July, 2005

Frantically and feverishly last April, Tony Blair asked Britain to 'draw a line under the Iraq war, so we can all move on.' But now the Iraq war has invaded his home turf, and England’s first homegrown suicide bombers (apart from, perhaps, the Dam Busters) have reminded the world that actions, oh yes, have consequences. An official report soon out, moreover, will show Blair to be the UK’s foremost recruiter of terrorists. He himself, and his deeds in particular, are what makes the Arab world want to kill the English, burn down Westminster Abbey, pull down Big Ben, defecate on the King James Bible and the rest of it.

Can this grinning ninny long survive this catastrophe, this ruin of British tourism, this military pratfall, this diplomatic bungee jump, this economic debacle that he, and his particular decisions, have caused? I don’t think so. Every Home Counties commuter leaves his house each morning with a fist-sized knot of fear beneath his weskit and, kissing his wife goodbye at the station, wonders if he’ll ever see her again.

Without Blair’s war this would not be so, and London this August would be boisterously crowded with American, Australian, Japanese and European money. Observe drab, empty Piccadilly on VJ Day; hear Blair booed in September at the Labour Conference, while he apologises for 'some mistakes' but swears he will 'never be sorry for bringing down Saddam Hussein' at a lectern shielded by bullet-proof perspex, in a Blackpool swarming with SWAT teams and police. It’s over. The slow clap is starting. He should kindly leave the stage.

Is the World a Safer Place

Why do terrorists do such horrible things? Howard says that they 'hate our freedom', Bush that they hate our 'ideology of compassion', but their reasons are even simpler than that. They’re to do with our killing, with war and sanctions these last fourteen years, five hundred thousand Iraqi children, while they have killed none of ours. This number of dead Iraqi children, Madeleine Albright once said, was 'worth it' if Saddam lost power. It is six times the number of dead at Hiroshima. Ideology of compassion indeed.

But why do they attack innocent civilians, killing as many as sixty of them last week? Well, they hold that a democracy elects a government, and if that government bombs, invades and subjugates another country in an illegal baseless war involving innumerable war crimes, house demolitions, desecrations of cemeteries and holy shrines, torturing of innocents and burnings of libraries, then the electors of that government can be held accountable for what the government they elected subsequently does. In much the same way as Baghdad, which 'elected' Saddam Hussein, can be punished with a holocaust of death for electing him, so too can London, which 'elected' Tony Blair with thirty-eight percent of the sixty percent who voted, or twenty-three percent of the total number eligible to vote, be punished for his crimes against humanity in the same way.

If Britain had a true democracy, of course, with compulsory preferential voting like ours, New Labour, for whom seventy-seven percent of the eligible electors did not vote, would have about fifty seats in the House of Commons and sixty Londoners would not have died for what Blair did, because Charles Kennedy, who was against the war, would now be Prime Minister.

Who now says the Iraq war made the world a safer place? Who now says no Iraqi would want the rule of Saddam back? The grieving relatives of the one hundred and fifty thousand this war killed for a start. That’s the number of all the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Get used to it. We are the bad guys now.