Tony Blair’s autocratic style of government was savaged yesterday by Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary.

Lord Butler, who led the inquiry into intelligence failures on the Iraq war that largely exonerated the Prime Minister, said the Blair Government was guilty of “too much emphasis on selling” its own policies, “too much central control” and too little cabinet discussion.

He accused the Prime Minister of presiding over “bad government in this country” with too many “bad Bills”, and a “huge amount of regulation”.
(Source: The Independent)

This is, of course, way too little, way too late. Certainly far too late for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered as a result of Blair’s collusion with Bush. Too little in that Butler had a chance to nail the PM in the inquiry he ran but he pressed the ‘whitewash’ button instead. What’s changed between then and now? If he’s condemning Blair now for being autocratic and anti-democratic, was he all sweetness and light when he ignored both his own party and the wishes of millions of British citizens?

I suppose I should be leaping on this morsel gleefully, anything that helps to reveal that we have a monster in No. 10 is a plus, after all.

But everyday, there are more corpses in Iraq, “liberated” by US and UK forces. Britain is now in league with a government whose army shoots wounded, unarmed civilians. A government that kidnaps children and holds them in illegal camps. A government that routinely tortures prisoners of war and sees nothing wrong in that horror. Butcher Blair bulldozed that support of Bush’s regime into place. He manipulated, obfuscated and downright lied in order to better serve Bush’s PNAC agenda.

And the people with power around Blair, the New Labour aristos and supposed checks like Butler closed ranks around him and protected him, just when their moral duty was to expose his evil.