Voy Por Ustedes

Tony Blair announced today he is resigning….on the 27th of June. Another 49 days from now, which makes it over 1000 days since he announced he was not going to serve a full term. He’s been in office for ten years and three of those were spent resigning.

My mind harks back to the birth of little Leo Blair in May of 2000. Poor bastard. A couple of days after he was released from Cheries’ wizards sleeve of a snatch I really started to loath Tony Blair. Appearing on the steps of 10 Downing street in a denim shirt and sipping probably nothing from a mug with a picture of his family printed on it for all the worlds media to see, “I’m a family man me”, said the mug. “You can trust me”.

What a c**t. Those were my exact words. What a total c**t. Who does he think he’s fooling? I turned to myself and felt a deep sense of foreboding. How right I was. “Rich”, says I to myself, “this man is trouble, I don’t know much, but I know that”

A few years later and we’re in Iraq and the rest is history. For the next 49 days his legacy will be debated. You don’t need 49 days for that, you don’t even need 49 words. He’s a war criminal. But let’s look at the evidence anyway; a word not in Tony Blairs vocabulary.

ECONOMY
We have a robust and thriving economy. For the sake of argument, let’s say that actually matters; this is down to Gordon Brown not Tony Blair no? Which is to say it has been Gordon Brown who was creative enough with the figures to have us all believing we’re living in some sort of economic Shangri-la. I think in real terms it amounts to an extra 40p a week in hard currency. Awesome.

Real wealth of course has very little to do with actual hard currency. There are people knocking about the place with more money than they could spend in their lifetime, but they’re miserable bastards. They are also people who are completely at one with the world, but are flat broke all the time, that’s not real wealth either. You need to combine the two to be genuinely wealthy. Wealth in terms of annual growth and percentages and GDP and the what such is a façade. It’s a means of tricking us into believing we’re better off.

We may have an extra 40p a week in a pockets, but I’m pretty sure we’re at least 50p more miserable. The last time I saw someone smile it was because he’d just seen a cat get run over. I don’t like cats OK.

PUBLIC SERVICES
Education: Education, education, education. I done thought about this for a while and I can’t accept that children today are better educated than ten years ago. In fact, I’d say we have the thickest kids in the developed world and if we don’t God help the country that does. None of them can spell, read or write and they all do drugs and shag when they’re 12 and stab pensioners. When I was 12 I did my homework and then went out to play, which is how it should be, The only thing you’ll learn in a state school is how to make a weapon out of a setsquare.

Public Transportation: Is he taking the piss here? I haven’t been on a train for about ten years because I can’t afford it and train carriages are the only place in Britain still infected with the Black Death. I won’t go on a bus because of my aversion to sitting in someone else’s piss and I live in the country anyway where buses are as rare as livestock who haven’t been violated by a man in wellies. If I didn’t have a car I would have perished years ago. FACT.

Fire service: Are these guys still on strike? I never agreed with the fire services contention that they ought to receive the same rates of pay as the rozzers. I don’t know anyone who has ever needed a fireman, I’m sure their work is dangerous, but I’m also sure they spend most of their working days shouting phwoooar at page three of the Sun and drinking tea. However, we should never have a situation where an emergency service goes on strike. That is the very definition of bullshit. What if I had had a pet caught in a tree during that period? What then??

Healthcare: Oooooooh jesus. Healthcare…now there’s a contradiction in terms. I don’t even know where to begin on this one. The NHS is vanquished chaotic and soul destroying. See a previous blog (here) for my assessment of his handling of the NHS. Suffice is to say the NHS will not form part of his legacy.

Police: The police were replaced some time ago by speed cameras, community officers and CCTV. No doubt speed cameras are an effective means of traffic control although to date not a single drink-driver has been arrested by one. I’m all for them though. It means I can drive home when I’m three sheets to the wind (cause there aren’t any buses) safe in the knowledge that as long as I remain under the speed limit and vaguely on the road I will return home safely. Community officers have proven an effective deterrent against street crime. OK, so they can’t actually arrest you, or touch you, but if you chose to stop when they ask you to, they can write your name down in a book and make an appointment for you to see a real policeman. I don’t know about you, but it’s the straight and narrow for me while these fellas are about. CCTV is always an effective means of fighting crime, or they would be if criminals didn’t cover their faces, cunning rotters.

NORN IRON
So, Northern Ireland then? NO! Absolutely f*cking not. No way. Apart from the fact that all Tony Blair did was make the tea, I’m not having that as an achievement. What exactly has been achieved? Peace? Is peace an achievement? Peace is a prerequisite for any country. You can’t say yay we have peace now and expect the wider world to clap and give you a cookie.

If you actually have to work towards peace then all that says is your country was fucked up in the first place. Americans celebrating the Presidential candidacy of Barrack Obamarama is another example of mistaking achievement for just being less fucked up.

