contrast believed in nothing other than his bank balance. Socialism to Tony was an unnecessary distraction. Unlike Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn the candidate he advised people not to vote for Blair has neither principles and backbone. Whilst Corbyn believes in nuclear disarmerment a renationalisation of important industries and a radical redistrubtion of wealth Tony believed in whatever the press and media told him to and moved the Labour Party so far to the right it became completely farcial and worthy only of ridicule. This was particularly true in the aftermath of British involvement in Iraq and led to a gradual loss of support at UK level to the Liberal Democrats and Greens and in Scotland to the SNP.
It to is that Scottish National Party and their desire for an independent Scotland that I turn to put the final nail in Blair’s coffin. During his early years in power Blair liked to portray himself as whiter than white, he even acquired the name Teflon Tony the man to whom nothing would stick. After Iraq that changed dramatically and Britain became a pariah state even at events as trivial as the Eurovision song contest. This exercise in European high camp was something Britain used to do well in but post Iraq you couldn’t buy votes for Britain. The United Kingdom’s international reputation had taken a battering Teflon Tony had now become Toxic Tony and nobody trusted him or his judgement anymore. Whilst people in England had no viable means of expressing their anger at Blair or his decisions the voters certainly did have an alternative option and that option were found in the Scottish National Party who had become increasingly credible since the re formed Scottish Parliament was brought back in to existance 1999 and in 2007 they won control of the Scottish Parliament from Labour ending 48 years of Labour dominance of Scottish politics.
To say Blair was unhappy at this result would I think be an understatement, you see if there was one party Blair hated far more than The Tories it was the SNP and that hatred based as it is on the shallow game of binary politics with only two parties competing for power was both delusional and past the sell by date. This proves beyond all reasonable doubt that Blair was is and will always be an establishment man, he is if you like Westminster’s child the boy who can only make sense of the world his masters taught him anything else is perceived to be a threat to his identity of course other views such as liberalism and environmentalism therefore smaller parties who embraced these ideas such as the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party could be tolerated if never quite accepted, but nationalism particularly Scottish nationalism was and for that matter still is seen as the enemy in his mind and therefore must be viewed with hostility.
It was with this very much on his mind that Blair compared nationalism and those who support it to cavemen. Personally I find more than just a little bit rich that a man who sent more British soldiers to their deaths in 10 years than any post war peace time prime minister should have the nerve to call anyone cavemen but then Blair always was a Westminster child and a man beyond parody. This is a man who exposed his double standards by saying on leaving Downing Street that ‘Britain is a great country and I feel blessed to be British’ Now I hate to tell the odious one but that statement is far more nationalistic than anything I have ever heard from Alex Salmond or his successor as both SNP leader and First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon.
So I issue this challenge to the former Prime Minister and those of his Ilk to admit that they too are nationalists and that the only difference between the Scottish Nationalists like myself they so openly despise and themselves, is that we challenge what is deemed the status quo whilst all too eagerly submit to it and go cap in hand for the perks of approval. You know I am beginning to think that maybe just maybe that the real cave dwellers are not to be found in the SNP but in the darkest corners of unionism where Westminster’s cavemen send others to fight in the name of their primative values.
@ Gayle Smith 2015
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