Former UK PM under fire Labour defeat
A senior British politician has blamed former prime minister Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq as a major reason stopping people from voting for the Labour Party.
John Prescott, who served as Blair's deputy prime minister for 10 years, called on his former boss to accept his own responsibility for the fall in support for the Labour Party.
His comments came shortly after Tony Blair warned of what he called “electoral suicide” if Jeremy Corbyn is elected as the new leader of Labour Party.
According to The Independent, Blair said that the Labour Party would lose two more elections if it chose the "old-fashioned leftist platform" of Jeremy Corbyn.
“Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it,” the former prime minister was quoted as saying.
However, Prescott lashed out at his former boss and urged him to “think about the reasons” why the support for the party had plunged.
"Tony, on the doorstep it was Iraq that stopped a lot of people voting for us… I found that absolutely staggering. To use that kind of language is just abuse. The Labour Party is about the heart as well as the head,” he was quoted as saying by the British media.
Many critics say Blair is responsible for the deaths of countless Iraqi people as well as many British soldiers killed in the unpopular US-led invasion of Iraq.
The US and Britain invaded Iraq in violation of international law back in 2003 under the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) allegedly stockpiled by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. No WMDs, however, were ever discovered in Iraq.
Meanwhile, a London-based political commentator believes that Britons have already learned the lesson and will not play into the hands of warmongering politicians like Blair any longer.
“It is very clear that British public is tired of these Zionist wars. It is tired of fake left and fake Labour. And the success of Jeremy Corbyn is probably the most positive sign we see in British politics for decades. It means that there is a support for genuine call for equality, for proper working class politics,” Gilad Atzmon told Press TV’s UK Desk on Friday.
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