Goodbye and good ridance to Tony Blair

He will retire to a life of affluence, almost certainly devoting himself to a lucrative lecture round in which he will continue to serve US interests.

He will, no doubt, continue to be a thorn in the side of his likely successor.

His obstinate refusal to go could not have done more damage to a Brown administration.

Blair leaves our country mired in war on two fronts and committed to renewal of a nuclear weapon system it shouldn't have, doesn't need and can't afford. He leaves a health service in chaos which haemorrhages money to the private firms and management consultants who have latched onto and an education system in which the common factor is bullying not academic excellence.

The British have a healthy scepticism about their leaders but many hoped for great things from Blair. He has disappointed them. By his arrogance and dishonesty he has stripped a nation of trust. He has made people angry but worse, he has made them cynical. The danger now is the electorate, expecting lies and manipulation, may vote in politicians purely on the basis of celebrity and media competence rather than what they say they believe.

Tony Blair came to power flaunting his Christian credentials but he is Thatcherite to the core. He has ruthlessly pursued Thatcher's agenda of privatising the NHS by stealth. Like her he has undermined public services and squeezed local authorities, bludgeoning them into selling their council housing. Under his leadership, as under hers, the rich have become richer and the poor poorer.

Labour initiatives which have ameliorated exploitation and poverty, such as the minimum wage, have almost always been the achievement of others - developed despite Blair, not because of him.

He promised a moral lead but delivered sleaze, cronyism and greed, compensating a despairing nation with deregulated access to alcohol and gambling and presiding over an increase in illegal drug use.

It is fashionable to say he at least achieved success in Northern Ireland but I query even that. Recall his failure to support Mo Mowlam when she was Northern Ireland Secretary and the disastrous decision to bring Peter Mandelson into the job - setting back the peace process by years.

Perhaps I too have grown cynical but it seems to me Blair ceased prosecuting the war against nationalist community in Northern Ireland not because of any great desire for justice but because he was encouraged to do so by the last US administration.

Since the accession of President Bush, the "peace process" has progressed on the British side largely, I suspect, because it has freed British troops to prosecute bloody US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is difficult for me to view Blair other than through the prism of Iraq.

Day after day the front pages of our newspapers display photographs of tens of young British soldiers needlessly killed, while on the inside pages we learn of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead. It's hard to grasp the extent of such suffering. So despite the fact that Tony Blair must be held accountable for the deaths of thousands, it's simpler to hold up a mirror to a smaller group.

Of all the images that have pierced my consciousness over the past few weeks, there are three which have stood out, one from Iraq, two closer to home. They are photographs of an adult and two children, faces to camera.

None knew Tony Blair yet they seem to accuse him. All are dead.

The first is the sweet, smiling face of 11-year-old Ben Vodden, from Sussex. He was just one casualty of a culture of bullying which is now endemic in our schools and is slowly corroding every aspect of popular culture. A recent inquest heard Ben hanged himself after enduring months of savage bullying at school, much of it on the school bus, some of it allegedly led by the bus driver.

On the day he died his mother said she heard him sobbing as she had never heard him cry before. His father found him hanged with shoelaces wrapped round his neck.

Adam Rickman, 14, also throttled himself with his shoelaces. He was a young offender who had gone off the rails after the deaths of three beloved grandparents. He was the youngest of the 29 children to die in British custody since 1990.

He was found hanged at the privately-run Hassockfield Secure training centre in County Durham, where he had been remanded in custody.

He was sent there, 150 miles from home in Burnley, because there were no places in Lancashire. He was desperately homesick and had repeatedly threatened to kill himself.

He had a history of self-harm and suicide attempts and had been known to social services since he was three.

Hours before his death, Adam was restrained by a custody officer using a so-called "distraction" technique which involved the use of force on his nose. The boy telephoned his solicitor and told her he was being bullied and feared his nose was broken.

When his mother rang the centre she was told her son had been restrained by a "tweak" to the nose.

The published photographs of Ben Vodden and Adam Rickwood show them alive and smiling. It is hard to reconcile these happy images with the misery which must have assailed them in their last hours alive.

The mortuary photograph of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel worker who died in the custody of the Queens Lancashire Regiment, is very different. He had signs of 93 injuries.

His father described the battered and bloodied state of his corpse. The family lawyer alleged that prior to death he was hooded, bound, held in a stress position and starved. An RAF forensic pathologist's report said: "The multiplicity of injuries and their widespread distribution is consistent with a systematic beating taking place over a period ... "

Seven soldiers were acquitted in March. Another, a corporal, admitted the war crime of treating a number of Iraqis in his custody inhumanely.

The judge, Mr Justice McKinnon, suggested a cover-up. He said: "None of those soldiers has been charged with any offence simply because there is no evidence against them as a result of a more or less obvious closing of ranks." All said they could "not remember" what happened.

The family solicitor said: "The video played in the court martial makes it very clear that unless you were stone deaf, if you were on that base you knew what was going on."

In response, our Government acted not to root out the guilty but to dispute whether the Human Rights Act applied abroad.

These deaths say our society has become inhumane and lawless. We do not protect our children. We do not protect prisoners and others who are powerless and in captivity. We collude with torture. When it suits us, we condone murder.

Blair has become ever more presidential, glorying in his ability to defy his critics. He has to take full responsibility, not just for damage done by warmongering abroad but for the corrosion of moral principle affecting every aspect of our domestic life.

Fish rots from the head down. I'm glad to see Blair go.

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