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Happy Birthday Tony Blair |
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It’s Tony Blair’s birthday today and so I thought I’d go see what he’s been getting up to since knowing when to leave the party!
Gordon Brown recons he has been saving the world, I think the rest of us think he might be slightly deluded and actually is simply the last man at the party, it’s 5 am in the morning and he should really go home and leave some grownups to tidy up the mess he and his mates have caused. Tony was at the party but he knew when to leave, before midnight, so he could get a good night’s sleep and crack on with some other great missions. Do you know he shares his birthday with a couple of Popes, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and George Clooney. Perhaps George could play Tony in a movie entitled... “Knowing when to leave the Party!” Actions speak louder than words and Tony is certainly busying himself around the planet trying to make the world a better place. I like the initiative he is taking with the Interfaith Youth Core through the Tony Blair Foundation. Sounds like a real positive way to get people of all faiths respecting each other. I have lifted the following paragraphs from his website and linked through to the full stories. Enjoy and well done Tony Blair, happy birthday... Ten UK Faith Fellows announced to help deliver Millennium Development Goals The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, working in partnership with the Interfaith Youth Core, is delighted to announce the ten exceptional young people who have been selected in the UK to take part in the young leadership programme which has been established to bring people of different faiths together to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and in particular, the scourge of malaria. They are five Christians, three Muslims and two Jews from all over the UK: Leicester, London, Liverpool, Middlesex, Bradford, Birmingham, Belfast and County Antrim. Working in interfaith pairs, they will reach up to tens of thousands of people of faith through outreach activity, informing them about the devastating impact of malaria and the opportunities open to faith communities to work together to save millions of lives. They are being hosted by Blackburn Cathedral in Lancashire, St. Philips Centre in Leicester, the Christian Muslim Forum and Tzedek and the Jewish Social Action Hub in London who will help them make contact and work with local faith communities. http://tonyblairoffice.org/2009/04/ten-uk-faith-fellows-announced.html Helping Sierra Leone reduce poverty and deliver growth Africa may have escaped the initial shock of the global financial crisis, but it is not being spared from its knock-on effects. Foreign investment is drying up, remittances are down, and NGOs are struggling to raise funds. Charity is not a viable path to development at the best of times, but that is even more true today. Nervous investors and cash-strapped donors alike are going to be expecting a lot more for their money. The developing countries that weather the economic storm most successfully will be those that have a positive, coherent and ambitious vision for the future, and can show they are serious about implementing it. Sierra Leone, which I am visiting this week and where a team from my Africa Governance Initiative is helping to attract investment and strengthen the capacity of the government, is one such country. http://tonyblairoffice.org/2009/04/promoting-sierra-leone.html Tony Blair speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs It is almost ten years to the day that I stood in this city and gave an address at the height of the Kosovo crisis. In that speech, I set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention, including if necessary military intervention, not only when a nation's interests are directly engaged; but also where there exists a humanitarian crisis or gross oppression of a civilian population. It was a speech that argued strongly for an active and engaged foreign policy, not a reactive or isolationist one: better to intervene than to leave well alone. Be bold, adventurous even in what we can achieve. ... My argument is that the case for the doctrine I advocated ten years ago, remains as strong now as it was then; and that what has really changed is the context in which the doctrine has to be applied. The struggle in which we are joined today is profound in its danger; requires engagement of a different and more comprehensive kind; and can only be won by the long haul. The context therefore is much tougher. But the principle is the same. http://tonyblairoffice.org/2009/04/tony-blair-speech-to-chicago-c.html Q&A: Tony Blair on restarting the Mideast Peace Process In between bites of an orange on a balcony in the fabled American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, Tony Blair, ex-British Prime Minister and current mediator for the Quartet - the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations - in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, spoke candidly with TIME's Jerusalem bureau chief Tim McGirk about the obstacles to peace. Earlier, Blair had met with Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish new Israeli premier, who says he will keep talking peace but left open the question of whether Israel would accept a Palestinian state. "One thing I learned," says Blair, "is that you simply just don't give up." TIME: How much longer do you expect to keep shuttling to the Middle East? Blair: [Laughing] As long as it takes. People keep saying this to me as if I were going to bunk off at any point. I knew this would be extremely difficult. But I don't give up on these things. I also think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is of fundamental importance to the whole struggle going on in the Islamic world. That isn't to say that its cause is the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, but its resolution would be a major part to solving it. If this thing could be put on a better and different path, it would change the whole dynamic within Islam. http://tonyblairoffice.org/2009/04/qa-tony-blair-on-restarting-th.html Helping Sierra Leone reduce poverty and deliver growth Africa may have escaped the initial shock of the global financial crisis, but it is not being spared from its knock-on effects. Foreign investment is drying up, remittances are down, and NGOs are struggling to raise funds. Charity is not a viable path to development at the best of times, but that is even more true today. Nervous investors and cash-strapped donors alike are going to be expecting a lot more for their money. The developing countries that weather the economic storm most successfully will be those that have a positive, coherent and ambitious vision for the future, and can show they are serious about implementing it. Sierra Leone, which I am visiting this week and where a team from my Africa Governance Initiative is helping to attract investment and strengthen the capacity of the government, is one such country. http://tonyblairoffice.org/2009/04/promoting-sierra-leone.html |
