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Friday 16 June 2017

The Killing$ of Tony Blair

I have finally got round to watching this documentary which has come highly recommend by others.  And I have to say I am appalled.

I admire bits about George Galloway, notably his testimony in the US when he has been accused of being in the pocket of Saddam Hussein, a man he was admittedly, felt to be too close to.  But this documentary is driven by hatred and is quite biased.  

The main thing it forgets, is that to bring about change, you must be heard. And Tony Blair and the U.K. under his leadership was heard and was listened to.

Galloway slates Blair for his work in Khazakstan, notably after a massacre of strikers there, but forgets to mention that Blair addressed this (and that action was taken against those found responsible).

He discusses the deal with the devil that Blair made with the Murdoch empire which was vital in helping secure public opinion which allowed Labour to do so much by being elected more than once into office. And while he admits Labour under Blair did improve things for many, he glosses over a lot of what had been done to help the nation under New Labour.

He discusses the debacle that was (and sadly still is) PFI without looking at the reasons why it was used, this being to rescue the NHS from the terrible state that the Conservatives had left it in 1997.

He claims that the man who had Labour elected over and over again was trying to destroy Labour.

And he also mentions the Iraq War.  Back then, we had to face several bad choices.  Our nation, under the Conservatives had armed Saddam, and when it came to what Iraq had with chemical weapons, we still had the receipts. If we were to not invade, it would have been to continue sanctions, or allow Saddam to regain the WMD he had used, during the Iran-Iraq war again.  And that ignores the help he was giving to support terrorism in Palestine and Israel which made it so much harder to bring about a just peace.

That was not the first conflict that Blair had taken the UK into.  We had the interventions in Sierra Leone, preventing a recurrence of he violence seen in Rwanda where the world watched genocide take place. We had e conflict in Kosovo, where we backed the side that was felt to be the least bad to prevent a repeat of the horrors seen during the Bosnian War.  And of course, there was Afghanistan, where the Taliban had sheltered the man behind the September the 11th attacks.  We could have left the Taliban alone, and allowed them to continue to oppress women and religious minorities and shelter terrorists, who had attacked the west.


He is however right to bring up issues such as the deal with Bernie Ecclestone, as well as the sale of a military air traffic control system to an impoverished nation with no meaningful air force of significance. The deal with the Saudi's, which ignored the bribery that had occurred, was, in my opinion a necessary evil to try and get them to take some more action to combat terrorism.

In summary, an interesting 'documentary' but on that belongs on channels known for mixing fact and fiction, such as Russia Today, Fox News or Press TV.

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