Neil Clark

The human commodity

issue 10 March 2007

Have two words ever said so much? President Bush’s unforgettable greeting to the British Prime Minister at the G8 summit in St Petersburg last summer epitomised how the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America had descended into one of complete servility. Can anyone imagine Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher or even John Major being addressed in such a condescending way? Geoffrey Wheatcroft can’t, and in his masterly 150-page polemic describes how under Blair’s calamitous premiership, Britain has ceased to be an independent nation. It’s a depressing story of corruption, personal vanity and mendacity unequalled in our country’s political history.

Blair, the self-proclaimed ‘pretty straight guy’, has presided over ten years of lies, spin and subterfuge, the culmination of which has been participation in the disastrous and deceitful war against Iraq. The warning signs were there from early on: someone who can lie about voting in the House of Commons against fox hunting, is, as Wheatcroft points out, also capable of giving grossly exaggerated and distorted reasons for entering needless and illegal wars.

Blair says things ‘which are not only untrue but that a moment’s conscious reflection would show could not be true’.

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