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January 4, 2021 - 10:05am
The next few weeks of this year are going to be bleak, worse than April last year, and the most traumatic time the country has faced since the Second World War. But the good news is: Tony Blair is back.
The former PM has been vocal of late, on the subject of vaccination; he first suggested delaying the second dose so that we can offer more immediate protection to twice as many people. Now he has accused the Government of acting too slow, arguing that we need to aim towards five million doses a week.
I suppose it’s a facet of ageing that, as you get older, the politicians of your youth seem to possess more gravitas and greatness than the people currently running the country. Perhaps Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock will in years to come feel like figures of great historical significance, political colossi standing next to whoever is in charge. But in Blair’s case, it certainly feels like he would do a more effective job than the current lot.
Surgeons often say that it is better to take the wrong course of action than to do nothing because the worst thing is to dither and wait for a problem to turn into a crisis, and for the bleeding to become uncontrollable.
That has repeatedly been the case with the current Government. Inactive about Christmas until forced to act at the last moment; inactive about schools until forced to act at the last moment; now, with the vaccine programme, they are reluctantly and tardily doing the inevitable and calling in the military — from next Monday! Because what’s the rush?
Not everything can be blamed on the cabinet team rather than the deeper idiocy around them; the fact that Britain has never required travellers to take a Covid test this entire time is almost unbelievable, but it reflects a deeper cultural prejudice towards “openness” which has cost us dearly. Likewise, that Government advice is still emphasising handwashing over the Three C’s; the sight of the “NHS Choir” singing indoors at Christmas was the most comically bleak way to end the year — but it’s fine, because they’re all two metres apart!
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Subscribe‘Only the former PM seems to appreciate we are in a wartime emergency.’
Well Blair would certainly know something about wartime emergencies, having started a number of wars himself. That aside, the very last thing than anybody wants to see is Tony Blair (or Campbell and Brown etc) on their TV or anywhere near any form or power.
No socialist can live without a ‘crisis’. If one doesn’t exist, they will create one. It becomes the excuse for the kind of politics they wanted all along, but which has no appeal to the wider public in normal times.
Well said.
First, it was Tony and his creature Mandleson who decided to scour the world, ‘To rub the Right’s nose in it’ and bring in millions of migrants without skills or high education or money in a sort of reverse Australian points system. That he was able to Social Engineer UK on his whims speaks volumes. He was acted in ways Emperors never could or would.
He is essentially pure evil. so no I would not recommend his returning, unless you feel it is time to sell UK to China for the fun of it, which would likely be his first move. If you hate Britain you will love Blair.
The speed of the vaccine roll out is governed by availability of vaccine not the logistics of putting it in peoples arms. Other than pushing ourselves ahead of others for vaccine supplies there is nothing to be done.
Blair just surfed the economic stability of the turn of the century and started wars whilst Brown fattened the public sector in a Faustian pact to look away from what was happening in the city. Then of course signing the Lisbon treaty which lead to Brexit and Stormont which has yet to play out.
So apart from 1. torching the economy, 2. bloating the public sector, 3.Surrendering to the the EU, 4. Radicalising Scotland, and 5. setting the middle east on fire, what did he do for us?
Gave us a leader.
He played the part of a leader. Subtle but important distinction.
A simulacrum of a leader.
A foreshadowing of Obama, I would say.
Well said, PG. You might have added that the Blair government took housing prices out of the Bank of England’s target inflation indicator, and effectively raised the target rate of inflation, which led in short order to a housing boom and bust. Along with “light touch” financial regulation this created the financial crisis and made it such a severe one.
Peace process in NIreland, minimum wage for two. Remember he won 3GEs, two with huge majorities.
Actually, for all the bad he did, peace in Northern Ireland was definitely a good thing.
He finished off what John Major began, credit where credit’s due, it would have been appalling if Blair had’nt managed that.
surrendering to the IRA when you have actually beat them just because the US President tells you to was a great achievement?
As I remember it, the IRA had just lost their funding from the US, but had simultaneously discovered that blowing up buildings in the square mile got them a propaganda boost inside England.
