Open letter to Blunkett

Dear Mr Blunkett,

Thanks for your reply of 1/9/03.

You accuse me of writing to you ‘in aggressive & belligerent terms’. But YOU, Mr Blunkett, are the one who belongs to a government that took us into an unnecessary & illegal war, & are now defending the use of D.U. weapons. YOUR aggression & belligerence is actual & physical rather than metaphorical & purely verbal.

It’s not words that I’m afraid of but real ‘sticks & stones’ & Cruise missiles, cluster bombs etc.

I abhor physical violence & reserve the right to denounce it in the strongest terms possible.

My impression is that you don’t know much about so-called ‘depleted’ Uranium & you care even less.

What isn't 'confidential' or 'secret' is that D.U. was used in Kosovo, Afghanistan & Iraq (twice!). Scientific evidence in the public domain proclaims its danger. The U.N. wants to ban it & so does the European Parliament. It causes indiscriminate killing of civilians, birth defects, & long-term health problems (leukaemia etc) for our servicemen & women. Moreover, it remains active in the environment for at least 4.5 Billion years.

YOUR government is responsible for using this stuff!
Probably few of your constituents in Brightside are aware of this. Most taxpayers would be horrified by the fact that public money pays for these diabolical weapons.

I feel heart-broken & betrayed that Labour has become the War Party.

History, pace Mr Blair, will not casually exonerate your government.

Have you examined your conscience recently? If so, could it not be that you are in denial?

The escalating cost of continuing to occupy Iraq will inevitably lead to tax increases. This will not be popular with the electorate. There is also a widespread perception that we have been thoroughly misled & lied to, & this will stick.

You were deaf to any reasoned arguments before the war. But in retrospect the anti-war majority was right. Iraq has been seriously destabilised & terrorism is on the rise.

I see no happy ending to this.

A mea culpa from you is the very least that truth demands…

It’s such a tragic shame that Mr Blair’s Faustian pact with Bush & the neo-cons has side-lined & over-ridden all the domestic good that this Labour government has done.

Britain should come to terms with its loss of imperial power & concentrate on the welfare of its own citizens. Only then will we become part of the solution & not cause further avoidable problems in the world. At heart, everyone, & that presumably includes YOU, wants, & in fact needs, peace. That will not be achieved by launching wars of aggression & deploying radioactive Uranium weapons.

I trust that clarifies matters for you.

Yours truly,

D.King