Alphen, the Netherlands, 18
July. There is nothing that proves the
essential corruption of modern political life than the sinecures handed out to
failed ȕber-elite politicians who did their country grave harm. The carefully-timed summer announcements
that two former failed British prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown,
are back is but the latest example of high political contempt for public
virtue. Multi-millionaire Tony Blair has been appointed by Labour leader Ed
Milliband as an advisor on “Olympic legacy”; for that read political advisor to
Milliband in the run up to the 2015 general election. Meanwhile, Gordon Brown has been appointed as
UN Special Envoy for Universal Education, which could only have happened with
London’s (and Labour’s) formal blessing.
These two men together conspired
to do more damage to my country than any prior political partnership. They quite simply misled the British people
about their aims and their intentions to disastrous effect and like many
millions I believed them. Indeed, until
the mid-naughties I had been a life-long Labour Party supporter. Thanks to these two I will never again trust
Labour with my country.
Their failure might best be
summed up as the four ‘I’s; Iraq, ‘investment’, Scottish indepdence and immigration. All are testament
to political hubris. Evidence suggests Blair
misled the British people over the Iraq War. The false dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction led to hundreds of British troops being killed in a war fought on
the most tenuous of legal grounds, and many tens of thousands of Iraqis. This week, in a letter to David Cameron, Sir John Chilcott, who heads
the Iraq Inquiry talked of a number of “unresolved disputes” triggered by
Blair’s testimony, “…including the treatment of discussions in the cabinet and
cabinet committees and the UK position in discussions between the prime
minister and heads of state or government of other nations”.
Brown disastrously destroyed the
public finances of the country, over-spending massively in the name of
‘investment’ and then tried to blame the mess on the world around him. Had Brown maintained a commitment to sound
finance Britain would be one of the strongest economies in Europe rather than
being dragged through the deep morass of debt which was Brown’s legacy to
Britain.
With a referendum due in 2014 Blair’s flawed devolution policy has even opened the door to Scottish secessionists and could see the break-up of the United Kingdom.
What is strange is why the Labour
Party is rewarding Blair and Brown whilst trying to pretend to the rest of us they
have moved on. It implies that nothing
has in fact changed. That come the
general election in 2015 the same political con-trick will be employed to dupe
millions of Britons like me sympathetic to social democracy and social
progress. What I fear is that again behind
the no doubt slick social democratic façade will be a hard left agenda that
will again lead the country to the very precipice of disaster.
Until the political class in
Britain learn there is a real price to pay for failure at the top they will
continue to play an all-too-cosy game in which backs are quietly and
lucratively scratched and failure rewarded with directorships and fancy EU and
UN appointments. For that to happen
there has to be real sanction for failure. However, as all the many faux inquiries have demonstrated into
the many disasters these past fifteen years there is little appetite in the
British Establishment for proper accounting.
There are endless inquiries into seemingly endless crises but no-one at
the top is ever actually responsible let along sanctioned. No wonder the British people despise
politicians, particularly the cosy elite at the very top.
What one-time American President Andrew Jackson once said of
a young Washington applies equally to modern day London, “I weep for the liberty of
my country when I see…that corruption has been imputed to many members of the
House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for
promises of office”.
Blair and Brown: jobs for the
boys.
Julian Lindley-French
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.