True faith

The news that Tony Blair is going to devote the rest of his life to uniting faiths by setting up a foundation is bound to cause widespread nausea. "His foundation will attempt to bring religions together to tackle global issues such as the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals, which range from eradicating extreme poverty to ensuring environmental sustainability"

He aims to unite all faiths - well hasn't he already done that? Christians, Jews, Muslims Hindus Buddhists and atheists all hate him.

"Mr Blair, who recently converted to Catholicism, said: "Faith is part of our future, and faith and the values it brings with it are an essential part of making globalisation work." His foundation will attempt to bring religions together to tackle global issues such as the UN's eight Millennium Development Goals, which range from eradicating extreme poverty to ensuring environmental sustainability."

So the world's problems only exist because we lack faith. If we only, you know, believed then globalisation would work. Well it seems to me that globalisation has worked. The rich have got fantastically richer and the poor are starving in the streets. Why does religion have to figure in the story unless it's meant to just play the traditional role of giving succour and keeping people quiet whilst they die conveniently and quietly?

It doesn't even work on its own terms - the rich can enter heaven as easily as a camel get through the eye of a needle - with Blair pocketing over four million quid for his book deal, being responsible for untold deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and countless millions for his boardroom jobs and lecture tours - who the hell is he to preach morality to the rest of us?

Finally - eradicating "extreme poverty" - that's a bit disingenuous isn't it really. Those in extreme poverty are those with absolutely nothing - not even the two dollars a day a billion or so people eke out a living on. Just making sure the former have just enough to starve to death over a slightly longer time period doesn't make the world any better. What an ambitious thing to believe in.

But all political histories end in failure - that Blair's was a permananet failure doesn't change that. Wanker.