Because of Blair, Britain will now be shaped by the world

Jez

Liberal interventionism.

One word;

Zimbabwe.

TGF UKIP

I agree, Fraser, but isn't it even worse than that. First of all, the decision to go to war, previously exercised by the government on behalf of the crown, was for the first time over Iraq delegated to Parliament. This will almost certainly have the effect of ensuring that no future Lab/Lib governement will be able to go to war and nor will any Conservative one unless it has a massive majority sufficient to overide the opposition parties and the One Nationers within its own ranks.

Secondly because of the obsession over UN Resolutions acting as "war permits" that was allowed to flower over Iraq and were so assiduously fostered in and by the media, an effective veto seems to have been handed to that den of knaves and thieves in New York.

Could be an interesting gaming scenario for The Speccie - a British Crown Territory, Falklands, Gibraltar or in the Caribbean is invaded and occupied and the knaves den chooses not to give unequivocal support to "the colonial power" - what happens then?

mitch

Perhaps next time they will try TELLING THE TRUTH!! I know its a radical policy but its not been tried before.

James

Shouldn't the primary purpose of our armed forces be to protect the UK?

Michael

I agree. Rwanda would not be an intervention country because of race. Same happened in Zimbabwe. Very selective was Blairs intervention as it seemed to be based on Arab oil countries. Not once was Israel even criticised by him.

Adam

"now so despised in the country that gave him three landslides"

Oh goodie. I look forward to seeing him on the campaign trail this year.
What worries me about intervention is the way we seem to completely forget the UN when there isn't a crisis.
There is now going to be a working group about Afghanistan with the 'regional players'. Why can't this be done at the UN?
My fear is that once this period of history is over the world's governments will have fatally undermined the UN.
Doing this will make the world less safe and make people in individual countries more at risk of being subjected to tyranny.

2trueblue

Blair created his own problems because he lacked integrity. He used his 'legal speak'to intimidate other people and get his way. He was a good orator who lacked the capacity to deliver and plan.

Iraq was a disaster because there was no plan once they were in. It was fascinating to watch the speed with which the invasion took place, and then how quickly it all fell apart. Basra was a sophisticated city, yet within days every part of its infrastructure was destroyed. Why? Because those who planned it were vacuous and did not have any plan on how to run it, or to safeguard the basic infrastructure for the city to function. After that, its history.

Britain will not carry his mantle, he simply needs to be removed from the world stage.

A man is the colour of his inner self. Blair thought that what the world saw was more important than the real person, but history will show it all. This is a man picks his beliefs to suit his timing, a shallow profiteer, who hawks his trade on the world stage and delivers nothing. A man who pays allegiance neither to the country or religion except in his time.

call me dave

Because of Blair (& Co.), Britain has been invaded by the world - 6 million immigrants since 1997.

Fergus Pickering

Balls, Fraser. Look at Blair's favourite intervention, the one that created not one but TWO unviable states in the Balkans. We didn't stop the killing. It had already happened. And what do you suggest that we, the world, do now? Perhaps a bit of doing nothing would not come amiss. Rather than playing at Captain Kirk of Startrek. And why did he do it? Pure vanity. Mrs Thatcher had had a war. He wanted one too. There is a fine Britiush expression. Mind your own business. Blair minded everybody's business but his own. Hang him high is what I say.

John Richardson

F. Nelson

Are you suggesting that 'The Great British Public' was committed to our military deployment in, say, Cyprus ? Or Bosnia ?
It was not.
It left such decisions to the political class, only supporting the troops for basic honorable, non-political reasons.
Without conscription, people maintain a sensible detachment to these military escapades. If you do not want to get involved, don't join up, simple.

Now there is no faith in the political class.
However, this has nothing to do with something called 'international Law'.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Saddam was a 'bad un'.
It has nothing to do with the next foreign genocide and any ugly vacuous 'guilt' the MSM and other who earn a living this way, might comment upon feeling ("...we'll be condemned in the Court of World Opinion") at the time.
Foreign countries far away have often been ruled by murderers. Some always will be.
You mention Rwanda.
No-one in this country feels any guilt about Rwanda.
Horror yes, guilt no.
The political class manufactured reasons for the invasion (45minutes) of Iraq but no-one with an ounce of sense believed them.
No-one in the UK was afraid of being attacked by Iraq.
I think many of the non-military people who stand silently to welcome home dead soldiers, as showing their SYMPATHY for the fallen.
They are not thinking, "They died so our country could be free."
We are not a free country.
They feel sorry for them as individuals. They know it would never have been they themselves in that situation.
The show of sympathy is partly heartfelt as the 'common people' know when British soldiers die for 'internationalist' politicians they have wasted their blood.
Or their arms or legs.
The people know there is not one current political party that attempts to protect British interests. I hope UKIP is an exception.
If British politicians were, in the past, able to apply force to effect good ends abroad this was for one reason. They justly and legitimately led the British People at home.
As the British People, especially the English, have been so respected throughout the world, this mattered.
This is where the military ability to 'intervene' came from. Not the other way around.ie being one United Kingdom that was justly led under the Rule Of Law enabled us to be strong enough to intervene.