Times were uncertain for both sides, but I didn’t have the IRA pegged as being beat at that point in time.
We surrendered Northern Ireland. I don’t much care myself, but it was hardly political genius.
As for the minimum wage, I am ambivalent. As for the to GEs, well, we got what we deserve.
He did come back and start negotiating with the EU on how to overturn the Brexit vote. Oh, and he also set off the expansion of the Higher Education system into a money spinning industry…..and that’s worked out well.
Excellent summary of the Blair Years.😷ðŸ‘
We should only bring back Tony Blair if we want to invade a foreign country for no good reason and need some lying, morally bankrupt scumbag to sell the idea to the people by inventing some fake threat.
And if you want many foreigners to invade England, that actually was his biggest accomplishment. NHS is more a Social Engineering organization then Medical one, and Blair perfected this. BBC was made what it is under Blair, a British hating, history re-writing, Western value trashing mess. He must have a portrait hidden somewhere which reveals his true rottenness, and it would be a horror to look on.
You are talking about the man who sent Brown to sign the Lisbon treaty so he didn’t get his own hands dirty, and the man who has done everything he could for the last 4 years to overturn a referendum which HE disagreed with.
He has zero respect for the Democratic will of the people of the UK. I wouldn’t trust him in charge of the laundry, let alone the country.
Fair enough – but just to point out the straw man argument here – no one has ever said c19 is just like the seasonal flu (although some hysterics are keen to compare it to the Spanish…flu), they have merely pointed out that it’s not the plague and responding to it like it is is detrimental to the wider human interest and will (has?) caused more harm than the virus itself.
Any leader – to be considered successful – can’t just be someone who agrees with the majority that this is the apocalypse and responds accordingly, they need to be mindful of what is proportionate and what is a sustainable precedent for future similar crisis.
I’ve read dozens of comments in these pages from people claiming C19 is just like seasonal flu.
None of them formulate policy though do they? Plus, many point out it is less dangerous than seasonal flu for certain groups (very young for instance), but this is statistically correct.
No one has ever disputed that the threat from the virus increases substantially with age (above what it does with flu) or that it transmits faster than flu.
Donald Trump helps formulate policy, and he has tweeted (7:03 PM · Oct 6, 2020), “Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”
As usual he was correct. He didn’t fold at the first whiff of what he saw as a globalist/CCP grab for power.
He didn’t compare it to the flu there did he?
He pointed out that the flu is also a killer (it is) and we don’t close down the economy for it (we don’t).
He then literally said what I did – that for some populations C19 is less lethal (children, for instance).
You’ve a very different idea of comparison to mine, or the OED’s: “compare 2 trans. To mark or point out the similarities and differences of (two or more things); to bring or place together (actually or mentally) for the purpose of noting the similarities and differences.”
But he didn’t make a comparison in order to belittle Covid 19 – which was, I thought – the whole point of your post – unless you really just intended to show that you own a dictionary.
He was merely using a common point of reference (flu is the best analogue we have for C19 in our yearly experience – as other corona virus in common circulation don’t significantly cause death). He could have used the common cold as a comparison and triggered hysterics even more.
Any comparison made was to contextualise the response and the threat to certain groups, not to downgrade C19.
“We are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!” sounds like Trump was indeed belittling and downgrading COVID, at the same time as comparing it to flu.
And I only quoted a dictionary lest you took my use of the word compare as idiolectal.
It will be by next year. Given the near impossibility of vaccinating the world against Covid before the virus mutates to a sufficient degree, I suspect the yearly vaccination hit-and-miss amongst the elderly will be very similar to what we do with flu right now.
Many, many people have said c19 is just like the seasonal flu.
Not as bad as the flu for me. Mind you, for all I know I may have had the flu 10 times this year and not noticed, so it’s hard to compare.
C19 has all the symptoms of a bad flu. Anyone who has suffered a really bad bout of flu, as have I, recognises the loss of smell and taste, the high fever, the rasping sore lungs and the two weeks of thinking you may indeed, die. Then the fever abates, taste and smell return but energy levels are low for another few weeks.
