A talented documentary maker from Luton has teamed up with MP George Galloway for an expose on Tony Blair.
Greg Ward, 28, from Bushmead, is using crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise the £50,000 needed for the project and today (September 5), hit the target..
The £50,000 was pledged in less than a week online.
Greg said: “It’s pretty amazing and unexpected. If we didn’t get to £50,000 we wouldn’t have received any of the pledges.”
Greg cut his teeth with a documentary about the English Defence League last year, through which he met Respect MP George Galloway.
The pair kept in touch and Galloway, famous for his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, approached Greg to make a film with him.
Greg said: “George came up with the idea of doing something on Tony Blair. I am quite politically engaged, I was against the Iraq war and Afghanistan. I have been in the world of investigating the far right so far but the Tony Blair thing is something I do feel passionately about.
“With Syria even now there’s the horrible cloud of Iraq hanging over the debate.”
The documentary will explore Blair’s investments in offshore accounts, his dealings with various world leaders, and the work he has done in the corporate world since retiring from office.
Galloway, who was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 over his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq. said: “Tony Blair killed the Labour Party as we knew it. He and George W. Bush helped kill a million people in disastrous wars.”
The Killing Of Tony Blair project already has a team of researchers investigating, and they are hoping to interview Tony Blair himself.
Greg, who went to St Joseph’s Infant School in Limbury, said: “I have always had this interest in documentaries, watching documentaries every night, I still do that.
“I’ve always been passionate about Luton and local politics and I’m interested in the clash of cultures in our town, with the extremists and the far right. I would like to revisit that topic in the future.
“Kickstarter is a whole different way of creating a film. You’ve already got your fan base because they are the ones who funded the project. That’s the way the industry is going.There is a pressure, people are expecting quite big things from it but I think we can deliver.”
Visit www.kickstarter.com/projects/22595538/the-killing-of-tony-blair for more.