All this has changed now.
This is because it is obvious that the political class now has zero interest in the people.
(This will become more obvious to the world when they eventually see Blair and Brown humiliated in public. This will go around the world via TV as soon as the two attempt to join real life at a sporting event, or at the theatre or whatever.
"Ah...the English have leaders like us! Look how they are hated!" they will realise.)

You claim to think Blair had a 'bold and coherent' foreign policy agenda.
I do not care about it.
I care about the country I live in.
Everyone I have ever met who cared more about somewhere else was either foreign or gently insane.
This is the correct moral gauge of a politician; what did they do about what they COULD do?
Blair betrayed his country again and again.
You know all about this betrayal but prefer not to 'analyse' it.
Though you write that you will. Then you don't.
We have never 'resigned ourselves to being shaped by the world'.
That is an insult Mr Nelson.
No-one said 'Foreign rule?, Why not?'
or
'Mass immigration from the third world?
It can only be a good thing.'
I appreciate you would prefer to suggest we grow weary of self rule.
This is not true.
We were lied to.
We were betrayed by a political class, including obviously the MSM, who just told lies.
If the British People are not honestly represented by their political representatives then I say
'Thank God that bastard politicians cannot intervene using our soldier's blood.'

Your perspective is that of the political class.

mitcheltj

"It will accelerate Britain's transformation from a war-fighting country which seeks to shape the world, into a country with a peace-keeping military which has resigned itself to being shaped by the world. It's the opposite to what Blair wanted. But due to the way he conducted the war, this would be his legacy"

Fraser - if indeed this is the albeit inadvertent legacy of Tony Blair, then we should cheer from the rooftops. I forget which American politician in the 1950s said that we had lost an empire but had yet to find a role but the truth is we - or more to the point politicians of every party - still carry on as if we ruled the world, or the world was hanging on our words of wisdom. Countries such as Germany, France, Japan and Italy do not seem to have the same need to strut their stuff on the world stage, and all have an equally impressive global past as the UK. I often think that the much maligned Harold Wilson's greatest achievement was to keep the UK out of Vietnam. The plain fact is that we cant afford politicians' international vanity; no-one pays us any attention anyway when we "send a message" or "set an example"; and it would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic in terms of blood and treasure. Wouldn't it be nice if Prime Minister Cameron (!??) concluded that we dont need to lead the world on climate change, banking reform, military adventures or whatever else in playing on the international stage etc and focused instead on the boring, tedious yet very important job - to us the residents - of running this country well, and working WITH other countries on international issues with a true regard to our influence and importance. Perhaps as first steps he should (a) give up our seat on the UN security council (b) withdraw from the EU (c) shut down DFID and the Department for climate change (I'm now battening down the proverbial hatches as I type, knowing that on this blog, I am likely to attract a few brickbats from all directions for these views, but, hey, let's have a lively debate!).

ndm

-- But due to the way he conducted the war, this would be his legacy.

Human-rights organizations almost never suggest war as a means to solve a human-rights problem precisely because war is uncontrollable and its final impact is unforeseeable. Blairs conduct lies in not recognizing the likelihood that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis might die as a direct conseqence of his malevolence towards Saddam Hussein. We need to hold political leaders criminally accountable for deliberate mistakes of this magnitude.

Ruairidh

You are making a mistake here if you think that the problem is anything to do with the specifics of Iraq or the actions of Blair. If anything Iraq should have been the easiest case. UN resolutions staking up, willful non-compliance and human rights abuses by the metric tonne by an almost friendless government. The moral and legal case was there to be made. The thing is in a conflict that has no immediate threat to the UK there will always be a vocal opposition at home claiming the moral high ground of pacifism. Furthermore the legal case will always hinge on getting a case through the illiberal UN. That means getting China, France, Russia and all those other countries onside who not signed up to your liberal agenda and have only their own self-interest in mind . We've had our Rwanada in Sudan and what happened? Nothing. Principally because the Sudanese had sold their soul to the Chinese in return for them blocking the UN.

