Tony Blair: Let There be no Easy Way Out for Him
Sean Gabb at The Libertarian Enterprise - on the malfeasance of the British Prime Minister. [tle]
I have consistently loathed Mr Blair ever since I first set eyes on him back in 1994. I knew then he represented everything low and corrupt in modern England. My loathing at times during the Iraq War reached levels I had never expected to feel. I prayed for his resignation after that war. I longed for his disgrace and even some formal punishment. But I am now content to see him still in office, still squirming and grimacing as blow after blow brings him closer to the inevitable end of his political career.
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His procedural changes have abolished the double jeopardy rule and allowed detention without charge and punishment without conviction, and greatly increased the inquisitorial powers of the State. Where substantive freedoms are concerned, he has enacted the modern equivalent of the sedition laws that were used to such notorious effect during the French Wars. He has thereby curbed our rights to speak and publish as we please. Leaving aside the suppression of debate on race and immigration and of defending those uses of political violence the authorities choose currently not to like, it seems to be a crime now to recite the names of our war dead beside the Cenotaph and to wear shirts with messages insulting to the Prime Minister. He has taken away our right to keep and bear arms for defence. He has subjected us to the petty but still vexatious control of officials of whom we must ask permission before we can play music in our gardens, or extend a ring main in our homes. He has created in the past nine years a thousand new criminal offences. He has made true for us our old sneer at the Germans--that whatever is not compulsory is illegal.
