Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
No, but the numbers make it clear that a sizeable number of people who opposed the war must have voted for Blair after the fact. After all, even if just the two million people who marched against it didn't vote for him you'd have seen a sizeable swing away from Labour, so extrapolating that across the country, you are forced to assume that many millions of people who opposed the war and are happily mouthing off about the Chilcott Report nonetheless voted for Blair in 2005.

As for the argument that there were no alternative parties, that's simply not true as the LibDems opposed the war. It is equally the case that simply withholding one's vote altogether was an option that was available to absolutely everyone.

The fact is that many of those wringing their hands and wagging their fingers after the Chilcott Report simply didn't care as much about Blair's Iraq war as much as they like to pretend, which makes their faux outrage pretty hard to stomach.
Fair point about the Lib Dems in that election. They did say "Iraq War: Never again" in their manifesto and their share of the vote went up 4% from 2001 and got 10 more seats. New Labour's share went down 5.5%. Tories vote was about the same. So it looks like significant numbers did move away from Blair to the Lib Dems (and Greens).

I think a more relevant criticism is not of members of the public who may have voted Labour despite opposing the war, (and as you will agree, people vote on a package of policies) but of the political class who went with it at the time, and are now hiding behing the cartoonish image of Blair the Monster. It's not as if he invoked the Royal Prerogative like in 99. He won a vote in the commons, despite the case being so obviously bull****. Are all the MPs who backed him going to get a public thrashing too?