I HAD flu (I know!) over Christmas and New Year but nonetheless watched the progress of the petition against Tony Blair’s award of the ‘Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (KG)’, the oldest and most senior order of chivalry.
The petition was started by one Angus Scott, a clearly troublesome fellow who lives in beautiful Banchory in Aberdeenshire and who describes himself as ‘just a very unhappy citizen of the United Kingdom’.
As I write, more than one million and sixty thousand other ‘unhappy citizens’ have joined Angus in his valiant effort. Surprising? Not really, as a YouGov survey shows that just 14 per cent approve of Sir Tony’s knighthood.
The petition is heart-warming in that it shows that people are still capable of being righteously offended by the actions of the parasites who run our country. On the other hand, it’s a wee bit depressing, because nothing will change. We are the little people and Sir Tony, top socialist that he is, will not be deterred from donning his ermine.
The Queen appointed Mr Blair a Knight Companion. Such awards are ‘in her gift’ without Prime Ministerial advice – a nice get-out for the tarnished Boris Johnson.
Blair was Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007 and electorally the most successful leader in Labour’s history. There is no debate that he radically changed our country, driving for ‘New, new, new’. As Andrew Cadman explained a few days ago in TCW, the change was not for the good.
The New Statesman characterises Blair as a paradox, ‘classless, rootless and ideology-lite’, the embodiment of ‘all the contradictions and ambiguities of the nation that had elected him’
His early years brought ‘bold liberal and social-democratic reforms’, including the minimum wage, tax credits, the windfall tax on privatised utilities, civil partnerships, and extra money for the NHS and education.
He implemented the 1998 Human Rights Act, so lucrative for his lovely wife Cherie, and facilitated the Good Friday Agreement bringing peace to Northern Ireland, announcing humbly: ‘This is no time for soundbites but I feel the hand of history on our shoulders’. He granted ‘independence’ to the Bank of England.
In 1997, Mr Blair caused irreparable damage to the constitution of the United Kingdom by agreeing to devolution, thinking erroneously that it would end separatist calls for independence. Since then, billions of taxpayer pounds has been squandered on the creation and maintenance of the ‘Scottish Parliament’ and the Welsh and Northern Irish ‘Assemblies’, with all their duplication of uncivil servants and advisers.
Not only are the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish now among the most over-governed and arguably oppressed peoples on the planet, but the English are subsidising the whole shebang through the outdated Barnett Formula. Would that this money had gone on improving the general lot of all British citizens rather than fuelling division.
Blair took the UK into two illegal wars and lied to Parliament without sanction. Sir John Chilcot, chairman of the public inquiry into the Iraq conflict, concluded that Blair was not ‘straight with the nation over the war’ but was, bizarrely, ‘emotionally truthful’.
Regardless of his motivations, Tony Blair went to war against the manifest wishes of the people. His aggression and deception, coupled with his alliance with the most reactionary US administration hitherto caused mass suffering and millions of deaths. A total of 179 British soldiers died in Iraq, yet ‘Commander’ Blair never attended a single returning coffin. Few Army families have forgotten or forgiven and millions judge him a war criminal.
In 2004, he opened the floodgates to unlimited migrants from central and eastern Europe when most other EU ‘partners’ were cautious. He upended the country’s already weak immigration processes, disrupted its ethnic mix and burdened the economic and social infrastructure.
Blair was deaf to plebeian worries about unprecedented migration numbers, a worsening housing crisis, increased rates of crime and diminished prospects for those squeezed out by immigrant labour; to question any aspect of the policy was to be labelled a bigot and a racist.
New Labour brooked no dissent from their unsavoury supporters: ‘diversity’ was an unalloyed social benefit. To this day, the monthly MORI poll of ‘the most important issues facing Britain’ reflects these same concerns.
After eventually resigning as Prime Minister in 2007, Blair became Special Envoy of the ‘Quartet on the Middle East,’ made up of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia. This ‘diplomatic post’ kept him close to globalist powerbrokers until 2015.
In January 2008 he joined the US investment bank JP Morgan Chase as a ‘senior adviser’ and chaired their international council, a ‘group of influential politicians and company executives that meet annually to share perspectives on economic, political and social trends across the world’. His starting salary was one million US dollars, small beer for investment managers, but sufficient for him to expand his personal property portfolio, estimated in 2019 to be worth £35million. In October 2021, the BBC reported that he and his wife had avoided paying bothersome tax on their property transactions (the Pandora Papers). As Leona Helmsley famously said, ‘Only the little people pay taxes.’
An arch-globalist and Europhile, he took the Brexit vote badly, telling us that we would rue the day and pay ‘a significant economic penalty’. He spent a great deal of time apparently ensuring he was right assisting our erstwhile European ‘partners’ and handholding the chief executive of JP Morgan and other financiers through the ‘disaster’.
He gets up to US $250,000 for a 90-minute speech and in 2008 was reported to be the highest-paid speaker in the world. Blair knows his worth and his knighthood will only increase his rates.
At 68, he is clearly not ready to ‘go quietly into that dark night’. He has risen recently from his crypt to keep the globalist show on the road, decrying ‘anti-vaxxers’ and promoting mandatory vaccine passports. Some suggest he fancies another go at leading the Labour Party.
Sir Tony is, like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, a practising Catholic, so in this new phase of his life it is charitable to remind him of Mark 8:36: ‘For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?’
