The Hindu Business Line : Blair scare

THE Labour Party in the UK which, in the early stages of the current campaign for the general election to be held on May 5, seemed sure of a third term under the leadership of the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, is running scared.

It has begun putting up panicky posters pleading for a massive turnout of all Labour Party voters at the polling centres, since "just one in ten Labour voters failing to vote will mean a victory for the Conservative Party"! How did this perceived slide in electoral fortunes come about?

The reason is that both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have been successful in making Mr Blair's intellectual and professional "integrity" itself the main issue, deflecting attention away from the bread-and-butter stuff that is the staple of such elections.

The person who has handed this opportunity on a platter to them is none other than Mr Blair himself.

At the heart of the grave questions raised over his integrity is his manner of handling the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and the apparent want of honesty and transparency in taking Parliament and the people into confidence for dragooning the country, as an appendage of the US, into what may well be an illegal war that has cost so much in money and human lives.

Already the false intelligence dossiers over Iraq's non-existent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, touted as the decisive ground for war, had cast a dark shadow on the trustworthiness of the Blair Government.

Now, revelations in the media have confirmed its deviousness.

The most damaging has been the publication of the detailed advice of the Attorney General given a few months before the war questioning its legality and the record of agreement of Mr Blair with the US President, Mr George Bush in 2002 to bring about a "regime change" in Iraq, which the Attorney-General had subsequently and pointedly warned to be an inadmissible ground for war under international law.

The news that the top law officer was arm-twisted to change his advice and justify the war has only served to inflame public opinion further.

There is one consolation in all this for us in India: Politics in the mother of democracies is no less shady and shabby than here or elsewhere.

B. S. Raghavan

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