No matter just how toxic Tony Blair remains for some people, at least he has given many of us the confidence to actually say what we think rather than beat about the bush, moderating what we really think in the face of a wall of noise from the hard right and the hard left. Since last year’s EU referendum, people of a more centrist disposition have laid low and kept our heads down, as the shrill voices from the extremes have dominated the airwaves. No more.
The election of President Donald Trump, hot on the heels of the decision of the British people to leave Europe, has left the world standing at the abyss. I am not exaggerating when I say that Donald Trump presents a clear and present danger to everything we stand for, especially free speech.
In America, Trump has launched a fully frontal assault on the media in an extraordinary manner, similar, I’m afraid, to Nazi Germany. In our country, liars and hypocrites like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, careerist, opportunist and establishment figures both, try to thwart and block debate. The national newspapers either don’t report on anything they don’t like or distort it. And what they really hate is someone with the wealth and experience of Tony Blair being able to project a different, more centrist view.
It doesn’t matter if Blair is right or wrong, although I happen to think he is bang on the money over Europe. He has the courage to say out loud what many of us have been saying in private, cowering in the background, ever since we voted to leave Europe. I, for one, feel empowered to actually say what I think about this, and virtually anything else. I no longer feel obliged to temper my views because “we must respect the decision of the British electorate to leave Europe”, even though we know that that binary decision will inflict massive damage to our country.
I am in no doubt that Trump is completely unhinged. Not mentally ill, you understand, just a narcissistic egomaniacal control freak quite unsuited to the highest political office in the world, having had no political experience whatsoever. I hope that Blair’s EU intervention gives confidence to the American people in general and the American media in particular to stand up for freedom in the face of a totalitarian onslaught from the political right, which I suspect will eventually turn up wholesale unsavoury links with Russia and eventually sink Donald Trump.
We need to stand up and challenge the bullies and racists of Ukip and the hardline right of the Tory party to and reassert our belief in British values of fairness and justice.
There will be implications, a price to be paid, for standing up to be counted and that will be abuse and ridicule from the media. Voices like JK Rowling and Gary Lineker have stood up to the bullies and have been frightfully abused and you know what? They don’t give a shit. The Sun and Mail want Lineker sacked from the BBC for having expressed his personal views on social networks. Just imagine, unelected tyrants like Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch trying to sack people from their jobs for not agreeing with them. This is the road to perdition.
We are not talking about Iraq here, so please stop going on and on about it when Tony Blair is offering the only available intelligent and articulate view on leaving the EU. And when the opposition includes the aforementioned Murdoch, Dacre, Ian Fucking Duncan Smith, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, you surely know Blair is onto something.
