So this is Christmas. And what have you done? Another year over. A new one just begun. During the year some 3000 innocent people were killed in Colombia by paramilitaries fighting to control the Cocaine Trade. During this never-ending conflict three million Colombians have been driven from their homes. Happy Christmas. War is Over.

Meanwhile Multinationalism means the poor fight the rich countries’ battles. At present the UN is in Sudan, Burundi, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Dafur, Haiti, East Timor, India, Pakistan, Cyprus, Golan Heights, Lebanon, Georgia, Kosovo and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Two thirds of UN Soldiering is done by the world’s poor. The Top Ten are Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Nepal, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uruguay and South Africa with just 5.8% of UN soldiers coming from the European Union and 0.5% from the United States.

There are War Memorials all over England. Those for the 23rd Division of Number 8 Platoon of the 10th Duke of Wellington‘s 69th Brigade are typical. Two thousand men were sent out from Bradford to the trenches of Europe in the First World War and 223 came home…J.B.Priestley among them. Must nine Priestleys die for one to survive?

America slaughtered hundreds of thousands of its own young men in Vietnam and death tolls in the War on Terror are rising in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Falklands Conflict gets an occasional mention in the United Kingdom but otherwise little is heard about the two dozen other wars which have killed British Soldiers since the end of the 1939-1945 Hitler War.

Here is the British Military Death Count over the past sixty years. Malaya 1443, Northern Ireland 1380, Korea 1086, Palestine 747, Suez 407, Cyprus 357, Falklands 238, Aden 167, Borneo 131, Iraq 120, Kenya 94, Balkans 65, Oman 58, Gulf War 47, Yangtze 43, Malay Peninsula 38, Afghanistan 41, Dhofar 25, Brunei 7, Rhodesia 5, Sierra Leone 5, Namibia 3, Congo 2, Saudi Arabia 1, Cambodia 1. That’s about a thousand a decade. How long before New Labour’s Spin Doctors start crowing about Tony Blair’s Peaceful Ten Years in office?

As for me I’m going to die on Monday 27th April 2020 which gives me 420 483 580 seconds before falling off the twig. My Deathday has been calculated by a computer. You too can find out how long you’ve got before you croak it. An Insurance Company computer has also figured out that a retired man of 65 will live until 81.6…3½ years better than 20 years ago. But odds are ten years better if you live in Kensington or Horsham and avoid Glasgow and Manchester. A sex change is a good investment too. A woman’s Life Expectancy at 65 is 84.

But will it be worth staying around for? What has life been like in Blair’s Britain? And where is it heading? When Matthew Parris looked for something nice to write about Blair’s Ten Years he concluded that England is a nicer place than it was…and that Blair’s premiership had helped to make it so.

‘Tony Blair has placed his personal stamp on a genuinely new era for Britain…an altered culture, a permanent change in our national mood. Without any shadow of doubt Mr Blair will leave a happier country than he found. Something tolerant, something amiable, something humorous, some lightness of spirit in his own nature, has marked his premiership and left its mark on British life’.

Parris goes on to make the point that the Prime Minister was cool in a way that no predecessor in that office ever had been. ‘Call it weakness or call it a strength but people without any dominating idea of their own but with the emotional intelligence to sense the spirit of the age and let it inhabit them like a ghost…to interpret it, to give it words and gestures, even to clothe it with theory and statute…these people are change-makers every bit as revolutionary as a Thatcher but in a different way. You can grab an era by the lapels as she did or you can let an era grab you by the lapels and guide it as he has. Both are creative forces in politics.’

Parris ends by remarking that in democratic politics it is no small thing ‘to catch a changed wind early, to let it fill your sails, and to help steer the spirit of a nation into different waters.’ That, he writes is what Mr Blair has done ‘with a deftness, with a sensitivity to national mood unequalled by any British politician I can remember.’ My caveat to this assessment is my belief that the Coming Bad Times might have been avoided. The next 10 years could be very nasty...and the rot set in on Blair’s Watch.