The Long Read: In Defence of Tony Blair.

When it comes to Tony Blair, there’s hardly a person left of my generation who doesn’t know how to get a cheap laugh at the expense of, or regurgitate a half-baked smear against, the former prime minister. Whether it was his decision to ally ourselves firmly with the United States after 9/11, to force the grisly Taliban from power in Afghanistan, or liberate Iraq from the blood-soaked grip of Saddam Hussein, everyone (including many in the Labour Party) has their favourite quip, factoid or claim to malign the man who won three general elections in a row.

I have my own criticisms of Tony Blair, but his intervention in the Brexit debacle yesterday was a powerful reminder of what we had in the former prime minister, and what we so sorely miss now, both in the Labour Party and the United Kingdom.

What ever else one thinks of him, in Tony Blair we had a prime minister who was an internationalist. He knew that Britain could be a close ally of the US and a constructive and positive partner of the EU. He also firmly believed that one role Britain would have in the post-Cold War world would be one of steadfast anti-totalitarianism. Despite the childish accusation of being a “poodle” to President Bush (an insult tinged with the anti-American xenophobia that so often informs and motivates the dislike of him), it’s as important to remember as it is easily forgotten that Tony Blair was taking Britain to war against totalitarianism long before George Bush was even a candidate for president.

Blair had watched the abysmal reaction of John Major to the full-scale revival of concentration camps, death squads and genocide in Europe in the break-up of Yugoslavia. This was the insane attempt by the Serbian regime to annihilate Europe’s oldest Muslim minority, and annex Bosnia. The long-awaited intervention by the Western powers came too late for many thousands of people in Sarajevo and Srebrenica (an intervention that was opposed by Jeremy Corbyn and was in many ways the birth of the contemptible “anti-war” movement of today).

When it came to Slobodan Milosevic’s second attempt to destroy an ethnic minority on the continent in Kosovo in 1999, Mr Blair decided that this time there would be a much tougher response from British social-democracy. This time swift and effective action was taken and an Anglo-American-led NATO force repelled the Serbian aggressors. This action not only saved Kosovo from annexation, but helped bring down Mr. Milosevic’s grotesque regime and eventually put him in the dock.

This is not the action of a poodle.

Not long after this victory, Tony Blair gave one of the most important speeches of the post-1989 epoch given by any Western leader. He told an audience in Chicago in 1999 that, while the fight against Slobodan Milosevic was over, the international community still had an inescapable confrontation with another aggressive, totalitarian dictatorship: that of Saddam Hussein. I stress again that this all took place before George Bush had even appeared on the radar of the average British voter.

This was followed by what I submit was Mr. Blair’s finest, and perhaps least well-known, moment in office. In 2000 the capital of the former British colony of Sierra Leone faced being over-run by Charles Taylor’s psychopathic, rampaging gang operating out of Liberia. As the former colonial power, Britain was asked by the UN to oversee the evacuation of foreign nationals from the country. Tony Blair promptly dispatched a force led by the gallant Brigadier David Richards to evacuate British and other European nationals in Freetown. Brigadier Richards then made an appeal to London: if he could be given more time, he could not only secure the capital, but halt and repulse the invasion. Mr. Blair’s government approved the operation. That Sierra Leone was saved from massacre by a British intervention, and Charles Taylor is currently serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity is to the enormous credit of both now-General Richards and Tony Blair.

That same spirit of international responsibility to not only know an enemy when you saw one, but to assume the even heavier responsibility of going to war against it to defend civilisation, had its most acute test following the morning of September 11th, 2001. The consequences of that direct attack on civilisation by the forces of barbarism are well-known, but I will just repeat what Tony Blair told the people of the United States when they were still reeling from that attack, and were no doubt wondering who their friends were:

“America: We were with you at the first; we will stay with you to the last.”

For this spirit of solidarity and fraternity, Tony Blair has never been forgiven by the forces of reaction, on both the right and the left.

So here we have a prime minister who knew how to be a friend to the United States. Who knew a crisis when he saw one. Who was not afraid to take the fight to the forces of reaction and genocide. But there was something else about Tony Blair that made him perhaps unique in modern British political history: he was as comfortable in Paris as he was in Washington. He spoke French and enjoyed holidays in Europe, and could be a good friend to an American president of either party. To him the Anglo-American alliance was not something to be maintained at the expense of our commitment to the European Union.

This comes back to my original thesis: that in him we had an internationalist prime minister who embodied so many of the values and traditions that have helped shape the modern Labour Party. He was a prime minister who led a Britain that confidently looked outwards, and did its best to welcome those from Europe and abroad who wanted to make Britain their home. Britain would longer be beholden to the hysterically paranoid and suspicious anti-European forces that had done their best to sabotage the nascent European community of nations. We would be not just a partner, but a friend of Europe and of the EU.

Contrast this with the mendacious opportunist who leads Labour now, who first did everything he could to avoid keeping Britain in the EU, and is now doing all he can to support the government’s campaign to take us out as quickly as possible. Jeremy Corbyn is an advocate of a closed-shop Labour Party, a pseudo-socialist UKIP, as hostile to the United States as it is detached from European cooperation. Instead of attacking the nativist forces that are taking this country into the abyss, he is transforming Labour into an extension of the government. Instead of appealing to open, pluralist, internationalist-minded voters, he is chasing the votes of the resentful, suspicious xenophobes who have wrenched this country out of the European family of nations because they took a look at Nigel Farage’s ludicrous fringe group and decided they had their best interests at heart.

For many, the cheap laugh and the easy line will do when it comes to Tony Blair, and he will probably have to tolerate this for the rest of his life. But for some, it may become more and more apparent that he is exactly the type of person the Labour Party needs right now and, who knows, who might even have been the right person to keep Britain in the EU in the first place.