For destructiveness, no one comes close to Blair in damage done to Britain and specifically England. Every one of our political problems, especially the collapse in democratic trust and the disasters of uncontrolled immigration, are his to own. It's true that all our PMs since have been appalling but Blair's legacy is now ineradicable. The idea of an heir is truly terrifying - though acolytes like Cameron were keen to claim the title.
The mystery to me is why many still wonder what was behind his fanatical drive for the Iraq war; he's now a ‘globalist’ with considerable behind-the-scenes power and accountable to no one. Iraq allowed him to build a world platform for himself, at a time when British politics was both boring him and showing signs that his Messianic self-belief was losing popularity. He's arguably not a political figure at all but used politics to join the amorphous and shadowy international elite, now advising governments of any type and morality on 'Global Change.' In essence, he's cashed out his political experience in the UK, on the world stage. That's now the norm for left-liberals in our polity, but the scale in his case is quite unprecedented.
A technocratic managerialist, with no obvious values or roots - but now also wealthy beyond belief, for someone who's never made, discovered or invented anything. His so-called political ideas - the centrist ‘third-way’ and ‘triangulation’ - are specious waffle, barely capable of being analysed. A good fit for the centrist managerial dads - and our left-liberal middle classes - in how he uses left-liberal pieties to hide his eagerness for enrichment and his essential nihilism. It should be remembered that he happily admits to having had no keen interest in politics or political ideas - well, ever - especially the latter.
His political legacy is that anything is allowed, if you express the 'right views' and are against 'the forces of conservatism'. And that values are performative, as are ideas. They are all just a means to power - operating on the largest scale. The role of politicians is to make the Overton window into a front-door spyhole, so that anyone and anything outside can be dismissed as ‘fruit-cake’, ‘far-right’ and ‘racist’.
More recently, anything which poses alternatives is based on ‘misinformation’ and needs ‘fact-checking’ then censoring. The public, as simpletons, are in constant need of protection against demagogues and populists. By definition, the technocratic approach of Blair, Cameron, Starmer, Clegg, Davey et al is so eminently reasonable that any challenge to it is always idiotic and often dangerous. They are the adults, the experts, and only a fool would question their position. Notice how Blair revelled in the Covid period, providing his expertise on virology, epidemiology and acute medicine without anyone questioning who he was to do so and - crucially - why. Similarly, why is a figure like Bill Gates involved in the drive to international control of all medical policy? Only the most gullible and credulous would answer: ‘pure philanthropy.’
And the answer to any growing public unease is to massively restrict freedom of speech, hiding their personal interests and prejudice behind legalism and worries for ‘public safety’. The mysterious figures controlling ‘kindness and reasonable evidence-based discussion’ are unelected, unaccountable and unchecked in their decisions, which always equate their own technocracy with those highly subjective ideals.
As a counter-balance to all this managerial emptiness, it's no coincidence that Blair was attracted to that showiest and most global of Christian faiths - Catholicism. Islam would also appeal, except it's too direct and not as performative (though he must admire its global reach and total unaccountability). And no surprise that he has a plush townhouse near Marble Arch/the Edgware Road - that nowhere land of trashy affluence and sleazy vacuity - violence lurking - 'international' in feel, like an airport departure lounge - his spiritual home.
Some object to ‘centrist dads’, but it’s a meme that seems to work; I rather wish the word 'sensible' had been added. Above all, it's the assumed faith - or rather its display: retail, boutique hotels, craft-ale pubs, rampant credentialism, the EU, artisan coffee or bread, ubiquitous selfish Lycra cyclists, net-Zero bullshit: a fake expertise and localism that is both global and ruthless. Just see how quickly it manipulated the ‘global pandemic’ into the relentless drive for globalist solutions. Witness its draconian authoritarianism, which is now itching around for the next big-thing public safety panic, to add to imminent climate catastrophe, raging war and God knows what new pathogens.
Thank goodness the ‘grown-ups’ will soon be back in charge…
Brilliant article, and exactly right.
‘The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’? No thanks. Try to look through that nightmarish organisation’s website and not feel a rising horror at what the future might hold.
I hear on the grapevine they want him to take over from Schwab, which I suppose makes complete sense - if you’re them. The WEF led by someone not wearing an absurd futuristic costume and not speaking in a WW2 movie Nazi accent, oddly, might be more unnerving than it is now - more people might deem it a plausible organisation.
In 2016, the Chilcot Inquiry into the British role in the Iraq war revealed, among other things, that six months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a consortium of Western banks led by JP Morgan extended a $2.5 billion loan to "help" Iraq's economic recovery.
The loan was guaranteed by Iraqi oil exports. It is worth keeping in mind that the money for such loans comes conjured out of thin air; a bank doesn't have to part with its own money to lend it to its borrowers. Instead, it has the legal privilege to create it at their discretion. If you or I usurped this privilege, we’d end up in prison. But the banks can conjure free money and lend it to their clients at interest.
From that moment forward, the loaned money becomes an asset on the bank's balance sheet, earning a handsome stream of revenues for its owners, creditors and executives. Of course, the money itself isn't doing any real magic: the real wealth for the bankers comes from the extraction and sale of Iraqi oil. The same is true for any other nation and any other natural resource under Western hegemony, and the hegemony’s ultimate purpose.
JPMorgan was also one of the biggest financial backers of the Bush/Cheney 2000 election campaign. At that time, nobody could have predicted that in 2001 we'd witness the 9/11 terror attacks which helped justify the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the attempted capture of their resources. The whole toxic brew was well in the works long before the events began to take place.
Incidentally, that same JP Morgan also richly rewarded Sir Tony Blair for his own inestimable contribution to making the 2003 Iraq invasion possible: after the end of his term as Britain's Prime Minister, JP Morgan hired him as an advisor on a $5 million/year contract.
[Credit to whoever I copied this from]