Bush might have been hated and so was Blair at the end, but at least they were hated because they stuck to their guns and weren't afraid of making tough decisions. It is easy to sit back and apologise for everything, and play the appeasement game. One wonders whY the legacy of Neville Chamberlain is not better remembered.
> implying the Conservative party would have supported military sanctions against Germany in the 1930s, not least as most (remilitarization of the Rhineland, for example) were revocations of frankly draconian Versailles policies
> implying we had the cash to rearm
> implying Chamberlain was the father of appeasement (it was David Lloyd George back in 1919)
> implying Chamberlain
wasn't the father of rearmament (in 1930, the RAF had a whopping twelve planes. Who, exactly, ordered more built despite the economic difficulties?)
> implying Britain had the state machinery pre-war to even
tax enough to rebuild the army
> implying we hadn't enough troubles keeping even the bloody Singapore base going
> implying Churchill wasn't one of the work Exchequers in British history, and that his gold standard fetish didn't prompt the General Strike of 1926.
That crippled the industrial base.
And therefore slowed rearmament.
> implying his 'hard decisions' post-war (r.e. the empire) weren't costly and disastrous adventures
> implying that the decisions politicians have to make are actually quite easy, and that things like circumstance, economic limitations and good ol' pragmatics aren't anything to worry about.
See what I'm getting at?
Also, I like the idea that Blair wasn't a flimsy popularist obsessed with his 'legacy', a bland, blank cipher of a man who couldn't bear to be anything but an object of public adoration. I'll have to write that one down some time.