Blair
© Getty Images/Carl CourtFormer British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Seldom far from the centre of events, newly emboldened Tony Blair returns to what he knows best - the avoidable slaughter of the innocents.

Britain's foremost expert on the deaths of children in the service of profits and politics, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, has made a significant intervention in the fierce national controversy over the return of our children to school on June 1. Full disclosure: none of my four school-age children will be returning until the children of the British elites return to their expensive private schools - currently slated for September.

The government had been toiling in its efforts to persuade the British public of the wisdom of such an early return - not least because it applied only to the state sector - with scientists, public health authorities (and the British Medical Association) and teaching trades unions. Several Labour-controlled local authorities, including Liverpool, had outright defied 10 Downing Street and declared they would not be complying.

Enter the Triffid

Drawing on what he called "the evidence" (not to be confused with the bilge he proffered before the British Parliament to successfully persuade the assorted dupes and villains that Iraq was bristling with WMDs and in hot pursuit of nuclear weapons) and the "experts" (not to be confused with the British weapons expert Dr. David Kelly who ended up dead in the woods, as he'd predicted he would, after trying to tip off the British media that Blair was lying about Iraq) Mr. Blair assured us all was well.

From 1998 until 2003, as the only British member of Parliament then travelling to Iraq, I repeatedly tried to interest Mr. Blair in the topic of the mass destruction of Iraqi children by the siege on their country insisted upon most strongly by his own government.

I found him surprisingly unmoved given the religion he wore on his sleeve and the growing number of children in his own family. He affected to believe that the mass slaughter of Iraqi kids (infamously acknowledged by the then-US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, to be at that time half a million children) was exaggerated, even invented.

When I told him that I had actually been at mass funerals, had helped lower the little white coffins into the ground amidst the wailing of their mothers, had actually seen, smelt, even tasted the filth and squalor of the sanctioned Iraqi children's wards, he looked at me with a demonic rictus grin on his face, the wickedness of which has literally never left me.

And of course, together with George W. Bush, he would go on to help kill more such children, with his invasion and occupation of Iraq, the deliberate fanning of the flames of sectarian hatred - which consumed first Iraq, then much of the Middle East. In those flames was forged the madness of ISIS itself.

What I'm trying to say is, that with the possible exception of Henry Kissinger, the oldest living war-criminal, the very last man on Earth I would take advice on the safety of children from would be the Rt Hon Tony Blair PC.

The more he talked of how safe our children would be returning to the killing fields of the coronavirus, the faster I counted the corpses.

It's not that I don't want to hear Tony Blair speak. It's just, as the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle said, I want to hear him speak from the dock at The Hague.
About the Author:
George Galloway was a member of the British Parliament for nearly 30 years. He presents TV and radio shows (including on RT). He is a film-maker, writer and a renowned orator. Follow him on Twitter @georgegalloway