Blair: '[W]e will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy'...

Tony Blair will be missed. Sky news has coverage.

From his final speech as PM at the annual Labour Party conference yesterday:

This is a struggle that will last a generation and more. But this I believe passionately: we will not win until we shake ourselves free of the wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy, that somehow we are the ones responsible.

This terrorism isn't our fault. We didn't cause it.

It's not the consequence of foreign policy.

It's an attack on our way of life.

It's global.

It has an ideology.

It killed nearly 3,000 people including over 60 British on the streets of New York before war in Afghanistan or Iraq was even thought of.

It has been decades growing.

Its victims are in Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey.

Over 30 nations in the world.

It preys on every conflict.

It exploits every grievance.

And its victims are mainly Muslim.

This is not our war against Islam.

This is a war fought by extremists who pervert the true faith of Islam. And all of us, Western and Arab, Christian or Muslim, who put the value of tolerance, respect and peaceful co-existence above those of sectarian hatred, should join together to defeat them.

It is not British soldiers who are sending car bombs into Baghdad or Kabul to slaughter the innocent.

They are there along with troops of 30 other nations with, in each case, a full UN mandate at the specific request of the first ever democratically elected Governments of those countries in order to protect them against the very ideology also seeking the deaths of British people in planes across the Atlantic.

If we retreat now, hand Iraq over to Al Qaida and sectarian death squads and Afghanistan back to Al Qaida and the Taleban, we won't be safer; we will be committing a craven act of surrender that will put our future security in the deepest peril.

Of course it's tough.

Not a day goes by or an hour in the day when I don't reflect on our troops with admiration and thanks - the finest, the best, the bravest, any nation could hope for.

They are not fighting in vain. But for this nation's future.

Straight-talk. (Video)