Britain’s leftist opposition Labour Party has tried to rehabilitate Iraq War architect Sir Tony Blair by releasing a video of him praising his own legacy and endorsing current leader Sir Keir Starmer.
Sir Tony, who governed from 1997 to 2007, with Gordon Brown succeeding him until Labour’s ouster in 2010, tried to persuade British voters to give his party another chance by lauding himself for lifting children and pensioners out of “acute poverty” — not mentioning the fact that poverty rates for poorer working-age adults without dependent children increased, or that child poverty had begun to rise again as Labour was leaving office, increasing by 100,000 between its last election win in 2005 and 2008/9.
The Blair video, shared on Labour’s verified social media accounts, also saw the former party leader claim to have “slashed” waiting lists at the National Health Service (NHS) — again, overlooking such issues as the financial crises in multiple NHS trusts following early spending sprees fuelled by non-recurrent funding, land sales, and the like, or the infamous Mid Staff scandal which grew to encompass 14 trusts accused of being responsible for thousands of excess deaths, which Labour actively resisted investigating under the Public Inquiries Act.
Blair also described how “business prospered” and positive employment and unemployment were produced under Labour, although a clear timeframe for the period he was talking about was not provided — perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the parlous state of the economy when Labour left office, having led the country into a major financial crash and the worst recession in six decades.
Most obviously, Blair made no mention whatsoever of what he is most remembered for: the calamitous Iraq War, into which he led Britain on the basis of bogus claims around so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) which were always extremely thinly-evidenced.
His decision to join America’s failed intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 to hunt down Osama bin Laden — ultimately found living in a villa in Pakistan under the noses of the Pakistani military in 2011 — was also passed over, along with the litany of procurement failures that saw the British armed forces suffer avoidable fatalities in both countries.
Other notable Blair-era failures which did not make the Blair cut were Gordon Brown’s botched sale of hundreds of tons of gold at the bottom of the market, and the party’s notorious prediction that opening Britain’s borders to new European Union member-states early would see an initial influx of just 5,000-12,000 migrants, when the true numbers ended up being in the hundreds of thousands.
Some of these episodes featured in a successful attack video compiled by the now-governing Conservative (Tory) party ahead of the 2010 general election, titled ’13 Years of Labour’.
Nevertheless, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer declared that “having the endorsement of Tony Blair is very important, very valuable”.
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