The opposition of France and Russia to the Iraq war had nothing whatsoever to do with doubts over WMD and UN breaches and everything to do with commercial contracts for oil and rearmament.

Moraymint

"It will accelerate Britain's transformation from a war-fighting country which seeks to shape the world, into a country with a peace-keeping military which has resigned itself to being shaped by the world"

Sorry Fraser, but you're forgetting the economics of all this. The UK is bust; shot; broke; skint.

A decade and more of unreconstructed Marxism has so utterly shafted the socio-economic fortunes of this country that any thought of the UK having the credibility and resources to "shape the world" is utter fantasy. What do you smoke exactly?

The British people have, by and large, chosen socialism as a national economic philosophy. Socialism means levelling down; it means, ultimately, running out of dosh.

Since a strong military presence in the world requires a strong underlying economy (or, in China's case, an economy founded on a billion citizens), then the British people have forsaken their place in the any new world order.

We Brits want to focus our precious resources (taxes) on supporting at least 8 million economically inactive citizens, not on "shaping the world". For as long as this is the case, our armed forces will be a tin pot outfit and unworthy of the cachet "a war-fighting country".

I say this as one who spent 20 years in the armed forces and these days despair at the antics of our political class.

Noa Zrk

liberal interventionism.

The imposition, without consent and at the expense of the electorate, of the prejudices of one political classes upon another which fails to share them.

thomas

Really? That's a very bold statement. War with Iran does indeed look very unlikely while Afghanistan is going on, but do we really see politicians lining up to promote a less interventionist foreign policy? Fraser is starting to smell of Heffalump I'm afraid. Too much pessimistic sensationalism for my liking. Where is the attempt to shape policy? Where is the attempt to persuade? This blog post just comes across as self-pitying and defeatist, and it is alarming to read before what we hope will be a Conservative election win. If Conservatives have resigned themselves to not being in power even while in government themn why bother getting rid of Brown at all?

Tony Gee

We are broke with further to fall with 1% of the world's population - time to pull up the drawbridge and copy Norway, Switzerland and Singapore.

toco

Blair and the increasingly erratic and dysfunctional Gordon Brown have several things in common-they are greedy for power,don't care how they get it,profess to religion as an excuse for their misdeeds,are cowardly and are unable to accept they are capable of mistakes.There are plenty more similiarities but life is too short.

denverthen

"I look at this in my News of the World column today. "

Heavyweight stuff, then.

David Lindsay

It is amazing how many on the Right are still forgiving of Blair over his wars, seeing them as the only good things that he ever did and as somehow not of a piece with the rest of his record.

Blair liked wars because they cost taxpayers vast sums of money. You might argue that the taxpayers should simply have been able to keep that money. Or you might argue that it should have been spent on fighting want, ignorance, ill health, idleness and squalor. But either way, you cannot argue for spending it on wars instead, if at all avoidable.

Blair liked wars because they are morally and socially disruptive. Everything to do with the Swinging Sixties started during the War. Just ask anyone of that generation. My late father always made that point in the Eighties, when Margaret Thatcher was on about the Sixties: she was right, but it really all went back to the War, when there was an epidemic of venereal disease, when London's and other cities' parks were turned on VE Night into giant outdoor orgies worthy of (indeed, surpassing) anything to come in the summer of 1968, and so much else besides.

Blair liked wars because he believed in making the world anew to some academic blueprint, or in his case to its vulgarisation for consumption by the uncultured likes of him.

And Blair liked wars because they create new enemies and entrench or embitter old ones, thus creating future threats, which lead to further expensive, morally and socially disruptive, make-the-world anew wars.

Sometimes a war is inescapable, such as when our territory is invaded. But we are neither fighting nor facing any such war today. Nor were we at any point in Tony Blair's Premiership. Indeed, we have not been since 1982.

John Wilkes

You are right that the consequence of Iraq is likely to be a lack of intervention. However, is that such a bad thing? The problem with liberal intervention is well illustrated by the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. The issue that all those who advocate it need to deal with is, what do you do when the troops are on the ground and the battle is won? Do you take over the country and run it the way you think it should be run? Do you install some alternative regime in the hope that it will run the country better and be more sympathetic to your foreign policy aims?

