The Workers Party has called for the arrest of Tony Blair as a war criminal in the wake of news that Blair is to receive a prestigious medal for his "steadfast commitment to conflict resolution". Blair will be presented with the Liberty Medal and a £67,000 in Philadelphia in September by former President Bill Clinton.

He can add this accolade to the Congressional Medal of Honour, which he received from George W. Bush in 2009.

 “This is the world turned upside down”, said Workers’ Party spokesperson, Justin O’Hagan. “Blair and Bush went to war against Iraq without any justifiable pretext. They developed a tissue of lies to justify actions that had already been decided in advance.”

 On July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq began and long before the public was told war was inevitable, Blair had decided to go to war. What was needed was a pretext that might convince or frighten the British public into supporting the war. Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general warned Blair of grave doubts about the legality of such a war.  And Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the case for war was “thin”. So Blair and his cronies set about devising a plan to justify war.  By the end of the meeting, a possible path to invasion was agreed and it was noted that Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the UK defence staff, “would send the prime minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week”.

 O’Hagan added that it was interesting that Blair would receive his latest medal from Bill Clinton. “We should remember that Clinton proved his own war criminal credentials by starving half a million Iraqi children to death throughout the 1990s under cover of sanctions against Saddam, by bombing a pharmaceuticals plant in the Sudan in 1998 and in his 1999 war in Serbia in the course of which 33 hospitals 344 schools and 144 major industrial plants and a large petro-chemical plant were destroyed by aerial bombing and at least 2000 civilians killed. And of course, Blair was behind Clinton all the way, just as he would later be behind George Bush in his zealous persecution of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 2001.”

 “Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was and remains an act of mass murder, committed by those who launched it. Instead of being free to earn obscene fortunes giving dull speeches and  to give each other medals Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George W Bush should be facing trial for commissioning the supreme international crime.”