Thursday, June 28, 2007

And so ends a decade of self-service

Luckily I was able to avoid most of the nauseating coverage of the Blair departure yesterday - but not lucky enough to miss all the retch inducing accolades and tributes that poured out from the MSM or from his political "opponents".

Because I didn't catch all the coverage, it's possible that I missed someone somewhere mentioning the most obvious point about Blair's exit - but in case no one mentioned it, I may as well do so.

Having left the office of Prime Minister, Blair went straight to his constituency and resigned as an MP - bringing to an end a parliamentary career that has lasted just 24 years - 13 as Labour leader and 10 as PM.

Just to put that into context, Blair's entire career was shorter than the time Ted Heath had served as an MP BEFORE becoming Prime Minister. I didn't like Heath - the man who sold Britain out to the EU. I believe he was wrong about the EU and a lot of other things and he certainly lied about the EU - but I never doubted that he did so because he believed it was the right thing for Britain.

And this is, for me, the glaringly obvious point about Blair which everyone seems to have missed. His decision to not just quit as PM, but to leave the British political system entirely confirms to me that the only thing that has motivated Blair over those 24 years was himself. He had no real interest in serving Britain other than using it as a stepping stone to the world stage.

As he leaves the British political stage to take up his role working for some foreign power, he leaves behind a Britain more divided than ever before. He leaves the Union teetering on the brink of collapse. He leaves a Britain where the gap between the haves and have-nots has never been larger and the chances for the have-nots to improve their lot have never been lower.

He leaves a Britain full of illiterate children - a generation barely able to read or write and hardly able to string a coherent sentence together without punctuating it with expletives.

He leaves a Britain that has spent most of the last ten years at war with someone somewhere - Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq - and armed forces that, even as they are committed to more and more efforts overseas, are stripped of men and equipment by ever tightening cuts in defence spending.

He leaves us all, grinning and waving and thinking of nothing but himself.

The most self-serving Prime Minister ever.

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