Barbara's Blog

UNIMPRES'D BY BLAIR

16-07-2009

Could Tony Blair be the first President of Europe? Apparently so - and Barbara Panvel ain't impressed.

The Stirrer’s editor darkened my day on Thursday with the news on Talksport that the amazing proposal for Tony Blair to be EU president has not only been resurrected but given government approval.

At present, the EU council presidency rotates between the leaders of each member state every six months. The new role would probably have a five-year term and would see the president chairing meetings of the EU council, the body comprised of the leaders of member states.

Tony Blair has been officially backed by the government to become president of Europe.

Unelected Europe minister, Baroness Glenys Kinnock, told journalists in Strasbourg that the entire government fully supported Mr Blair's "candidature” for the post of president of the European Council.

The Conservatives warned that it would be undemocratic to appoint a new European Council president before the Lisbon Treaty was ratified.

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said "Any holder is likely to try to centralise power for themselves in Brussels and dominate national foreign policies. In the hands of an operator as ambitious as Tony Blair, that is a near certainty. He should be let nowhere near the job."

SNP MEP Ian Hudghton said: "[Tony Blair] will never be able to escape his reputation as a warmonger, nor his role in the illegal invasion of Iraq. That alone should disqualify him from a position like this."

Even his biographer who wholeheartedly approved the proposal said, when questioned by Adrian Goldberg on the radio phone-in, “his foreign policy until Iraq was successful and principled”.

The Iraq war is by far the most serious consequence of Blair’s years of misrule: Martin Bell’s verdict describes Blair as a man who sent the armed forces to war on the basis of a grand self-deception, using dossiers doctored to read pre-programmed conclusions; it was a form of corruption - of thought, of language and of the political process.

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