EX-PM Blair could be made to stand trial for war crimes over the invasion of Iraq, Labour leadership front-runner Jeremy Corbyn has said.
Corbyn correctly said that the 2003 conflict was an ‘illegal war’ and that Blair had some decisions he had to ‘confess’. Asked whether Blair should be tried for war crimes, Corbyn said: ‘If he’s committed a war crime, yes. Everyone who’s committed a war crime should be. I think it was an illegal war. I’m confident about that. Indeed (former UN secretary general) Kofi Annan confirmed it was an illegal war, and therefore he has to explain that.’
Pressed on whether he personally wanted to see Blair put on trial, Corbyn said: ‘I want to see all those that committed war crimes tried for it, and those that made the decisions that went with it.’
Blairite and ex-Home Secretary Alan Johnson has responded by calling from the rooftops to ‘put an end to this madness’, meaning that all and every means can and must be used to prevent Corbyn winning the Labour Party election battle, because of the ‘madness’ of the mass support he is receiving from workers and youth.
He urged those who are eligible to vote to cast it for Yvette Cooper, who, he said, has the ‘inner steel’ to do the job, that is, support Tory austerity measures in the face of mass working class opposition.
The current stand-in leader Harriet Harman, the woman who rescued the Cameron government, when she led Labour to abstain on the notorious Welfare Bill, when it came before the House of Commons, is now on the job of dealing with the ‘madness’.
The right wing are cursing Miliband for bringing in a system where non-party sympathisers could vote in elections for the leadership by paying £3. Miliband was trying to smash the trade union bloc vote by adopting the US Democratic Party system of ‘primaries’ where all general supporters could come along and vote for who should be the Party’s presidential candidate.
With millions on the march against austerity this policy has backfired, approaching the scale of Marie Antoinette’s ‘let them eat cake’ suggestion. Tens of thousands of anti-austerity fighters are now taking part in the ballot. However, ‘witchhunter’ Harriet Harman is now on the job to deal with this ‘madness’. Harman has written to all Labour MPs asking them to check new members and supporters are not trying to skew the party’s leadership contest.
Each MP, and each constituency party has been sent a list of new members from their constituency so they can check for suspicious names. Harman, the acting leader, wants to ensure anyone who does not ‘share Labour’s values’, construed to be the values of US lapdog Blair, is weeded out.
Echoing the state’s secret police, she said: ‘We are policing the integrity of this process.’ Here we have it – the inspirer of the right wing, Blair, is correctly regarded as a ‘war criminal’, while the leader of the opposition to him, Corbyn, is being thrust forward by the ‘madness’ of the working class and the youth, according to the right wing.
Faced with the big issue, whether to serve the British capitalists with a massive austerity programme or remove capitalism to go forward to socialism, the Labour Party is being broken apart. The truth is that Labour reformism has hit the rocks. Even the left Corbyn cannot resolve this crisis in favour of the working class since this requires the organisation of a socialist revolution to put an end to capitalism and go forward to socialism.
The working class is on the march and its first effort has been to hoist and raise up Corbyn onto its shoulders. It will quickly learn that Labour’s high point was from 1945-1951, since when it as been back-pedalling to the point where all of the gains that were made are now under huge threat.
The working class needs a revolutionary party to defend the gains that it has made by organising a socialist revolution to expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in a workers’ government and a workers’ state.
The only party that is prepared to do this is the WRP. Join it today!