I didn’t return to work for nearly two months in 2009 after contracting flu. The pity is that many people do not have the flu until their immune system is low due to age. That is why so many elderly have pneumonia on their death certificate as real flu causes pneumonia just before death.
This C19 virus is part of the flu viruses. I suspect released to cause as much fear as possible in America to punish President Trump. The CCP do not respect life. They do not care who else gets caught up in the anger. What was a bonus to them was how Europe fell at the first whiff of a fight.
You were doing so well until the last paragraph.
“This C19 virus is part of the flu viruses.”
Nonsense. It’s a different kind of virus. You might as well say humans are part of the cat family since we’re all mammals.
C19 is a cold virus not a flu virus.
If Bliar is the answer…What on earth is the question?
“If Bliar is the answer…What on earth is the question?”
Would the UK benefit from a more belligerent warlord?
Can we have a better PM please?
What we have is already far better than a greedy liar such as Blair that poisoned so much and brought shame to the UK that will last generations
Perhaps more than just shame. Would the London bombings of July 2005 have occurred without Blair’s illegal wars?
We know that the 2005 bombings were indeed as a result of Blair’s illegal war – the bombers told us so in their video.
What do you get when the Labour Party multiplies six by nine?
How to die in every sense of the word, with physically being the final stage.
Ed West is trolling us, I’m starting to think he’s a bit mischeivous, and I like it.
Don’t be so bl**dy daft!
We need Blair back like a hole in the head. Everything Blair touched turned to poison whether it be; his illegal wars, devolution, the GFA (hounding men who served our country while letting murderers off scot-free), his Human Rights Act etc etc.
Has Mr West lost his memory. The mess we are in is largely to do with Tony Blair and his Davos meetings.
Why on earth would this country want a war criminal, communist and europhile to govern our beautiful island? Every single road to destroying our culture, our judiciary, our institutions leads to the Blair regime, the propaganda spun by Campbell and the corrupt Civil Service under Jeremy Heywood, a Blairite through and through.
Blair a communist? I expect Blair and communists alike would be surprised to hear that.
A Socialist is much the same thing as Communism. It always ends in failure
Maybe he doesn’t; hasn’t it started a lovely comments section though.
Another attempt by the terminally insane msm to rehabilitate Blair back in to UK Politics.
I think this article forgets that every global leader is struggling. This is not really a fair reflection of leadership. We have a generation of leaders who have never had to manage anything this hard.This is actually a good dress rehearsal for them in the face of future real emergencies in my opinion. The rest is conjecture and noise.
Had this been a paper exercise GAME OVER YOUR ALL DEAD would have been called out long ago in the UK.
No one even bothered to check that the local system structures they were gaming on even existed in the real world.
I no longer doubt that journalist’s can sink any deeper in the cess pit of their own making. Only a creature of ignorance and utter stupidity could have penned such an appalling article. Mr Blair to many is allegedly a war criminal. He lied to Parliament. Claimed evidence of Iraqi WoMD. An imminent attack on the UK and finally settled for regime change. All under command of the USA.
But the real sickener to me of Mr Blair’s rule was the unanswered questions of Dr David Kelly’s death. What his and Campbell’s role in the whole sick episode should be brought to light.
As a leader In your opinion at a crisis time? Well tell that to all the troops and their families who lost their lives. For What? Also you could explain to an unknown number (250.000. 500,000/) of innocent Irqai’s families at the same time. Explain how it made Iraq a better place!
If you got paid for this piece of perversion it would be a disgrace.
How do you think he got his seat at the top table of the multinational (largely US) rich other than by supporting the Bush administration when it wanted to go to war in order to line the pockets of those lucky enough to run or have shares in the huge US military industrial complex? As always, FOLLOW THE MONEY or as the Americans say, ‘When money talks, morality walks’.
I have always found it to be sound policy to do the opposite of whatever Blair suggests. With this, you will not go far wrong.
What a terrible thought.
No doubt that Blair would have handled it differently, but not necessarily better, only those countries who have reacted in an extreme manner have been able to keep the virus under control and those extreme measures would not be welcome here, and don’t forget that most people regard Blair as a war criminal and hardly someone to be looking up to, even in these trying times.
