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“... by liberals. Liberals didn’t need to show much conviction, at least until it was too late. As Tony Blair put it in his 2005 conference speech: ‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.’The forces that coalesced around the 2016 referendum had been gathering strength ...”

“... had nearly trebled, and the number of degrees had increased by a factor of five. In 1999 Tony Blair vowed that the 33 per cent of school-leavers then in higher education would rise to 50 per cent in the next century, a goal that was reached in 2018.Widening opportunity in education is the noblest of social and political projects. But the cost is ...”

“... behind this grand attempt, as the US and Britain put it, to ‘modernise’ the country. Cherie Blair and Laura Bush said it was a war for women’s liberation. If it had been, it would have been the first in history. We now know what it really was: a crude war of revenge which failed because the occupation strengthened those it sought to destroy. The war ...”

“... At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended by Tony Blair, Jack Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society ...”

“... testimony from defectors, including Saddam’s own son-in-law.’ At Camp David on 7 September, Tony Blair said proof of a genuine nuclear threat had come in ‘the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites’. Saddam had killed his son-in-law Hussein Kamel ...”

“... and permits a president to pardon himself, should we understand the same rule to apply here? If Tony Blair had been charged with selling honours for cash, could he (or John Reid, or Jacqui Smith, or whoever was home secretary at the time) have procured the grant of a pardon in the name of the queen? I can’t think any British lawyer would give an ...”

“... of people. After the United States, which was blamed for propping up the Colonels, Britain and Tony Blair were 17N’s principal targets, for supporting the Nato bombing of Serbia. Curiously enough, as Michael Llewellyn Smith, a former British ambassador, reports in Athens: A Cultural and Literary History, the young ...”

“... of the Regions’, not a few cries of alarm will be raised. The real question, as ever, is what Blair wants. He began at a cracking pace in 1999, by setting up Regional Development Agencies and non-elected Regional Chambers throughout England. Then all went very quiet, and what if anything happens next remains uncertain. Perhaps in this, as in other ...”

“... the behaviour of his predecessor in the run-up to the Iraq War; and the best-known Mark Fisher was Tony Blair’s former arts minister, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central – it had recently been revealed in the local paper that he’d claimed parliamentary expenses for items including a face-painting set, a packet of Fun Chunky Crayons and two ...”

“... tries to reassert control over his own destiny. Like a man to whom he is sometimes compared, Tony Blair, Ferguson could and should have quit a couple of years ago. But both men have come to believe in their own myth, which insists that it is they who made the decisive difference to the success of their own teams, and it is they alone who can keep ...”

“... fulfilling Western interests, than at any time since 1919. ‘We are all internationalists now,’ Tony Blair declared to the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999, in the midst of bombing Serbia. ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society ...”

“... Lady Olga Maitland. Portillo, for his part, has significant support on the Left of the Party. Tony Blair and Charles Kennedy would no doubt prefer Portillo, and at the moment, the Euro remains a real obstacle to Clarke’s leadership, unless the Party can formally agree to differ on Europe, as Labour sensibly did in 1975. Which leaves Portillo as the ...”

“... including terrorist atrocities. Of course, everybody should be tough on terrorism, but to adapt Tony Blair, they should also be tough on the causes of terrorism, and there is little chance of that being achieved. For the main causes of terrorism stem from Israel and Washington. Israel nourishes terrorism by its ruthless oppression of Arabs in Palestine ...”

“... in from Work and Says Where’s My Supper? The Man Who Has Never Made a Bed in His Life’. Even Tony Blair (who grew up in an era when feminism should have had an influence, says Benn) knows where the washing machine is, but is not (Cherie once confessed) ‘intimate’ with it. Occasionally it appears as though Benn’s unspoken wish is for a whole ...”

“... for change; probes the meaning of English and British identity; and looks at the choices facing Tony Blair’. But it’s unreadable and hasty, ‘drafted between May and August 1997 and finalised after the events of September’. Barnett is himself ‘acutely aware of the missing references, the partial arguments and contributions unheeded’, but ...”