It is a very dangerous thing to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign state other than is absolutely necessary to preserve the interests of your own state. Britain, with or without empire, has a relatively honourable tradition in that regard..
Why was it, do you suppose, that Conservatives were so reluctant to intervene in the Balkans in the 1990's? In retrospect, which policy damaged Britain's interests the most, that one or Tony Blairs?

John David Barnett

Fraser

Cold or called?

John David Barnett

mitcheltj

It was Dean Acheson and he said it in the 1960s.

Wislon

"Tony Blair, the most successful election winner in Labour party history"

He won three general elections. Harold Wilson won four.

stephen

Maybe no bad thing; the UK is forced to give its overinflated self importance with the military "punching above its weight!" Admirals will have to give up their floating Gin Palaces Carriers and nasty nukes, the RAF its Boys Toys and the Army becomes a sort of international rescue!
It would do wonders with our deficit who cares about our permanent Security Council seat!

John David Barnett

Stephen

I care about it. We need strong defences.

Simon Denis

Surely it's about time we gave up on these pretensions in any case. In point of fact, we should have given them up in 1919. The illusions bred by our role in the second world war have been almost as catastrophic as the fact of our participation. One thing is becoming clear - we were only technically the victors in '45. The real winners were Roosevelt and Uncle Joe. Put simply, they defeated the people who had defeated us - Germany and Japan.

Now, nothing can or should detract from the courage of The Few or the Desert Rats or the people of London, but that is not the point. The point is that Britain and France would have done far better by their people and their destinies to have played a waiting game with Adolf - the same game which did for the Bolsheviks in '89 - rather than placing themselves with surpassing futility in his path of destruction. However, they chose to fight and the rest is history - a particularly bloody and anguished chapter of history at that.

Unfortunately, the problem doesn't end there, for it is this crazed example of "The War" which has inspired so much subsequent folly. The rule is: there is no such thing as a liberal conflict. Not only does democracy not grow from the barrels of guns, the presence of guns forestalls all chance of democracy in the first place. Conversely, those societies which have imposed their will through violence have rarely if ever attempted to bring freedom. Secondly, whatever their agenda, they have been willing to maintain an occupation indefinitely. The exceptional West German example (an "imposed democracy") fits the second part of my prescription to a T.

So let us discard as an example that cigar chomping old drunk, Churchill and look for guidance to those statesmen who built the empire, rather than to the one who liquidated it. Our first step must be to hunker down into our own affairs. We must free ourselves from debt, control our borders and prevent terrorism. Chasing primitive, Islamist numbskulls around the wastes of Afghanistan is simply bleeding us of treasure and expertise and Al Qaeda knows it. Only once we are prosperous, better educated (goodbye, comprehensives), independent of the middle east (hello, nuclear power) and culturally stable (no more mass immigration) will we stand a chance of imposing our will on any portion of the planet - the British Isles included.

stephen

I see Mad Gord is now backing the building of the Navy's floating gin palaces. Why? Jobs in Scotland? At least Boy George has not committed to this £5bn "folie de grandure" Why not leave fighting pirates to the Chinese? I don't think they will be such gentlemen when it comes to sorting out the Somalis as our PC ridden Navy?

AndyinBrum

I'd say Sierra Leone was a good intervention

John David Barnett

Simon

Why so keen to run the country down? We need a strong Navy more than we ever did.

Remember the Falklands?

Sacre Bleu

I thought the period of a Parliament was 5 years maximum in which case this shower should have recorded 15 years in power by now. Why not? Blair had to be in the record books as the first labour leader to be re-elected so he ran a short Parliament and to ensure that no other would beat his span as a leader he ran another short session so he now has 3. Beat that Gordo or any one else for that matter. Did he intend to run a full term third time round? I don't think so, he saw the shit coming but he has his 'Legacy' not just in his own head but in the record books.

Yam Yam

Blair must have forgotten that the principal reason why the world (and especially the United States) stood by as Rwanda descended into genocide was because it had already had its fingers badly burned in Somalia in 1993.

Frank P

Simon Denis

What a defeatist, pacifist, ungrateful person (and I use that word as a euphemistic synonym) you are. Sadly your ilk increases daily and Dhimmitude approaches at an alarming ever-increasing pace. In my own case I hope the Reaper arrives before the mosque in my village, otherwise I may well have to become a geriatric vandal. I suppose as a final act of defiance I could stuff my long John’s with semtex and kill two birds with one stone: deal with my dodgy prostate and make one last gesture of defiance. That would of course also kill two stones with one blast and in the unlikely event of 72 raunchy infidel virgins waiting to be served in the hereafter; I could always make my excuses and leave. Grow a backbone man! I am beginning to believe that there really is something in this theory that hormonal residue in the drinking water from female contraception has neutered a mutated (or mutilated, even) generation.