I don’t regard him as a war criminal. He hardly compares to people who really were war criminals.
And why exactly don’t you regard him as a war criminal? Did he not co-start an unjustified and illegal war?
He took the UK into an illegal war knowing millions of innocent people would be killed. That’s a war criminal. Before Blair came to power the British people had never, ever started a war.
Thousands of years of being true to humanity and dignity of only ever going to war when there was no other option and always to save life, not destroy it. Blair was an utter disgrace. A stain on the United Kingdom
He was not a war criminal. Saddam just needed to comply with the inspectors. There was evidence of gassing the Kurds and the Shia Marsh Arabs. Saddam had raped Kuwait, tortured and slaughtered his own people, Was planning to invade Saudi, had used gas in the million man death trench warfare with Iran, and would have any WMD he could. It was a mess because we lost the peace, not because we went to war. Brenner was the war criminal.
He did lead us into a war based on a total fabrication, so is certainly directly responsible for many thousands of deaths.
Actually, the counties like Peru, Spain and Wales who ‘reacted in an extreme manner’ have not kept the virus under control. Quite the reverse, because they have some of the highest rates of infection and death.
This is because the virus spreads most easily in the home. Thus, if you lock people in their homes, you will have more infections and deaths.
The countries who got it right were for the most part the lucky ones, the ones who got a seasonal coronavirus epidemic just as the season was ending. Or who, like New Zealand, had a chance to clamp down during their Summer.
It’s funny how people have stopped quoting Germany as a perfect example of what to do.
As an island the UK could have done much better if it had closed the borders and set up quarantine.
The UK has not handled Covid well compared to other island nations. (Take a look on ourworldindata.org and filter for island nations.)
That said the UK having a very elderly and unhealthy population and an terrible health service probably didn’t help much either
When I say “extreme manner” I was referring to countries like Australia, NZ and S Korea, who’s response to the virus makes all others seem tame by comparison.
The only countries who have handled this well are Estonia, Sweden, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil and the Republican States of America.
All these areas decided against lockdown, kept their economies open and respected the intelligence of their citizens. The media do not report that the very worst deaths are in Democrat NYC which count for the majority of America’s death toll. All Republican States chose to stay open, many decided against ventilators and used HCQ and all are now functioning almost as normal. The biggest loss of business has been in the Democrat run states. Equally the worst death rate in UK is London. With an extreme left mayor. Followed, again, by leftwing Labour councils. Wales is also Labour run and is the worst for deaths in the West of the UK but nowhere near bad enough to shut down its economy or country.
Until there is an honest reporting of this disgusting scam, we will be terrified into destroying our children’s futures and handing our country to CCP
Neither Laos nor Cambodia have any reported COVID deaths so far, and without lockdowns, perhaps indicating they have handled this even better than the countries you mention.
…having shown they have no means of counting them.
Excellent post. Also Belarus, the second European nation to not lock down.
Sweden? Cases doubling every eight days. I suggest you update.
The UK population is over 60 million. And you believe Blair is the only one that can help us? Please get out more….
Trump is the only one who could save England from the craven and cowardly Boris wreckage. He will be available soon, Please think of a way he could ‘Guest Prime Minister’ UK for a bit, it is the only chance.
You’ve already got a Trump Lite arsehole as PM …
I didn’t read the above, assuming it was a piece of satire, and any mention of Blair only puts me in a rage to no purpose.
Could not get past the first few paragraphs of this nonsense – all I can say to the author is ‘You really need help’………..
Poor dear Tony. Ignored. Reviled. Desperate for attention.
When judging the PM and his government, we should take into account that almost every public, quasi public and governmental institution is actively trying to undermine them, aided and abetted (and reported) by most of the MSM. When Blair took power, the opposite was the case.
Unfortunately too many conservative and centrist voters are falling for the Left’s narrative (including many on this web site)
Blair made the BBC into the British loathing mess it is now.
Sadly I was dumb enough to vote for Blair –twice!
His meddling with the make up of the country enabled the Racists and National Socialists in Scotland to get a foothold, which they exploited to the full.
He also sold the country out to the EU and bankrupted the place .. all whilst smiling that horrid Joker grin.
