Thursday 7 July 2016

The Scruples of Tony Blair

They went to war in a Sieve, they did, 
In a Sieve they went to war: 
In spite of all Hans Blix could say, 
At Bush’s command on that fateful day 
In a Sieve they went to war! 
But when no weapons were found in the place 
And every one cried, “You have no case” 
Said Tony Blair “we’re trusting to luck
We don’t care a button! we don’t give a f***! 
In a Sieve we’ll go to war!

Far and few, far and few, 
Are the scruples of Tony Blair; 
His lies are bold and he’s shameless too, 
And they went to war in a Sieve. 

They went to war in a Sieve, they did 
And totally unprepared 
With not enough armour for soldiers to don 
With too few choppers – the list it goes on 
But Blair, he never cared. 
And everyone said, who saw them go, 
“O won’t they be soon undone, you know! 
For the list of shortcomings is terribly long, 
And happen what may, it’s extremely wrong 
To send our boys unprepared!” 

Far and few, far and few, are the scruples of Tony Blair... 

The casualty figures soon started to rise, 
The coffins they soon came in; 
So to cover their arses they lied and lied 
(No sign of remorse for the many who died) 
And they gave the order to spin! 
And they hunkered down at Number 10 
And they lied and they spun and they lied again 
"Though the charges against us be ever so long 
Yet we’ll never admit we were rash or wrong. 
While we have breath, we spin!” 

Far and few, far and few, are the scruples of Tony Blair ...

(with apologies to Lear)

ND

14 comments:

markc said...

Utterly superb, Nick.

Better than the original!

Mark Wadsworth said...

Scans beautifully, but is it scathing enough?

dearieme said...

Arrest him, charge him, try him, convict him, sentence him, hang him.

Electro-Kevin said...

I always thought Blair was an insane sociopath. What I cannot understand is the people who voted for him - especially those who did time and again and who still think he was a good PM to this day.

I became a blogger having been 'recruited' from Peter Hitchens' site because I was so frustrated that no-one - except Hitchens - seemed to see it and was greatly comforted to find that many people felt the same way.

It would be easy to say he wrecked this country but it was the Tories who created many of the policies and who signed every treaty that enabled him to do it and set us on the course that led to Blairism.

Sebastian Weetabix said...

I always thought Bliar was a piss-poor ham actor with a Messiah complex. As for the war... it was worse than wrong, it was a mistake. To this day I cannot conceive why anyone listened to that speech with the claim about WMDs hitting our boys in Akrotiri in 45 minutes and believed it. I was watching it live on TV at the time & actually burst out laughing, it was so risible. There were former officers from the RAF & the Dropshorts in parliament who must have known it for bollocks and they all meekly went along with it.

Our elite class is not numerate, has no understanding of science or technology, no ability to think critically and forms part of a hive mind which is wrong about everything from global warming & energy policy to the banking system and all points between. We need a system reset.

CityUnslicker said...

brilliant stuff Nick,

SW - I fell for it at the time, thought we needed to root out the cancer in the middle east that was fanning terrorism.

Shame really, we had the troops on the ground in Saudi to do the job, but with hindsight they drove North instead of South.

andrew said...


You wont catch him in a bare faced lie - he is too clever.

However, the documents in the chilcot report do show he was deceitful at best ( many would say he did lie) at he parliamentary debate.

Listening to him on R4 today shows him to be self deluded and clinging on to shreds of partial paragraphs that show others could have done better too - esp the intelligence people - of course he did not show the full reports (that had lots of caveats) to his full cabinet / the opposition.

He also allowed the discussion of the legal advice, but did not provide it in writing

These are things I do when I want to control a meeting - if you don't provide information in advance and control the agenda, you effectively control the discussion content and the decision.

The one that made me chuckle was his claim that things are better than if we had done nothing.
Firstly, he cannot know that
Secondly, given what we know, probably not so
Thirdly and more disingenously, he posed a false binary choice - there are things we could have done other than walking away or invading.
One could point at the Iranian sanctions as an example of success.

It was his underlying view that "the ends justify the means" that reveals him to have a bit of a moral vacuum at his core.

He will never be prosecuted.

The best we can do is to make clear that he will never be honoured or even welcome in the country of his birth.

I think the queen had him spotted as a wrongun a long time ago

Bill Quango MP said...

I never believed the 45 mins nonsense. We couldn't fire our own missiles inside 45 mins.

