How Tony Blair Got Away With His Alleged War Crimes

All very simple when you know how it’s done

Everyone’s favourite silver-haired rogue has been back in the news recently after an announcement that he’s joining the Queen’s inner circle of bezzies. Not content with having sex-offenders in the family, she’s offering stockings, suspenders and other regal leg-based paraphernalia to anyone doing dodgy shit in the early 2000s.

Step forward Tony. What next? The Gillian McKeith foundation for nutritional deviance?

Ex-Prime Ministers are often given knighthoods and bits of Devon for keepsies and it seems Tony ‘Don’t mention the War’ Blair is to be no exception. There’s one problem… almost everyone in the nation hates him. There are child sex offenders in prison who wouldn’t share a cell with him.

That’s how popular the man is.

It’s quite a feat really. Objectively he did more for the average man on the street than most of the soporific twats who pre-dated him and the lunatics who followed, so why is he so reviled?

Don’t mention the war.

I was one of a great number of people who protested the war back in 2003. I was out and about, came face to face with a police horse in Bristol for my sins. I’m allergic to horses so it was genuinely terrifying stuff.

The British public hadn’t gone out and protested like that for a long time. We only come out once a decade or so and we’d just regrouped after the Poll Tax riots.

There was a great strength of feeling in the UK. We felt it then. We feel it now.

Reasons for the war subsequently turned out to be bullshit, fabrication and sham-pokery came as no surprise to most of us. Tony Blair took this country into an illegal war and did so knowing full well we didn’t want it. He did so on the grounds that he could and the implications of his decision were devastating and manifold across the world.

So why hasn’t the murderous twat gone to jail? Glad you asked.

Why hasn’t Tony Blair gone to jail?

The High Court refused to prosecute him because they had nothing to prosecute him with. Simple. There currently is no crime of ‘aggression’ under English law to hold him accountable for his actions.

There is no court in the land that can touch him. There is no offence on the UK statute and, until parliament decides to put it there, there’s not a legal argument to be made. Neat huh?

Given that parliament were crucial in getting the decision to go to war made, the chances of them adding this crime to the books is minimal.

When an Iraqi general attempted to bring a private court case against Tony Blair, the whole thing was laughed out of court. The aim of the case was to attempt to get justice for the millions of victims of the 2003 invasion.

Michael Mansfield QC argued strongly that the international crime of ‘War of Aggression’ had been assimilated into British law after Nuremberg

This was almost successful. Nearly.

After all, what’s the point of having an international law that can’t be prosecuted in the home courts. It makes a mockery of the process of law. Nevertheless, that’s the loophole Blair has been hiding in. He’s a lawyer, he knows the score.

Whether or not another country could prosecute Mr Blair on our behalf remains to be seen. I can’t see any Government responding well to the prosecution of a previous leader for something done whilst in office.

It opens up a whole raft of legal complexities, especially for the inestimable Pffeffel Bohnson, a man so incompetent he doesn’t know whether to lie once, twice or say pfffah to any question he’s asked.

Don’t get me started…

Blair is a living reminder that Governments of Western nations can act with impunity as accountability for their actions isn’t in place. Such luxuries tend not to be exported to other war criminals. Had Iraq won the war (and they were never going to) Blair would’ve been hanged.

I’ll leave you with the words of Imran Khan, the solicitor who brought the failed case to the high court.

“The invasion and subsequent occupation resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals as well as the displacement of over 4 million others who had to seek sanctuary and refuge in another country. Iraq has been left decimated and in a state of chronic instability. Despite all of this, and the clear findings of the Chilcot inquiry which laid bare the conduct of those that should be held to account, the high court has confirmed that there is to be no accountability. Those responsible are to remain unpunished. This is not justice.”

And I’m inclined to agree. The UK is still setting a dangerous precedent, one echoed by the USA and others around the world in a time of great global instability. Justice should be a universal and that should see Blair in jail not on the New Years Honours list.

Some crimes are so serious they cannot be prosecuted. A dangerous message if ever I heard one.

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