Tony Blair
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 2, 1997 to June 27, 2007.
Sovereignty rests with me as an English MP and that's the way it will stay.
I don't like it, to be honest, when politicians make a big thing of their religious beliefs, so I don't make a big thing of it.
As I have said throughout, I have no doubt that they will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
We have no plans to increase tax at all.
Somebody who did it first and perhaps did it better than I will do. He has been an example for so many people around the world of what dedicated leadership can accomplish.
Do I know I'm right? Judgements aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I'm like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe.
We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few years–contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence–Saddam decided unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.
I want to see a publicly-owned railway, publicly accountable.
Yeah, Blair, what are you doin'?
A new dawn has broken, has it not?
Whatever the dangers of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are far, far greater.
Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I tell you: education, education and education. We are 35th in the world league of education standards – 35th. At every level, radical improvement and reform.
If there are further steps to European integration, the people should have their say at a general election or in a referendum.
I was born in 1953, a child of the Cold War era, raised amid the constant fear of a conflict with the potential to destroy humanity. Whatever other dangers may exist, no such fear exists today. Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war. That is a prize beyond value.
Isn't it extraordinary that the Prime Minister of our country can't even urge his Party to back his own position. Weak! Weak! Weak!
For the moment, let me say this: Saddam Hussein's regime is despicable, he is developing weapons of mass destruction, and we cannot leave him doing so unchecked. He is a threat to his own people and to the region and, if allowed to develop these weapons, a threat to us also.
Some may belittle politics but we who are engaged in it know that it is where people stand tall. Although I know that it has many harsh contentions, it is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. If it is, on occasions, the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes. I wish everyone, friend or foe, well. That is that. The end.
He was the future, once...
A day like today is not a day for, sort of, soundbites, really - we can leave those at home - but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders, I really do.
In the early days of his government, Tony Blair liked to paraphrase the famous joke from Monty Python's Life of Brian ('All right, but apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?') in order ironically to disarm his critics: 'They betrayed socialism. True, they brought more social security, they did a lot for healthcare and education, and so on, but, in spite of all that, they betrayed socialism.' As it is clear today, it is, rather, the reverse which applies: 'We remain socialists. True, we practice Thatcherism in economics, we attack asylum-seekers, beggars and single mothers, we made a deal with Murdoch, and so on, but, none the less, we're still socialists.'