What would it take for Tony Blair to go away?
The former prime minister is allegedly worth more than £60 million. If everyone in the UK chips in with £1, we could more than double that as long as he promises to retire.
It simply must be time for him to leave public life
Failing this, we could tell him that he has been appointed to an international board for cultural and economic development on Mars. Then we could send him into space. I’m not wishing physical harm on the man, to be clear — he should be allowed to orbit the Earth safely and comfortably. But it simply must be time for him to leave public life.
Seriously, Blair can’t stop giving us his opinions — or trying to worm his way into important and ironic positions like the Gaza “Board of Peace”.
His latest intervention into British politics is an article headlined, “We must end left’s unholy alliance with the Islamists”. Some have argued that it is “important and brave”. Actually, it is trivial and cowardly.
To be sure, I don’t disagree with Blair for a moment on the evils of anti-Semitic behaviour. But he seems to think that we can end anti-Semitic behaviour by sitting people down and having a long chat about the nuances of the Israel-Palestine War.
This side-steps the fact that Blair is as responsible as anyone for the expansion of anti-Semitic attitudes in Britain. According to a Henry Jackson Society poll from 2024, nearly half of British Muslims say that Jews have too much power over UK government policy, while only one in four has a negative view of Hamas. When did the number of Muslims in the UK take off? During the premiership of Tony Blair. To be clear, these polls illustrate that a lot of British Muslims do not have anti-Semitic beliefs. But when millions of people are entering the UK from deeply anti-Semitic societies, the idea that you can maintain placid community relations with long-winded lectures about the finer points of Middle Eastern politics is crackers. The hubris is alarming. It’s the ideological equivalent of breaching a dam and trying to reverse the consequences with a teaspoon.
Blair is right, of course, that Israeli foreign policy does not justify a generalised prejudice against Jewish people. That is — or should be — moral common sense. But Western foreign policy in the last twenty-fears does justify prejudice against Tony Blair. I can’t criticise tendencies among British Muslims without acknowledging that Mr Blair is a much powerful and insidious form of extremist — a war hawk who has never learned his lesson.
Afghanistan was a destructive failure. Iraq was a destructive failure. We now learn that Blair has been rebuking Keir Starmer for not supporting Donald Trump over Iran. The idea that Tony Blair — Tony Blair — has the stones to recommend supporting an American president in their rush to war is downright obscene.
The War on Terror, with Blair at the U.K.’s helm, led to violent destabilisation which fuelled and spread Islamic extremism across the Middle East and into the West. At the same time, it was the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. That killing does not justify Islamic extremism — indeed, many of the perpetrators were Islamic extremists — but extremism was an inevitable result. “If you stick your dick in a bees’ nest, you’ll get stung,” as the much-missed online satirist Harry Hutton observed. With this in mind, Mr Blair’s posturing about extremism is absurd.
Finally, I can’t help commenting on Mr Blair’s passive aggressive attempt to lecture British people on how they should stop disapproving of Israel. “I don’t know exactly what the response of the people of Britain would be,” writes Blair:
… if we woke up one day and between the hours of 6am and midday, 1,200 of our citizens were murdered, including young people at a music festival, with women raped and others taken hostage (and for Britain, proportionate to the size of population, the figures would be much larger). But I suspect it would be total determination that those responsible were going to be removed as a threat, and nothing would deter us from doing so.
Hundreds of British girls were raped by grooming gangs while Mr Blair was the prime minister. Of course, this was a more diffuse, less murderous phenomenon than October 7. But it is hard to stomach lectures about what must be done in the face of evil from someone whose government did absolutely nothing. Of course, mistreating innocent people should have been unjustifiable in both cases. But Blair should be the last person to hold forth on “removing threats”.
Anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism are certainly dangerous, but so is Tony Blair, and just as I don’t want to listen to a Wahhabi cleric on Western foreign policy, I don’t want to listen to Blair on Islamism.
Can we pay him to go away? I’ll set up a GoFundMe.
