So good bye then Tony. You have fought some good fights but have mainly been on the wrong end of the argument.

You have tried to be Tory-lite but lacked the moral fibre to carry your actions through. You were right to remove both the Taliban and Saddam from power and those that now denigrate you would, in your position, have been too cowardly to confront evil. Indeed as Clare Short said just before the Iraq war “no amount of British lives are worth a single Iraqi one”. We feel real sympathy for you battling such racism that exists on the Left of the spectrum.

Well done for recognising that when New York was attacked there was a straight choice between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing. Even as members of the press lampooned you and Bush for believing in “black and white” issues we, as you did, saw that they were simply warming up for the next round of anti-American propaganda.

But you will forever be remembered as a man of sleaze and wasted opportunity.

With Peter Mandelson pushing through passports for party supporters and taking money off of other members of the cabinet, of Robin Cook leaving the Queen in India to conduct an illicit affair, with John Prescott sex-pesting his way through the be-skirted Civil Service, with cabinet ministers seeking to undermine the State education sector while their progeny seek enlightenment at fee-paying establishments, with all this and more (see the Big Book of Labour Sleaze) you will be remembered as someone who pontificated in opposition about clean government but became just as corrupt in 18 months as the replaced Tory regime had become in 18 years. And that is even before you started to sell seats in the Lords on the open market.

You missed great opportunities in what you term “public sector reform”. You missed the opportunity to properly de-nationalise the NHS. Instead you allowed Brown to bring in PFI to mislead the public as to the true nature of public debt. You allowed the unions to grow again so that we have the unedifying spectacle of the first days of the Brown premiership being without post. Or that Chairman Crowe has called another RMT strike because he thinks that striking should not affect a bonus paid to staff for, well, working.

You leave behind perhaps your greatest legacy. A hobbled Upper House. Stripped of its peers in a petulant punishment for it being independent minded, it has limped along. Still able to inflict the occasional body blow to an executive that holds Parliamentary democracy in contempt it has been destroyed. No more will it keep a contemplative watch over the populist nonsense emanating from the Other Place, it will soon be consumed in party politicking as well.

So how will history remember you? Will history remember you? How many Prime Ministers can a school child remember these days? Maybe 3? Churchill because of the Second World War, Thatcher for being the first woman in the job and because the leftie teaching establishment still hold her up as a hate figure and the current one which, by the time most people read this will be Gordon.

You may be remembered as the man who finally signed away Britain to the EU. You may be remembered as the man who lead us in the opening battles of the Jihadist Wars. But given that Brown has sulked over not being PM for 10 years I would expect a Maoist purging of you from the history books. And that would be a shame.

Because we learn from history. And the future generation needs to learn that regardless how the Labour Party dresses itself up, and regardless of who is the front man, underneath they are still a collection of bitter, low-expectation big government socialists who eye any success with envy and seek to stifle free enterprise. If we forget history we are doomed to re-elect similar conmen forever.

Said RfS @ 1:17 pm | Permalink   

1. Great post, RFS. I used to be enthralled with the handsome Tony Blair, encouraged by his standing tall against the terrorists and as an ally with the United States. Slowly that veneer began to peel away.

   I am seeing a different picture of him now, through your eyes and those of others. Your stand against socialism is instructive and we should take it as a warning for what I fear is coming here.

   Comment by Cao — 7/1/2007 @ 5:11 pm

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2. Let’s also mention Blair’s:

   - capitulation to the Islamification of Britain.

   - wholesale destruction of civil liberties in the name of PC absolutism.

   - abolishment of concepts of private property (including the right to defend onself inside one’s own home, which amounts to a communization of the home), and concentration of all power in the hands of the state.

   Blair (and his accomplices, which includes Brown) have wrecked Britain for all time. The nation no longer exists as such, a condition which partially concealed by the fact that it takes some time for the ruins to collapse.

   Together with Sweden, the UK is one of the two European entities on my personal “already lost” list. Most of the others are merely “doomed.”

   Comment by Lastango — 7/1/2007 @ 9:35 pm

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