I remember being asked about the war in the lead up by some very skeptical people.
And I said Tony must have info that he isn't sharing with us. And they asked why did I think that?

"because Tony Blair and his government has ducked every controversial decision that has come his way. Every one. He's been fence sitting on something as trivial as fox hunting for 5 years. He's dodged his promised house of Lords reform. Monarchy review. Military cuts..All these things have been long grassed. The Euro dodge.And much much more.

Why would he do something so unpopular? Mr Popular never does anything unpopular. Not openly, anyway.Why would he attack Iraq when we are already fighting in Afghanistan? We aren't equipped for two wars. Not even the US is really? Not two inland campaigns. Look at Somalia and how badly that went..Nope! he must have knowledge of more 9/11s. Maybe poison gas or dirty bombs or something. He must be scared to death to be even thinking of forcing another war."

well..That turned out to be bollox.

He really did just begin the war because he thought it would make the Middle East safer. And never thought much beyond that.

Steven_L said...

I was young and idealistic when Bush and Blair took us to war. I was dead against it, I thought it was a stupid idea.

But now I can see his point. He says he didn't want to USA to feel alone and act alone, and to turn to the UK as it's number 1 supporter. Since the US military could completely trash the UK in about 48 hours, and since there is diddly squat we could do about it, it is in actually our interests to keep the US electorate on side.

He says that Iraq, with a legitimate elected government has fared better than Baathist Syria since the Arab Spring. He's right. And Obama and Hilary's new policy of doing the bare minimum is hardly making the world a safer place.

He says it was a US-led thing, that they provided 95% of the muscle and that he didn't really have all that much influence on how they went about things. Well I believe him on that one too.

Without Blair the war would have happened anyway, Bush and the people around him were hell bent on it. He believed, and still believes, involving the UK was the right thing to do. Fair enough, I believe him when he says he believes that.

It was the ridiculous credit and house price bubble, mass immigration policy and welfare expansion that put me off his government, not his wars.

Blue Eyes said...

Great work Nick!

My position on this at the time was that I didn't really believe the 45 minute claim, but that surely a British government would not take us to war on a hunch so I trusted that there must be something there that justified it - even if we couldn't see it. I was also much younger than I am now.

When it all began to unravel I realised I had been misled, and will never forgive Blair or myself for that. Once that trust is gone it becomes very easy to lose one's sense of bearings and even believe in some of the conspiracy theories...!

EK people voted Blair in 1997 because they needed a change - and the 1997 manifesto is pretty sensible stuff if you read it now. However, by 2001 and even more extremely by 2005 they had ditched most of their initial position and were just going by incumbency advantage and the disarray that the Tories were in.

A fairly permanent Labour government seemed fairly inevitable, remember. They only got knocked out because the Great Moderation came to a shuddering halt, and then once the slump kicked in everything turned out to have been built on sand. You were totally not alone in hating the Labour government, but it is clear why it kept getting re-elected.

Anyway, Gordon Brown may have turned out to have been one of our best leaders for a long time. He kept us out of the Euro, eventually toppled Blair, set Chilcot going which will lead to a much more sober way of deciding where and when to intervene, left such a bad economic legacy that Cameron and Clegg seemed a better option, made such a pig's ear of the Lisbon Treaty that he got us out of the EU a few years later, and finally left the Labour party in such a mess that it will barely exist by the end of next week.

Not bad for a weird-jawed obsessive from Fife.

Jan said...

I loathed TB from the minute he appeared on the scene. He reminded me of my ex who also turned out to be a lying manipulative b****** who could not be trusted!

I sometimes wonder how different things would have been if John Smith hadn't died so suddenly and if he'd been able to have a shot at becoming PM as everyone expected. I quite admired him as he seemed to have some integrity and I may even have voted Labour if he'd been at the helm.

By the way I think Corbyn's appeal to those who like him is that he also has integrity. He stuck to his views through thick and thin however unpopular. After someone as deceitful as Bliar he makes a refreshing change.

Electro-Kevin said...

Blue - The manifesto was different to what he actually did and people definitely would not have voted for it. It led to us voting the leave the EU a couple of weeks ago - based on the Tory Maastricht Treaty.

Mark Wadsworth said...

I have set up a fun online poll on Chilcot's "revelations" here.

Blue Eyes said...

EK, so you basically agree :)