Bless 'im

No actual news today as Blair's made a speech at the “Labour” party conference and the Beeb is thus obliged to cover the news ticker with dead-pan statements like “Blair says we must not surrender to propaganda” for the next twenty-four hours. For those well-balanced individuals who managed to avoid the whole thing, he went on a lot about the sort of freedom he believed in, which is apparently the freedom of Daily Mail readers to see vicious punishments meted out to anyone they suspect of having done anything.

He also explained why this whole war on terror thing is in fact a fight against those who hate our freedoms and nothing to do with foreign policy because 9/11 happened before we went into Iraq. Now while this does show a more sophisticated grasp of the chronology than George Bush professes to have (see earlier post), I'm not sure I really buy into his apparent suggestion that the Middle East was a totally blank canvas from a foreign policy point of view throughout the twentieth century.