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1. PETITION TONY KNIGHTHOOD GETS HUNDREDS THOUSANDS FULL
2. PETITION TONY KNIGHTHOOD GETS HUNDREDS THOUSANDS TRIAL

PETITION TONY KNIGHTHOOD GETS HUNDREDS THOUSANDS TRIAL

His weasel words are in line with his four-and-a-half-year tenure as leader of the Labour Party, during which he did everything possible to defend the party’s Blairite core.Ĭorbyn’s popular reputation as a “left” was built on his opposition to the Iraq war, in particular his speech to the 2003 protest in London warning that a war “will set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation that will fuel the wars, the conflict, the terrorism, the depression and the misery of future generations” and telling Blair, “Stop now or pay the political price.” He was chair of the Stop the War Coalition from 2011 until taking leadership of the Labour Party in September 2015.ĭuring the leadership election, Corbyn was asked if Blair should stand trial for war crimes and replied, “If he has committed a war crime, yes. This is the closest Corbyn could get to saying nothing without maintaining his by then deafening silence. A co-conspirator with Blair, Hoon’s memoirs were published two months ago and dug out first by the pro-Conservative Daily Mail in the absence of any oppositional Labour angle on the Blair knighthood story. The tweet was not even written in direct reference to Blair’s knighthood, but to an Independent article reporting Blair’s own defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, claiming in his self-serving memoir that he had been told to “burn” legal advice ahead of the Iraq invasion warning of its illegality. “Parliament must never be misled into backing an illegal war again.” “This underlines once more what a disastrous act of aggression the war on Iraq was,” he wrote. Only later that day did former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn publish a tweet in which, unlike even Burgon, he succeeded in not mentioning Blair by name. Even for much of Thursday, the media was reduced to citing one Labour MP who hid behind “speaking on condition of anonymity” to describe Blair as an “untried war criminal”, and a single Twitter comment from Socialist Campaign Group MP Richard Burgon that “it says a lot about what is wrong with our system when after being one of the leading architects of the war on Iraq, Tony Blair, is honoured with a knighthood”.

PETITION TONY KNIGHTHOOD GETS HUNDREDS THOUSANDS FULL

This makes more extraordinary still the fact that it took a full five-days before any figure on the Labour Party’s nominal “left” made any response. The Blairites were so nervous that Starmer was almost alone in mounting a defence of their ideological mentor. Insisting on ITV’s Good Morning Britain that the issue was not “thorny at all” and that Blair “deserves the honour”, he was forced to acknowledge “strong views on the Iraq war” while arguing pathetically that this did not “detract from the fact that Tony Blair was a very successful prime minister of this country”. But he squirmed like a worm on a hook while doing so. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who leads a thoroughly Blairite cabinet, came forward as expected to defend Blair’s knighthood. Many have noted that the grotesque honour was bestowed on Blair in the week that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marked 1,000 days entombed in Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the US and a lifetime in jail for exposing the war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan and Iraq.įamilies of soldiers killed or injured unnecessarily in these bloody military adventures expressed outrage and said they will return military medals if the knighthood goes ahead. Its introduction argues that Blair “should be held accountable for war crimes.” One million people, at the time of writing had signed the petition, “Tony Blair to have his ‘Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter’ rescinded”. The former Labour leader’s knighthood was greeted with a wave of anger and contempt. He left office in 2007 having vastly expanded the role of the private sector in essential public services, encouraged social inequality, trampled over democratic rights and finalised Labour’s transformation into a Tory Party mark two that earned him the praise of Thatcher and the undying hatred of the working class.

Together with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, it marked an explosion of imperialist militarism, centred on the Middle East, and prepared the way for subsequent catastrophic interventions in Libya and Syria.īlair’s domestic record was no less reactionary. The fears expressed by working people were realised in a grotesquely unequal conflict that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, countless maimings, the destruction of whole cities and the dismemberment of Iraqi society. Opposition to the war was massive, with upwards of one-and-a-half million people taking to the streets of London on February 15, 2003, as part of the world’s largest global protest mobilising over 11 million people. Protesters pack London's Whitehall during a march to Hyde Park, to demonstrate against a possible war against Iraq.