So many have had to pay the price of Blair’s deluded folly
THE AFGHAN debacle is not just a humiliation for the authority of the West. It is also a final, crushing blow to the last few shards of Tony Blair’s already shattered reputation as a political leader. As the Taliban take charge, all his grandiose imperialist fantasies have turned to dust. The downfall of Kabul has fully confirmed him as the creator of chaos and merchant of mayhem.
After the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, Blair was the most eloquent passionate advocate of co-ordinated military action in Afghanistan.
Brimming with his messianic zeal, he promised the defeat of jihadism and the promotion of freedom. “This is a battle with only one outcome: our victory, not theirs,” he thundered. But 20 years later, following the deaths of 457 British troops and the expenditure of £37billion, how hollow those words now sound.
Yet Blair’s disastrous Afghan policy is just one part of an extraordinary catalogue of failure at home and abroad during his premiership. He posed as a humanitarian warrior and progressive reformer, yet the longterm consequences of his decisions have been misery, turmoil, instability and even carnage.
In his first six years as Prime Minister, he sent British forces into combat five times, a record of bellicosity which exceeds that of any predecessor.
To him, the British military was not so much a defender of our national interests but a tool of social engineering and regime change.
ITWAS an arrogant outlook that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on the cynical manipulation of intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction.
The deceit of the “dodgy dossier” was followed over the coming years by defeat and blood-soaked anarchy, in which at least 280,000 people lost their lives. Just as catastrophically, the shock waves of Iraqi meltdown spread right across the Middle East, fuelling civil war in Libya and Syria, as well as the brutal terror group Isis.
Blair’s capacity for destruction extended to Britain, whose social fabric also suffered from his reckless determination to impose his ideological values. He liked to portray himself as a moderate but in reality he was a dangerous revolutionary, full of contempt for British traditions, heritage and culture. That shone through most dramatically in his eagerness to pursue unprecedented levels of mass immigration. Under his leadership, British passports and work permits were dished out like confetti, restrictions on entry were lifted and free movement was immediately allowed from all the Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004.
Our civic infrastructure and social cohesion have been buckling ever since Blair began this vast experiment in demographic upheaval. The breakdown in proper border controls was accompanied by the Blairite machine’s intolerance of dissent at the pace of change. Backed by hate crime laws and a cheerleading broadcast media, the relentless quest for equality became the official creed of the state.
NEW Labour’s wrecking ball could be seen on every front. The flames of Scottish and Welsh nationalism were fanned by devolution to the extent that the Union is now under real threat, while the parts of the 1998 Human Rights Act became a charter for criminals and a bonanza for progressive lawyers.
Trumpeting his commitment to democracy overseas, Blair hypocritically encouraged the unelected, unaccountable House of Lords to become a bloated monster.
Expensive state bureaucracy flourished in his time at Downing Street, epitomised by the useless Regional Development Agencies, just as culture of dependency grew due to the expansion of welfare, part of huge increase in debts that resulted in the crash of 2008.
Blair famously called himself “a pretty straight sort of guy”, but in truth he debased public life during his premiership.
This was partly through his addiction to relentless propaganda, much of it eagerly practised by his aggressive spin chief Alastair Campbell, and partly through the atmosphere of sleaze he created, reflected in the series of scandals that punctuated his time in office, many of them involving donations to the Labour party.
His behaviour since leaving office, characterised by a continuing quest for wealth and power, has only reinforced that negative image. His former friend, the novelist Robert Harris, described Blair as “a tragic narcissist” with “a messiah complex”. But the real tragedy is that so many, including the people of Afghanistan, have had to pay the price for his dangerous, deluded folly.
‘New Labour’s wrecking ball could be seen on every front’