Frank P

Wonderful rumbles from the Onion Field:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7009686.ece

three landslides ?

In the 2005 general election more people voted Conservative than Labour in England. Even in 1997 Labour only got support from 30% of the electorate (43% of a 71% turnout).

David B

Unfortunately this is the price that must be paid what Blair did. He brought Parliament, Government, the inelegancy services and the principle of intervention into distribute and it will take a long time to repair the damage.

Kennybhoy

Simon Denis wrote:

"So let us discard as an example that cigar chomping old drunk, Churchill..."

God forgive us, we already have....

Kennybhoy

Frank P,

Credit where it is due man. Mr Denis is to be congratulated for unashamedly revealing the true lineage of the current anti-war, anti-American "Michael Moore Conservative" position. Most of his ilk hereabout and in society at large are too stupid or too dishonest to do so.

It is only fitting that "that cigar chomping old drunk" should have the last word....

“If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to that moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

David Lindsay

Simon Denis is absolutely spot on.

In the Thirties, there were two British threats to constitutionality and, via Britain’s role in the world, to international stability. One came from an unreliable, opportunistic, highly affected and contrived, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, Eurofederalist demagogue who admired Mussolini, heaped praise on Hitler, had no need to work for a living, had an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, profoundly hated democracy, and had a callous disregard for the lives of the lower orders and the lesser breeds. So did the other one. Far more than background united Churchill and Mosley.

In Great Contemporaries, published in 1937, two years after he had called Hitler’s achievements “among the most remarkable in the whole history of the world”, Churchill wrote that: “Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed, functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” That passage was not removed from the book’s reprint in 1941. In May 1940, Churchill had been all ready to give Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda to Mussolini.

Churchill’s dedicated Zionism was precisely that of the BNP: he did not regard the Jews as British, so he wanted them to go away. The anti-British terrorists who went on to found the State of Israel agreed with him, very nearly coming to an understanding whereby Hitler would have expelled the Jews by sending them to British Palestine, which he and the Zionists would have conquered together for the purpose.

All sorts of things about Churchill are simply ignored. Gallipoli. The miners. The Suffragettes. The refusal to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. His dishonest and self-serving memoirs. Both the fact and the sheer scale of his 1945 defeat while the War in the Far East was still going on, when Labour won half of his newly divided seat, and an Independent did very well against him in the other half after Labour and the Liberals had disgracefully refused to field candidates against him. His deselection by his local Conservative Association just before he died. And not least, his carve-up of Eastern Europe with Stalin, so very reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Simon Denis

Well, Mr Lindsay, thankyou for your support. I hope I do not sound ungrateful when I observe that my views of Churchill, albeit critical, are not as hostile as yours. As cigar chomping old drunks go, he was much more witty and humane - at least in his purely personal relations - than I think you allow for. In any case, the real issue goes well beyond his personality. Some will never understand this, of course. He is to them what Mohammed is to the Muslims, his words holy writ, his sayings treasured wisdom. You can tell the real Churchillolator by the tone of spleen and rancour with which they reply to attacks on his record. They assert that we should be "grateful" to him. For what? The debacle of the restored gold standard? The "Ten Year Rule"? In tandem, these measures brought about the state of military weakness which he came to rail against. It is almost as though in a few years time, with bombs going off all over Europe, Tony Blair were to blame the guilty men who had presided over excessive Islamic immigration. That he was himself the guiltiest of men in this regard will not trouble him in the slightest, just as Churchill shrugged off his own responsibility for a number of bungles, blunders, botched jobs and failures which almost make Blair look competent. However, as I said, this is not the central point which is that war rarely if ever pays; military preparedness does. Containment, not conflict is the way to approach an enemy in nine cases out of ten. One contributor to this thread scorns such views by implying that they are typical of a generation lacking testosterone. Passing over the primitive misogyny, I suggest that he start thinking with the contents of his cranium, rather than with those of his scrotum. As to Iran - that may well be a country with which we need to fight, but the Churchill style Iraq blunder has made that infinitely more problematic.

clif e

This Labour party is a disgrace, they are against freedom, divercity, eqaulity and social living and is only interested in social engineering and dictatorship, the sooner there gone the better.