www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012 ... sfeed=true Blair admits that it's "unlikely to happen" although he would do it, but is he being too pessimistic? If Blair put himself forwards for the next by election, and then challenged Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership, I am pretty confident he would win. If Blair was leader of the Labour party at the next election, he would win outright. He's streets ahead of Cameron, Ed Miliband and Clegg and I for one would welcome him back into Downing Street. I've lived under five PMs and only under one of them did Britain become a better place. Come on Mr Blair, the UK needs you.

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012 ... sfeed=true Blair admits that it's "unlikely to happen" although he would do it, but is he being too pessimistic? If Blair put himself forwards for the next by election, and then challenged Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership, I am pretty confident he would win. If Blair was leader of the Labour party at the next election, he would win outright. He's streets ahead of Cameron, Ed Miliband and Clegg and I for one would welcome him back into Downing Street. I've lived under five PMs and only under one of them did Britain become a better place. Come on Mr Blair, the UK needs you.

Wouldn't he have to denounce his Catholicism?

He's more likely to take over from Cameron than Millie.

No.

Would he have to denounce being a t0sspot?

Hardly. It appears to be the primary qualification for being PM.

Time spent at the Hague, with his old mate Dubya, first.

He could drop in on the way back from enriching himself even more by helping a despotic government in Kazakhstan.

apparently he wanted to go and pay his respects to Gadaffi, but he's too busy giving Syria foreign affairs advice.

Correct answer.

Makes a change from ganging up with Murdoch to find ways to justify his and his mate's religious war in Iraq.

is there a single high ranking politician in the UK that has any integrity, of any party?

Come off it Minty. He had WMD. Was harbouring the 9/11 plotting types, and was responsible for the murder of a trillion Kurds!

He would never win a Labout leadership election so it ain't going to happen.



I would say he is no worse than Cameron and Clegg which isn't saying much as I doubt he would undo much of the mess these two are making especially the NHS changes and he is big on faith schools and academies. It would be no change on the crucial policies of health and education IMO. As to Milliband his main problem is IMO one of perception as I do genuinely think he and Cruddas are trying to come up with a different way of doing things.



That is quite a scary thought in a way as I am sure that would appeal to many including the right wing press and those who see themselves a "one nation" Tories. It has about as much chance of flying as him getting back to be leader of the Labour Party though given it seems the right wing of the Tory party see Cameron as Blair MkII anyway and don't like that at all.

Not a lot that I can think of.

Still, Blair was just a Tory by another name – continued what Thatcher had started. Paved the way for this lot.

The utter disaster that is PFI, for instance. Dreamed up by the Tories, given a big kick by Blair, now seeing health trusts go bust, which will mean that this lot can sell it off so that their mates can make fat profits from health.

As Dr Phil Hammond tweeted yesterday, there are already examples of private healthcare companies giving patients money to go back to the NHS for cancer care, rather than it cost the private company loads of money.

Immoral scum, the lot of them.

And yet Bob Diamond will get off, with a fortune that will mean he never has to worry about anything – and the disabled person down the street will be vilified as a scrounger who is harming the country.

And there are plenty of cretins who are all too ready to believe this sort of drivel.

You'll be confusing the fook out of some of the lesser well aware types on here. (no banana split for guessing who). The one's who increduously still believe that being the leader of the Labour Party means you have to be a socialist.....Doesn't it?

There is another side to that, though.

The likes of Murdoch helped to ensure that anyone who was even close to being a socialist had little chance of electoral success without their backing.

There's a reason that many in the country even now still believe that there is 'no alternative' to austerity – even though history has shown us, time and time again, that austerity does not work.

I was at a conference on economics the other day. Off the top of my head, even the IMF, looking at around 170 (IIRC without my notes) austerity packages in the last 35-40 years – concluded that not a one has worked.

Let's just reiterate that, because it's important: austerity is not working. Austerity does not work.

Yet the government gets away with pursuing this path (for ideological and greedy reasons) and it is getting away with it far more easily than in other European countries, because the bulk of the people believe what the bulk of the media tells them.

Apathy/UK Plc.

Aye. And it's not new either. There are reasons nothing much happened over here in 1848.

Blair would never get back in, even if he seriously wanted to. His name has become toxic over the last few years regardless of how good he actually was.

People are going to remember him for illegal wars, spin, 'Bliar' and cosying up to Murdoch before they remember him leading a country that had a good, if not solid, economic base.

It was pretty much as it is now – a country where the economy is out of balance, with something like 75% of it dependent on the service sector.

Now Blair didn't start that process, but he did continue it. He didn't do anything to deal with the housing issue, which in part helped provide the fuel for the crisis. And he did do things like push forward with Tory ideas like PFI.

PFI is a minor issue Minty, you know that. In comparison to the state of the countries finances, it is a small drop in the ocean.

I'm not one for blaming Brown, or even Cuddly Dave, for the state of the country/Europe/world's economies, that finger can still be pointed at bankers, but Blair would be still seen to be at the root of it all when the Tory party and it's media lackeys have finished pointing their fingers.

I'm not sure how pfi works. But, it a health trust is bust surely one solution to be considered ought to be to let the Trust go bust and the private investors lose out (I suspect HMG guaranteed the deals though).

Yup, it was described as a copper bottom guarantee when the story broke earlier in the week.

No. It's not. It's far from it. Not when you've got hospital trusts going bust because of the charges levied by the private companies that own the building etc. And that is what is about to happen.

But it's okay – the private sector will be able to step in and run hospitals for profit.

This is only a 'minor' issue, Scooter, if the NHS is a minor issue.