That’s not something to celebrate. Hoorah look at us, look at the progress we’ve made; it’s only taken us two centuries, but we now have a nig..I mean, we now have an African American running for President. He hasn’t got a sweetcorns chance in shit to win, but he’s running.

NO. That is not an achievement. All that says is it’s the 21st century and we’re such a bigoted racist nation that we’re only just getting around to treating Africans like people. It’s not progress it’s just what you should have been doing from the genesis of your supposedly great nation.

Parents don’t want praise cause they managed to feed their children. Parents shouldn’t be offered up for an award for finding the money to clothe their kids, that’s just something you’re supposed to do.

So NO! I’m sorry but peace in Northern Ireland is no great moment in history. Especially when they were blowing each other up because of something that happened over 300 years ago, which essentially was engineered on the basis of something written a few thousand years ago in a book of Chinese whispers.

If you want to blow yourselves to pieces because of religion fair enough…let’s build a wall (always with the walls!) around your battle-ground and we’ll leave you to it. They don’t deserve any help and they don’t deserve any praise now they appear to have finally realised it’s all bollocks. Peace in Northern Ireland amounts to; from now on let’s not throw bricks and petrol bombs at each other’s children anymore on their way to school. If this is a great moment in human history I’m switching species.

IRAQ
Tony knows he’s dropped a bollock on this one. He’s hoping though that thirty years from now that Iraq will have become a shining example of democracy and he’ll be able to say ha, you hated me then, but see, I was right.

I don’t know how wrong someone can be, I mean I don’t know how wrong it’s humanly possible to be, but this assumption has to be close to maximum wronging.

This is a civilization that was doing long division before Britain was even Britain. They were literate before the Greeks they, invented weaving without which we wouldn’t have chicken and chips in a basket and yet Mr Blair seems, astonishingly, to actually believe that we and the Americans can install western style democracy inside of three decades.

Iraq is a collection of tribes who have hated each other since a time that predates the f*cking Bible and he seriously believes he can have the place licked into shape in his lifetime.

It beggars belief. You know how the universe is so enormous and all the twinkly stars are so far away you just can’t get your head around the distances and all sense of perspective is futile cause the numbers are too big and the maths are too complex; this is how I feel about the Tony Blair game plan for Iraq.

If you rolled out a toilet roll to represent Iraq’s history, Tony Blair’s little episode wouldn’t even cover the last square of the toilet roll. It wouldn’t even cover the tiny little zig-zaggy perforated edge of the last square; it would be a dot of the peak of one of those edges. Yet he quite sincerely believes he can essentially do something in three decades that wasn’t possible in the previous seven millennia.


Famously Tony Blair once said I only know what I believe. Today he said he apologised if some people thought he had made errors, but he sincerely did what he believed was best at the time. He did really say that cause I’ve watched it a few times to make sure.

This is an argument Hitler could have used. Hitler obviously was not quite as deluded as Blair, which is quite a statement really, but he wasn’t because if he was, he wouldn’t have killed himself. He’d have stood trial at Nuremberg and given speeches with plenty of pregnant pauses, hand gestures and eye brow raises, and said I only did what I felt was right for my country at the time m’lud and I apologise to those of you who feel I made the wrong decisions, but a decision had to made and I made it.


See, now this is the problem with beliefs. Beliefs are fine if they have facts to go along with them. Otherwise they can cause issues. It’s fine for a kid to believe in Santa (as long as when the facts are in they no longer believe in Santa). But it’s not fine for one of the most powerful men on the planet to make his decisions based purely on what he believes. I’d prefer it if he chose to make his decisions based on what he knew and could prove with real world evidence rather than a, trust me I’m Tony, it’ll be OK, kinda justification.

Consequently, it doesn’t actually matter what he’s achieved. I don’t think he’s achieved anything anyway, I think it’s been ten years of hollow promises, grandiose speeches and ridiculous crass insidious posturing. But, even if he had achieved something, even if the economy was booming and our hospitals were like palaces and our school the envy of the academic world and teachers and nurses and doctors were enjoying six figure salaries; it all pale’s into insignificance when you manufacture a means to go to war.

There’s nothing worse a Prime Minister can do. Nothing more vulgar and reprehensible, not even getting that woman pregnant time after time. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to take themselves off somewhere quiet and answer some searching questions about what’s really important in this world.

Tony Blair is a war criminal and should be in jail, but he will never be held accountable for what he has done. He’s not accountable because the power that our politicians have is so absolute that he is above the law and change is impossible and any attempts to change things are futile.

Also, people are now so desensitised to suffering and war and killing and death, that they don’t care. And this is how some people are still able to look at their lives and think how great it is to be alive. Only when you can block out what is happening around you and cocoon yourself in your own world not three inches from the end of your nose can you continue to think that the world is a great place and life is worth living. I’m not that narcissistic. Tony Blair has made me not care about my future and he’s made me lose my sense of humour and that was my favourite thing about me.

All of these things are tragedies, they are not beliefs they are facts. I don’t know much, but I know that.