Blair Leaves - 27th June 2007
Alex:
May 10th, 2007
Finally, after an exhausting year long bout of rumours, accusations and hearsay, Tony Blair has declared that he will resign on the 27th of June this year. The time has come, ibloggers from around the country and indeed the world - our gentle readers - to assess the legacy of without doubt the most politically successful politician of our generation. Surely, he made terrible policy decision regarding the Iraq War and has continued to make poor decisions concerning the on-going conflict. Yet this man revolutionised the Labour party and was responsible for aiding its complete re-branding, the man who romped home to landslide election victories every time he stood. He is the man who is so significant that the Conservative party is within his thrall sufficiently to attempt to create their own puppet Blairite figure. Yet to gain power, did Labour betray almost every one of it’s founding principles, and finish the job of crushing the unions that Thatcher started through discrediting almost every one of their activities? However, his actions in Northern Ireland have been filled with patience and care, resulting in a final victory for peace over centuries of violence. What of Tony Blair the musician, the family man dealing with a drunken teenage son, with a wife unafraid to enter the public sphere, with a human being whose party that is divided against him and who attracts the hatred of many of those who first brought him to power. Just how much hair has he lost since 1997? Why has he seemingly aged about 30 years in the last ten? How will history judge Anthony Blair? And what of his successor? Comments, as ever, are open.
May 13th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
My parents bought me a book when I was studying ‘A’ Level History, entitled “The People’s Party - The History of the Labour Party”. Published in 1997, it is full of pre-landslide confidence, socialist zeal, Big New Ideas and a very fresh-faced Tony Blair. Blair wrote the introduction, which I remember reading avidly. Here’s a sentence or two from the foreword that now I almost find hard to read:
“Not for the first time in its history, as this book recalls, Labour is carrying the hopes of the British people for a more decent and successful society. These hopes mean that we carry an inescapable responsibiity to translate them into reality…. It is for Labour to show that we can have both economic dynamism and social decency - and to provide an example to others.”
In his resignation speech, Tony told us Labour hadn’t so much failed us as fallen short of our expectations, which had simply been too high. Perhaps his own were too?
May 13th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Don’t know what to say to that apart from excellent comment.
June 30th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
History will judge Tony Blair kindly, and so it should. His party has been his political assassin and should be ashamed of its collective self. Blair is unmatched for political depth, width, vision and understanding and not only in this country. He is regarded as probably the world’s most consummate international political figure.
And I am not convinced that Iraq was a mistake. Yes, people have died at the hands of insurgents. But come on now - people died every day under Saddam. They were poisoned, burned to death and buried with a bullet in the back of the head daily under Saddam’s regime. And meanwhile insurgents were reproducing like flies all over the middle east, armed with their creed of righteous twisted nonsense.
I was never a Labour voter because of earlier party loyalties (which I no longer have). But I did vote for Labour in May. Over his tenure I watched with a kind of detached admiration as he moved the whole political centre of gravity and the Tories to a more acceptable place. I watched as he understood the relationship between Britain and the EU and the USA - possibly the only European leader to actually “get it” (apart from Ireland).
I was intrigued as to how he understood as I had that without huge tax increases we cannot sustain a free NHS while everyone thinks they’re going to live to be 100! He set about reforming the funding arrangements.
I could go on. But suffice it to say I was so angry over his party’s treatment of him over the often feigned excuse of the ‘failure’ of Iraq, their acceptance that he ‘lied’, their judgement on him if he HAD lied, their rush to replace him with Brown, that I started a blog in his support. The coup was a move too far to keep me quiet.
My blog’s still going - though probably not for much longer.
Anyway your article here is one of the fairest I’ve seen on Blair at a blog. They’re usually run by hangers and floggers. They make me despair at being British. Whereas - Blair? He makes me proud.
He may well make more of us proud as he settles into his Middle East envoy post.
Good luck to this good man. He deserves it.