This May marks the seventh anniversary of Tony Blair's landslide election victory in 1997. Never far from the news, he has consistently broken promises, betrayed those who voted for him and squandered taxpayers' money on unnecessary and pointless endeavours. Here is a quick reminder of some of the Blair government's achievements over the past seven years:

- Dome fiasco

The Millenium Dome was supposed to be an enchanting experience to mark the end of the 20th century, a lasting tribute to an important date and a building that would serve to remind people that they were living in an era of hope and prosperity. In 1997, Tony Blair described it as "The most exciting thing to happen anywhere in the World in the Year 2000". One of the designers said it would enable people to "explore the possibilities of their own personal futures in the next millennium." It would be an experience to be remembered for decades. On the stroke of midnight on 31st December 1999, there would be a "river of fire" shooting down the Thames, wowing Londoners and supposedly incinerating the pigeons nesting under the river's various bridges.

What we eventually got was a vast plastic tent in the middle of Greenwich, containing various sculptures of the human body, which closed down after just one year. Apart from a spectacular attempted diamond heist, which was foiled by police, and providing the backdrop for the pre-credits sequence of a James Bond film, it has now been largely forgotten. As for the river of fire, it simply did not materialise. The total cost of this project was £758 million, at least one million of which was kindly provided by the Hinduja brothers in exchange for British passports, creating a scandal which eventually led to the (first) resignation of Peter Mandelson. The building was recently sold at a terrific loss, and its future is still very much uncertain - a recent report indicates that it may be turned into a casino. It is still costing several million pounds per month to maintain, an expense which has been kept very quiet.

- Strikes and protests

In September of 2000, Britain ground to a halt under the strain of a massive protest by long-distance lorry drivers over the cost of fuel. Across the country, petrol pumps dried up and gridlock ensued on the roads as motorists desperately clamoured to the few pumps which had fuel left in them. The crisis is estimated to have cost Britain's economy around £250m per day. At the time of writing, fuel prices have just again reached the 80p per litre mark which triggered the 2000 protests.

- Foot-and-mouth

On 19 February 2001, the first case of Foot and Mouth Disease in Britain since 1967 was confirmed in an abattoir in Essex. Over the next few months, the crisis would escalate to the point where 1,718 outbreaks would be confirmed. Over the course of the epidemic, over 7 million animals were slaughtered and either buried in mass graves or burned on horrific pyres. Most of the animals slaughtered were in fact healthy, but thanks to the government's illegal scheme of culling non-infected animals, they went to their graves along with the livestock confirmed as carrying the disease.
Advice given after the 1967 outbreak was completely ignored, and Blair did not even become involved in the crisis until weeks after the disease had got a foothold in the countryside, preferring to let Alistair Campbell and his spin doctors try to fiddle the figures to make it appear that the government had the epidemic under control. Vaccination, which many FMD experts predicted could have stopped the disease in its tracks within weeks, was not even considered until late in the outbreak. In total, one eighth of Britain's farm animals were wiped out, most of them unnecessarily, because of Government incompetence. The disease cost Britain a fortune in lost revenue from meat exports and tourism, as well as the cost of destroying the animals, disposing of the remains and compensating the farmers. The total cost of the fiasco has been put at over £2.4 billion.

- 5 wars

Tony Blair has commited UK troops to conflict more often than any other Prime Minister in recent history - five times in seven years. From Kosovo to Sierra Leone, to Afghanistan and Iraq (twice), Blair's thirst for conflict is matched only by his thirst for power, and his apparent conviction that he alone knows the difference between right and wrong. Blair's various conflicts have cost the UK billions of pounds, the most expensive and controversial of which has been the recent invasion of Iraq.

- Iraq

On 20th March 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq began. The Government had justified the war with claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. One year on, not a single weapon has been found, and 882 coalition troops have been killed, most of them since President Bush declared the conflict officially over. The conflict is expected to cost Britain about £3bn.

Given that the above is only a small selection of New Labour's "accomplishments", it is safe to estimate that the Blair government has squandered billions of pounds of taxpayer's money over the last seven years. Even given the money which Gordon Brown has been pouring into the NHS (to little visible effect), it is reasonable to assume that Blair's government has cost the UK very dearly indeed. Is it any wonder that he cannot afford to pay the firefighters a decent salary, or that he has broken his own election pledge by introducing top-up fees for university students? Have we not suffered enough under Blair's New Labour machine, with its stealth taxes and string of economic disasters?

We've served our seven years hard Labour. Isn't it time for a change?