The same grin he wore whilst following Bush2 into a totally unwarranted and unwinnable war — based on the idiotic concept of the middle eastern states becoming bastions of liberal democracy.
Blair is a cunning but stupid, self serving, immoral, demagogue.
If he is the answer to the Uk’s problems then God help you all.
Not sure saying: “The vaccine should be rolled out quickly” is a mark of great statesmanship. Is there any reason to believe Blair, or anyone else, would have been able to roll it out more quickly? It isn’t clear whether 5 million doses a week will be available by the end of the month. It isn’t known, yet, how many vaccinations could be done per week by the end of the month.
He might have told us there is incontrovertible proof that 50 million doses a week are already available for the UK, but unfortunately we cannot see this proof for reasons of national security.
Excellent bit of trolling Mr West. The comments indicate you may have earned a bonus this week.
I find this article very simplistic.
There are three main problems with the virus.
One is to stop people dying from it.
The second is to stop the country going bankrupt.
The third is to provide children with an education.
Obviously all three are to a large extent in conflict with each other. The benefits of hindsight can point to a time where a different decision could have been made, but hindsight does not provide the answers for the future.
There is an interesting article in the Spectator, where President Macron, is being blamed for ordering vaccines from a French manufacturer. Unfortunately this producer does not have a vaccine at present – it is all Macron’s fault. But imagine the outcry if the French manufacturer did have the vaccine now, but no orders. – it’s all Macron’s fault.
It seems to me that the MSM and the country generally expect politicians to have magic answers to everything.
The latest whizz idea is from Ed, who claims that Tony Blair is the magician we need.
In reality all Boris can do, is to reduce the effect on the economy and schools when the virus cases are low and increase the effect on them when it is high.
This means that over time he has to alter the approach he takes (aka U-turns) depending on the virus figures.
Boris has been the worst PM ever, as he wrecked UK without a shot being fired. He is a cowardly worm.
He doesn’t think much of you either. Damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.
Please let the vile Blair stay in his dark little corner.
The last thing we want is to give him the oxygen of publicity.
“Perhaps Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock will in years to come feel like figures of great historical significance, political colossi standing next to whoever is in charge”
That almost certainly means comparing said ministers to algorithms, and I will leave it to you to decide who will look the more capable. The fashion these days is for ‘rules based’ governing, but the truth about ‘rules based’ anything is of course, that you don’t actually need humans to execute it. Algorithms will do just fine. Even for policy at national/supranational level. And arguably algorithms would do a better job because they won’t get distracted by human emotions – and they certainly won’t need ‘technology lessons’ from buxom Americans. The only question left would be a sort of Turing Test for politicians (call it a Blair Test if you like) – how will anyone tell the difference between a machine and a politician if they behave identically in all situations? After all, politicians these days all seem to follow exactly the same robotic, soft-left politics.
This must surely be sarcastic.
Is this a joke?
Tony Blair, really?
You need to take a long lie down you are hallucinating
I know, its like wanting Jimmy Savil to go back to running hospital care.
Blair’s a cvnt.
Anything he says or does or is involved in or has anything to do with at all is toxic.
Whatever he is saying he is saying for someone else, or some other organisation we’ve never heard of in order to move us one-step closer to whatever he and his murderous cronies are attempting to achieve.
If you ever read CS Lewis’s fantastic book. ‘That Hideous Strength’ Blair is the dark side. He is exactly the ‘Head’.
What the country needs now is not yet another back-seat driver.
He wouldn’t want the job. He’s fully committed to sucking up to despots for cash.
Sorry but no, not ever.
Tony Blair was the exemplar at pretending to be a man of substance. He played it all as an act, being the first British PM to master the act of walking the tightrope of ‘what is most popular right now’ and putting spin on everything and anything.
Sure, he would be better at pretending to be a wartime Prime minister than Boris, but it would be better to have someone of actual principle and worth. There are few politicians who nowadays fit that category.
Anyone know of any? I would perhaps nominate Dan Jarvis (Lab) – mainly because he actually has had some real world experience. There must be some others though….
