Blair and Brown: Jobs for the Boys

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. 

However, it was hyper-immigration which was the signature policy of both Blair and Brown and which has been a disaster for the country. This week the Office for National Statistics released the latest census. Since 2001 the population of England and Wales (excluding Scotland) went up a massive 3.7 million, much higher than thought to 56.1 million, and increase of 7%.  This was a deliberate policy choice that ran totally against the wishes of the massive majority of British people with the aim of ramming “diversity down the throats of the right” as one Blair aide put it and gerrymandering the vote.  Such has been the impact of hyper-immigration that English society in particular is still in a state of shock with Westminster having to resort to draconian race laws to suppress dissent and thus prevent an explosion in the powder keg that is contemporary England.  The England I once knew has been destroyed.  England today is a broken place where life is fair neither on Britons nor the many decent immigrants who make a contribution to British life.  A black friend of mine works on the front-line of the social and racial tensions caused by Blair-Brown.  He calls it a war.

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