Blair is no repentant liberal

The Financial Times leader today remarks that: “Blair made many mistakes. To be fair, he admits to some in the book: the u-turns on health; curtailments of personal liberty.”

The FT’s right on the health point, but does Blair admit that he was wrong on civil liberties in his memoir? I’ve  only read the released extracts so far, but I’ve not come across much regret. The very opposite in fact.

Here’s Blair on ID cards: “I could see all the practical problems. I could envisage that it might take time. The civil liberties argument I thought a little absurd, I confess – many well-functioning democracies have identity cards, and the information stored is less than most supermarkets have.”

He also mocks the Tories’ opposition to Asbos saying “they were supposed to be the party of law and order”.

Not that Blair likes to think of himself as authoritarian. “Except on law and order, I am by instinct a liberal”, he writes. Which strikes me as a bit like saying “except on that ’son of God’ stuff, I am by instinct a Christian”.

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• MC Miker G

  His comments on fox-hunting were the last nail in the coffin for me, and, I suspect, for many others. His u-turn on the issue seems to have been prompted by the fact that enacting the legislation was a real hassle (diddums) and his realisation that it “wasn’t just toffs” who hunted foxes. No consideration to the fact that most people who oppose fox-hunting simply abhor the cruelty, whether it’s committed by princes or paupers; just retrograde rubbish about the class war.

  I was massively hopeful about the future in 1997; far from it now. Blair’s legacy is a mean-spirited, NIMBY, minority-hating, low-achieving Daily Mail-reading country. And I haven’t even started on the hypocrisy of him calling himself a “Christian” and being this country’s biggest warmonger since Palmerston. I hope that the rest of his hair falls out quickly, and that he dies a lonely man.

• http://www.rulehibernia.com Marcus Aurelius

  More and harsher penalties does not equate to a superior stance on law and order. Blair’s mockery of asbo’s is not firmly rooted in facts.

• http://www.facebook.com/rhitchings1 Richard Hitchings

  Hes just totally insane