The People vs. Tony Blair

An unmade movie

Better never than late? It’s a tough one.

The humble hack baulks at calling our dear leaders prima facie war criminals. Still, someone should have made something similar long ago. Various BBC bigwigs declined, while the crusading cavaliers at Channel 4 sneered at the very notion of being serious.

“There’s nothing worse than the dripping sore of a whining intellectual who complains,” said the boss of More4, explaining why he’d plumped for a satirist to craft mocking fiction about The Trial of Tony Blair. “The lightness of his approach and the comic turn of his pen are really helpful.”

I dare say. But why not lay it all bare instead of just beating about the Bush?

Apart from the government servant who endorsed it, most lawyers agree Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq was illegal.

The Foreign Office expert who resigned in protest said: “An unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression.” That’s what Hitler’s henchmen were hanged for.

But, four years on, there’s no sign of Blair being indicted, apart from in a North London theatre.

Attempts to press charges get nowhere, Parliament hasn’t tried to impeach him and journalists think it’s all old news.

So what does the failure to hold the Prime Minister to account tell us about democracy, the rule of law and the society we live in?

The People vs. Tony Blair examines the case to answer, explains what stops it being heard in court and explores what might be done to ensure that might doesn’t simply make right.

Whether Blair spends his retirement getting rich or doing time, it’s up to us to prevent his successors from committing the same crimes.

London, 19 March 2007

The full proposal is archived here.

Wanted: Loose Change…

…for a Good Cause

Over the past few years I’ve been working with Franny Armstrong, director, among other things, of McLibel; one of 10 documentaries that shook the world, according to the British Film Institute.

Click on the picture above for a synopsis of her latest project. And rest assured it makes more sense on the big screen. It’s all about our collective incapacity, unwillingness, or refusal to change the way we live, even if it’s going to kill us.

“I think people in the future will be angry at us for not thinking to protect the environment,” says one of the stars, the octogenarian Alpine guide Fernand Pareau. “We only thought to profit from it.”

In New Orleans, a lifelong employee of Big Oil agrees. “With our use or misuse of resources the last 100 years or so,” reflects Al Duvernay, who lost most of his possessions to Hurricane Katrina, “I’d probably rename this age something like The Age of Ignorance, The Age of Stupid.”

And there’s worse to come. “If you multiply what happened to a million people living in this area by the billions on this planet,” he warns, “it’s gonna be ugly.”

In India, meanwhile, entrepreneur Jeh Wahdia is launching another airline. “Everyone has a higher purpose,” he says, and his is to “end poverty in our country in my lifetime.” To Jeh, that means offering flights for one rupee and putting hundreds of millions more people on planes, just as the campaign to ground them gathers momentum.