The Saturday Essay by Ian Bell: When the hand of history feels your collar, strange thoughts follow. I would pay money to enter the private mind of Tony Blair this week.

When the hand of history feels your collar, strange thoughts follow. I would pay money to enter the private mind of Tony Blair this week, complete with the gaudy roller-coaster ride and the ghost train, but the entity is unavailable. Such, for a decade, has been the real story: Tony speaks, yet never speaks.

Instead, listening to the Prime Minister's valedictory to the sapient of Sedgefield the other day, I found myself drifting off to Bob Dylan, in England, in 1966. The middle-aged among you may recall the moment.

"Judas!" yells the true believer, disputing a tendency towards electrified modernisation.

"I don't believe you," says the singer, stoned beyond argument. "You're a liar!" Then, to his musicians: "Play it f***in' loud!"

This would be the Blair self-image. This has been the spin, the burden of the endless avowals of absolute self-belief: "I don't believe you." Someone is right, to his resolute core, therefore the rest must - must - be wrong.

Play it loud, and louder, always. Drown them out.

So who is Judas, now, and who is entitled to call this Labour Judas a liar? It probably counts as a pop trivia quiz, but it will do for Blair.

Before attempting to write this stuff, I tried an experiment. Put aside the predictable and the sectarian, I told myself. Make a counter-intuitive case, as in one of those debating societies you never joined, for a man and for a life. Be fair. Be London media-friendly-dull. Be dispassionate.

I even took a page from a notebook and drew a line down the middle. Pro and contra emerged, clumsily, as "OK" and "Not OK". I left no space, on purpose, for ambiguity or ambivalence. The difference between history and journalism is a matter of nuance. I'm a journalist.

OK?

People with minority sexual preferences are better treated than before. People with a need for healthcare or education are slightly better served than previously. People who believe they possess human rights have the law of the land on their side. People who fear for the air they inhale and the earth they enjoy have collective and, sometimes, state support.

People who sought some local autonomy have been supported. People who believe in a moral responsibility for the wretched of the earth have been (somewhat) vindicated. People who saw capitalism as liberating have prospered. There is a law, equally, against objectively obscene pay. The irreducible poor aside, no-one is truly poor these days, apparently.

Most people are better off, most of the time. This is a two-holiday nation. Cool, as Blairites might once have said.

If you had a mind, you could also add that the Blair years destroyed the idea of class as a potent idea in British life. The numbers who vote according to a declared origin-allegiance are small and diminishing fast. Certainly Blair's Labour Party does not use the "c" word unless it sees a use for denial. Mortgage rates, with all their implications, are the real socio-economic issue. This, historically, is new.

Not OK?

Like a much later Bob Dylan, I have some of those Workingman's Blues. Be any sort of minority you like in this Britain of ours, but don't be Muslim, or a supplicant immigrant or an Asbo derelict. We have you on CCTV; we kick your doors down at dawn. Such is "our" security.

Tony's Britain is, by effect and implication, very proudly, wholly, racist. And wholly guided, as it happens, by the whey-faced fat men who run the tabloids. And wholly in thrall to middle-class superstitions towards - what's the word? - scum. Those never vote, mercifully.

In fact, far beyond the oversight of any party hack, or judge or legislator, we have every one of that sort on CCTV, or on computer, or on file, or under suspicion. In order to preserve the state we have a state apparat ready for the likes of them, and for you. It's for our own good. It's the £5.75bn ID card you voted for, you mug shot.

Incipient fascism - the clean, caring, corporatist version - is no longer a satirical fancy in this 21st century. It happens, by no accident, to be real, and barely worthy of comment. It's what we once called a Labour government. In reality, the security state is a creation we should recognise as a Blair legacy. Even now, historians are wetting themselves over the multifarious ironies.

Still, Blairites have a moral budget for poverty, too, obviously. They assume that a national galleon listing with unearned gold will drift always, by a charted course, far from the vast raft to which the feckless - possibly "budget class" - cling. Believers assume that poverty is a fact of life, indisputable, and probably a good thing, too. Being hard-up is good for the hard-up. If pressed, just add a dash of "compassion", then render the rest "history".

Afterwards we - always "we" - shall grant the residue tax credits, if we feel so inclined. Credits - Victorian moralists would have loved it - that the poor saps do not understand. These credits are ours to bestow, we say, or to withdraw. Still, have a free footnote: no-one lodged like a cuddly tick within the Blair "project" ever claimed a tax credit.

New Labour said, at the outset, that wealth contains no implications. That was the revelation. Peter Mandelson, once Blair's favoured "Bobby", delighted repeatedly in this idea. Unless you happened to be starving photogenically in Africa, or liable to vote irrationally, your lack of a wherewithal was a mere tedious fact of free markets. Poor you. Meanwhile, smart people got rich (with pensions). Everyone else settled for intellectual satisfaction.

But I'm being churlish. Contrary to what you read in news-paper columns, more people like and value Tony Blair, even after a difficult decade, than hate the man. Most don't wake in the morning with loathing in their hearts. They possess no fancy journalistic preconceptions. They don't grumble much, if at all, about Tony's 10 years. They still like him, mostly.

So are a 54-year-old's political obituaries written. As with all eulogies, disagreeable facts are given limited prominence. This week, as it happened, an entire country acquired a new name while Blair pressed willing flesh in Sedgefield. It became "Iraq Of Course", as in "and then there's Iraq, of course". No-one felt a need to amplify or explain. Items on my little Not OK list were redefined as "mistakes", even by the great man's political foes.

On my list it says: "No mistakes; entirely conscious and deliberate; willed." I added war crimes, mass murder, shameless lies and a rough definition of treason before I stopped to wonder at the process whereby yesterday's fantasies become today's realities. Elsewhere, in more moderate circles, Blair's decade was described as having been "overshadowed", merely, by Iraq. Tens of thousands of needless deaths will do that to a political reputation, one finds.

It eradicates everything, good and bad. It renders even the miracle in the north of Ireland - and I know exactly what I'm saying - trivial. Blair made this entire country criminal and complicit. Not in my name?

Sorry about that: it was in your name, and mine, like it or not. And it was, now and forever, unforgivable.

Slip on the CD again. "I don't believe you," says the singer. "You're a liar." Play it loud, louder, for as long as it takes.