Tony Blair

“Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number!/Shake your chains to earth, like dew/Which in sleep had fall’n on you/Ye are many —they are few.”

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” from 1819 may seem unattainable. I don’t think so.

Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a British government spreadsheet.

Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam
By Mark Curtis
352 pages (pb), Serpent's Tail, 2010.

In Tony Blair's new memoir, A Journey, the former British prime minister says one of his biggest regrets is introducing the Freedom of Information Act, because journalists have used it “as a weapon”.

Despite carefully-crafted appearances to the contrary, projects like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) are no solution to the problems that confront the colonised “developing” world.

Endemic corruption, environmentally unsustainable development and spiralling income inequality are inseparable from the process of capitalist global expansion, which EITI and other corporate-funded front organisations only serve to legitimise.

Tony Blair must be prosecuted, not indulged like his mentor Peter Mandelson. Both have produced self-serving memoirs for which they have been paid fortunes. Blair’s will appear next month and earn him £4.6 million.

“Tony Blair today cancelled a second event scheduled to mark the launch of his memoirs after anti-war campaigners prepared to mount a protest against him …

“The decision comes just days after Blair announced he was cancelling a signing session due to be held at the Waterstone's book store in London's Piccadilly this lunchtime, amid concerns over planned protests …

“A book signing in Dublin a few days earlier had seen eggs and shoes hurled by protesters, with one individual attempting to make a citizen’s arrest.”

— September 8 Guardian.

“Tony Blair's autobiography, A Journey, is being subversively moved to crime sections in book shops by members of a Facebook protest group.

“Over 10,000 Facebook members have joined the group ‘Subversively move Tony Blair’s memoirs to the crime section in book shops’ and have been posting photos of them doing so …

“The Facebook group description said: ‘Make book shops think twice about where they categorise our generation’s greatest war criminal.’”

— September 8 Webusers.co.uk.