Tony Blair. Unflushable, isn’t he. Just when you think you’ve seen or heard the last of him he pops back up again.
Like human herpes he’s only ever lingering in the background, waiting to make a comeback that nobody wanted.
I can’t help but feel like we’re living in the mess Tony Blair helped to create.
PA
Stefan Rousseau
Blair made a decision to irreversibly change the demographics of this country, In 2004, eight countries in central and eastern Europe, including Poland and Hungary, joined the EU as part of the bloc's enlargement project.
Blair chose not to put a block on the amount of people who could come.
For the decade that followed, net migration to the UK from these new member states topped 423,000. Economic migrants were also waved through as asylum seekers, reportedly.
Blair really set the ball rolling on mass migration and entire communities, entire cities, changed forever.
In many areas there has been the total loss of any sense of community whatsoever.
Then there was devolution. Blair signed off on devolution to end the question of independence once and for all…well, that went well, didn’t it.
The potential disintegration of the United Kingdom is in no small part down to good old Tony.
PA
Stefan Rousseau
He’s clearly about as good as seeing into the future as a backstreet clairevoyant with a catorax.
It’s interesting that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are in the Hague currently for the Invictus games. In my opinion they should have brought Tony Blair with them so he can stand trial for war crimes.
There have been a million excess deaths as a result of Blair’s push for war in Iraq, according to the MIT Centre for International Studies. Many of them civilians. Many of them children.
179 British troops died in Iraq. I’m just going to quote now the mothers of some of the young men who died in that needless war.
PA
Victoria Jones
When Blair was knighted I think the comments of the mothers of some dead British soldiers are very telling:
Rose Gentle is the mother of Gordon Gentle, a 19-year-old from Pollok who was killed in 2004 by a roadside bomb in Basra.
She said: “Instead of standing in front of the Queen being made a Sir with that stupid grin on his face, he’d be better going to the cemetery and standing in front of my son’s grave to see what he’s done.”
I do think the only way Blair should have got down on his knee in front of the Queen was if he was begging for forgiveness.
But of course, another one of Blair’s enduring legacies is this.
He wanted 50% of young people to go to University – the premise being that they’d become more intelligent, more employable and better paid. But, in reality, we’ve ended up with people saddling themselves with a lifetime of debt, being pummelled by spiralling interest rates.
I’m convinced it won’t be long before you need a PHD to stack shelves in Lidl. There are people flipping burgers in McDonald’s with a first in psychology from Sheffield University.
There’s no point getting a degree just for the sake of it. Shackling yourself with tens of thousands of pounds for the privilege of getting a Desmond Tutu in fine art from a glorified polytechnic that rather suspiciously seems to accommodate a huge number of Chinese students from well to do families is absolutely insanity.
But Blair’s back at it again. With the kind of logic that one can only assumed is from having one too many on the back of Mick Jagger’s yacht, Blair now wants 70% of people to go to University. I believe this is just so that they can saddle themselves with debt and render themselves reliant on the state for the rest of their lives.
Just in case you were on the fence about what a terrible idea this is, George Osborne has come out and backed Blair on this.
The irony here is that Blair, lovely, fluffy, lefty Blair, is actually contributing to stigmatising people who don’t go to university. He’s adding to the perception that if you don’t go to uni you must be thick as mince.
But the reality is that we need people with practical trades. We don’t need any more people working in recruitment, we need plumbers, brickies, labourers…there’s nothing thick about being a mechanic. I have no idea what’s going on under the bonnet of my car, that’s why I call a mechanic. Because they’re highly skilled.
But it’s not just me saying this – Tony Blair’s son Euan has devoted a large chunk of his career to telling people not to go to university.
For anyone who thinks Blair is a deeply principled man who has all our best interests a heart, just remember that he’s the ultimate champagne socialist - the Pandora Papers revealed that Tony and Cherie Blair did not have to pay £312,000 in stamp duty when buying a £6.45m London townhouse.
The couple bought an offshore firm that owned the building.
And the Telegraph reported that the Blair Institute made millions by advising Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince.
The man widely believed to have ordered a journalist to be carved up with a bone saw in a Turkish embassy.
Look, thanks for the memories, Tony, but you’ve done more than enough damage to the UK already. Please pipe down. If I had it my way, there’s be a hostel room in Rwanda with his name on it.