Blair is a has been who liked to look in the mirror and give himself a cheesey grin. Forget the man that was yesterday and so was his drivell.
Surgeons often say that it is better to take the wrong course of action than to do nothing because the worst thing is to dither and wait for a problem to turn into a crisis, and for the bleeding to become uncontrollable.
This is the medical equivalent of the political fallacy of “do something,” which may well make things far worse than doing nothing. At best, doing the ‘wrong thing’ will have no impact but since it’s the wrong thing, that sounds like a stretch.
Do something is where we are now, with economies that are on shaky footing, with increases in problems from abuse to overdoses to suicides, and with the steadfast refusal to focus on the most vulnerable populations. If you want to go the medical route, might I suggest this thing called triage, which does not presume that every single person is at equal risk of harm.
When they asked Margaret Thatcher what was the best thing she created she said “Tony Blair”
That would be handy for his Blairship. He could then look forward to more and more, Dodgy World jobs (Envoy for anything) and loadsa more wonga.
Tony Blair was brilliant at deceit and corruption and we have been paying the price of that for many years now e.g. PFI which was basically about giving back handers to Tony’s buddies for ever whilst screwing the public sector (Tax payer), Or Tony’s anti democratic supreme court or his made up dodgy dossier that justified the killing of many thousands.
Yep Tony would be great. I didnt think you could get worse than your Brexit was a mistake article but you have achieved it congratulations Ed.
Oh Ed you delightful troll!
I must say when I see Anthony Blair I don’t see a colossus, I think “Oh God he’s still here!” He has risen like some sort of movie ghoul, to seek out the living for sustenance.
I am glad he is promoting the vaccine however, the best way to KILL anything poltiically in the UK is to have Mr Blair stand next to it grinning madly.
Sadly for us all Tony Blur *ahem* sorry I mean Blair, will never lead our country again. He is damaged goods in the eyes of many over Iraq, most notably in the ranks of those who voted for him, such as myself. Our sense of betrayal will never leave us and he will always be associated with that.
Ed you must have a part time job with the Guardian. Head in the sand.
‘A self-seeking, messianic showman with neither leadership skills nor conscience but with much blood on his hands’ was how he was once described to me by someone who had worked for him. Blair was mong the first to instigate the false apology syndrome which became the fashion amongst our politicians. He still reminds me of those charlatan US TV evangelists who make their millions out of conning others. No, he’s not the answer to our present troubles.
Well, the Labour party could do a lot worse than have Tony Blair as their leader.
In fact they HAVE done very much worse:
1. The deluded Gordon Brown
(convinced that his time had come at last. In fact it was time to go)
2. The terminally unimpressive Ed Miliband with his £3 membership wheeze
(he opened the gates to hordes of woke kids and Marxist bores)
3. The great Lefty hope, Jeremy Corbyn
(The ultimate disastrous result of little Ed’s £3 wheeze)
4. Sir Keir “forensic” Starmer.
(not so much a leader as a plodding, meticulous manager)
That 3 pound wheeze is a Trot method of infiltration called ‘Entryism’. This is exactly how the Frankfurt School has infiltrated the entire education and MSM industries of the West! Look it up, Entryism, mostly the algorithms of the search engines skip over it.
Also known as The French Turn ““ look it up.
Interesting that the idea for the £3 wheeze seems to have originated with Len McCluskey and his hard left crew (previously associated with a hard left group called Militant Tendency ““ look it up).
In a democratic system (that’s where people get to vote for their political leaders ““ look it up) entryism requires a softer, electorally more palatable left wing body to host (virus-like) the hard left infiltration ““ look it up.
What remains a mystery (something not understood or beyond understanding ““ look it up) is the undying appeal of Marxism (a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx ““ look it up). One can only assume that Marxist devotees are trapped in a state of denial (a refusal to accept the truth ““ look it up).
Fact of the day.
Cancer remained the top cause of death in South Korea, a government report showed on Tuesday. In 2019, a total of 295,110 deaths were reported in South Korea, down 1.2 percent from a year earlier. 22 Sept 2020. This is nearly 900 deaths a day.
