The real history of the Blair era

Over the last few weeks I've read plenty of articles and commentaries on the "Blair Years", but nothing as good as this one from one of my favourite commentators - Theodore Dalrymple.

Tony Blair's most alarming characteristic, however, has been his enmity to freedom in his own country, whatever his feelings about it in other countries. No British prime minister in 200 years has done more to curtail civil liberties than has Mr. Blair. Starting with an assumption of his infinite beneficence, he assumed infinite responsibility, with the result that Britain has become a country with a degree of official surveillance that would make a Latin American military dictator envious. Sometimes this surveillance is merely ludicrous--parking-enforcement officers' wearing miniature closed-circuit security cameras in their caps to capture abusive responses from those ticketed, say, or local councils' attaching sensing devices to the garbage cans of three million homes to record what people throw away, in order to charge them for the quantity and quality of their trash.

I can not recommend it enough. Read it all - then compare it to the garbage chucked out by the BBC and the rest of the British media.