Tony Blair's final speech to the Labour Conference was a masterpiece of politics: it sounded great and managed to paint an almost unrecognisable picture of the last ten years. If that's how Blair thinks history will remember him then he really is living on a different planet.

For all the achievements Blair has presided over - and there have been some, such as the minimum wage - he has presided over more and worse disasters.

One Blair achievement that he chose not to mention was the 1998 Human Rights Act which incorporated the EU Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Perhaps Blair doesn't want people to remember that his was the only EU government that decided after 911 to derogate from section 5 in order to lock people up indefinitely without trial. And it is his government that is planning to effectively neuter the Act.

Blair mentioned the "Google generation" but somehow forgot to mention his government's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) - the snoopers' charter that abolished online privacy in the UK.

But that's all small stuff compared to the major defining moment of Blair's ten years: his decision to join George W Bush in an illegal invasion of Iraq. The invasion cost the lives of thousands of innocent Iraqis and - according to the UN - torture today in Iraq is worse than under Saddam. The invasion has also made the world more dangerous for the rest of us.

So what did Blair's retrospective say about this most significant and disastrous personal decision of his premiership? Did he apologise? Did he seek to justify? Even explain?

No. He didn't even mention it. The only mention of Iraq was to say that we're there now so we have to stay. That might be true, but the point is that we're there because of him. What sort of leader doesn't think the decision to send the country to war is worth even mentioning?

And, of course, he remains unapologetic about his attacks on our basic civil liberties. He follows his usual approach of describing a problem about which everyone agrees and then relying on the idea that the end justifies the means. That morally reprehensible position is handing victory to the terrorists who want to destroy our way of life.

Perhaps the most frightening - if unsurprising - line in the speech was this:

" We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world"

In other words Blair intends to continue his attempts to redefine "liberty" to meet his own political agenda.

Minitrue would be proud of the way Blair's speech rewrote the history of the last ten years. But there are limits to what even spinmeister Tony can do.

You can't redefine freedom for the sake of political expediency

Blair's failure to realise that shows beyond anything else why he must go. Not next summer, not next May but now.


freedom Tony Blair UK politics ukpolitics