TONY BLAIR should be put “on trial” for his disastrous warmongering, influential cultural critic Jonathan Meades has said.

In an exclusive interview with the Morning Star, Mr Meades launched a fierce attack on the former PM for “frivolously waging war in a completely unnecessary way.”

Mr Meades, who has written and presented dozens of television documentaries for the BBC focusing on architecture, also called for “draconian” measures to combat the “scandal” of non-doms snapping up empty homes for investment.

Mr Blair was “one of the most shocking politicians who’s ever lived,” he said, laying into “his hypocrisy, his warmongering, his bellicosity.”

Mr Meades branded new Labour’s leading politicians “truly disgusting human beings — absolutely appalling people, far worse than Thatcher.”

He added: “At least with Thatcher you knew what you were getting and she did have a kind of directness and an antipathy to euphemism.

“[Blair] thought he was answerable to God or someone, God being a kind of fiction, rather than answerable to the people who put him in power.”

Mr Meades now lives in France but was in London to launch his new spoken-word record Pedigree Mongrel.

He praised “bolshie” campaigners resisting the gentrification of Earl’s Court in London, and said politicians should call time on vulture investors.

“One is getting great swathes of London that is being bought by non-doms. They don’t live in them and it exacerbates the housing crisis.

“I think they should be compulsorily purchased. You shouldn’t be able to buy somewhere and not live in it.

“I can’t see any party having the wit or the nerve to do such a thing, to take such a draconian measure.”

Councils are currently allowed to increase homeowners’ council tax by 50 per cent if they leave properties empty for two or more years.

But, last year, research by the BBC found the charge had been levied on only 4,399 of London’s 80,489 empty homes.

Seven London boroughs had not applied it to a single property.

Labour has called for the fines to be doubled.

Mr Meades is known for his forthright views on urban planning and establishment figures but has intervened on specific policy issues more rarely.