There are around 165,000 cancer deaths in the UK every year, that’s around 450 every day (2015-2017).
For the people who are SO fascinated in governmental competences in relation to different mortality rates!
Peter Hitchens has said everything that really matters about Tony Blair.
What we really need are center right politicians that have Blair’s cunning, patience and vision.
From his arrival to the scene Blair
never pulled the wool over my eyes. A rabble rowsing tub thumper of a man. Who undemocratically took this Country to his own crusade. Never considered the Union . Sucked up to an American President . Will he please go away
Tony Blair never sucked me in.
“Now he has accused the Government of acting too slow, arguing that we need to aim towards five million doses a week.”
I say we should aim towards ten million doses a week! Okay – can I get the job now?
If only we had a vaccine for every Iraqi and British soldier who died because of Blair….
“Surgeons often say that it is better to take the wrong course of action than to do nothing because the worst thing is to dither and wait for a problem to turn into a crisis, and for the bleeding to become uncontrollable.”
Sounds like the whole Brexit process from the referendum to now. Once the people voted yes, the sooner that it was done, the better
I remember Andrew Marr once asking Tony on TV. Who’s side are you on Mr Blair.
I don’t take either a rose tinted view of Tony Blair’s time, or the opposite type of deeply conspiratorial one. I think his big advantage was that the hard yards of the Thatcher years did provide a boomy time, but the Conservatives’s stuffed it up, or were stuffed up, by fighting over Europe that was what really did for Major..well and Thatcher really as well.
That let Blair in to surf the wave in a sense, the house price boom made people happy that maybe wages weren’t going up so much perhaps for many, but the house was *earning more than they did every year*…which itself applied to many more people because of the Right to Buy.
So I think on that side he was (whether right man or wrong man) man at the right time.
Even his battle against the Left was easier because of the 70’s union madness when the NUM started to beielve they did actually rule the country and, again, Thatcher’s hard yards…with a bit of the old Neil Kinnock battling.
On policies I personally feel his best is the one he now professes to regret most bitterly: FoI…which everyone should fight like mad to keep, and fight like mad to conastantly push back against baseless redactions and non-response responses.
Maybe one that I think was very bad, has had long term effects and doesn’t often get mentioned was the 24 hour city centre drinking thing, and indeed drugging thing. Where under the mirage of *continental cafe culture* he brought in the sort of mono cultural city centres we see these days, with drinks turned into soft drinks to appeal to younger people more (they stopped alcopops as such , but it was cosmetic) and drugs were seen as less and less harmful.
I would be interested to see, at the end of the acute crisis stage of Covid19, if anyone ever does a report on Covid spread linked to either the vertical drinking culture, the drug distribution *unofficial* party scenes, or just the perceeived right of young people to crowd into flats for a party…ie the lifestyle in which *a party* became a right rather an option.
Before it turns into a right rant I’ll stop now….Happy New Year…
a weird and wo(nd)e(r)ful article on the war-monger, mass-murderer Blair, whose destruction of hope on a grand scale is perhaps inequalled in UK political history.”gravitas” ? ! Slickness and spin institutionalised/internalised by an arch-exponent of the very “liberal” mantras which UnHerd is supposed to target as responsible for present woes. Will the writer soon list drone-drunk Obama among the great figures of the recent past ?
Sure. But then so would Screaming Lord Sutch.
Oooh…
Could someone help me understand this excerpt from Ed’s article please?
‘Not everything can be blamed on the cabinet team rather than the deeper idiocy around them; the fact that Britain has never required travellers to take a Covid test this entire time is almost unbelievable, but it reflects a deeper cultural prejudice towards “openness” which has cost us dearly’.
Carry on giving us our country back Boris . When your going through “it” keep going. Attaboy!!
It must be said however, that not testing people at the border for the virus (even with just a handheld thermometer thingy) is one of the reasons I never beleived the pandemic was that serious, because if it were, the border is literally the first place to start looking and restricting movement.
Tony’s six form project is over. Turn the page!!
Indeed, I never liked him much, he was too oily and condescending, but he knew how to win elections and he would be well suited to being in charge now
He would be well suited to being charged now. It isn’t too late.