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Speaker: So farewell then, Tony Blair

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  • andin,

    Interesting perspective on things, there is probably some merit in it. My knowledge of british politics, like most people outside thr country, is scant.
    Any way this article gives me more reason to not think highly of the Bob Gelfdof, Bono, U2 triumvirate. Read a couple of Ben Eltons books and thought they were crap.
    One thing you do get wrong is Reagan and Thatcher bringing down the Evil Russians. Russia was collapsing under the financial strain of the arms race and too many comrades with their hands in the till. Gorby admitted this to Reagan who probably told Thatcher. Then as any lowlife politico would, they exploited it to their advantage, and a lot of people fell for it, including you it seems.
    But as the saying goes it's all history now.

    raglan • Since Mar 2007 • 1891 posts Report Reply

  • Craig Ranapia,

    Governments don't promulgate philosophies, they run countries.

    *cough* Up to a point, Lord Copper. Perhaps the electorate is entitled to a certain degree of cynicism about folks who campaigned against 'Tory sleaze' a decade ago, and are now facing credible and persistent allegations of selling peerages for campaign cash? In the UK, as in New Zealand, there's a legitimate argument to be had around whether increasingly stage-managed 'presidential' politics is a healthy thing. But it's a little rich of Blairites or the UK Labour Party in general to complain when the political/media culture they did so much to create ultimately comes back to bite them in the arse.

    North Shore, Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 12370 posts Report Reply

  • WH,

    I enjoyed reading this. I always liked Bill and Tony, and sometimes felt caught in the vice between their left wing critics and their right wing opponents.

    Blair just delivered a speech about the British media, which was also interesting.

    Since Nov 2006 • 797 posts Report Reply

  • Rich of Observationz,

    "He took a party that, just a few years earlier, was essentially unelectable and swept it into power"

    And subsequently adopted most of the policies of his predecessors. In fact, he went beyond what the Tories would have done. I can't believe that John Major would have introduced ASBOs and threatened autistic kids with jail.

    "His chief opposition is in pretty much the same state of flaccidly protean, mewling, self-inflicted irrelevance that Labour was in during the ‘80s."
    But are still ahead in the polls

    "I can think of no British equivalent of the Abu-Grahib scandal"
    Apart from this and other cases

    "Governments don’t promulgate philosophies, they run countries."
    Apart from Asquith, Lloyd-George, Attlee and Thatcher - all of whom unquestionably promoted a distinct set of ideas. (Churchill was different - he won a war - partly by adopting concepts such as a command economy that were somewhat alien to his background).

    Back in Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 5550 posts Report Reply

  • Tom Semmens,

    The Blairite legacy? As Mao Tse Tung said when asked what his view was of the French revolution: "To soon to tell."

    Sevilla, Espana • Since Nov 2006 • 2217 posts Report Reply

  • Don Christie,

    I liked the balanced perspective. Personally I have always found TB very hard to stomach, but I recognise that is more of a style thing. The war in Iraq has been a disaster and makes necessary Kosovo interventions less likely to happen in the future. Blair badly misjudged the Bush administration, in my opinion. He wanted to rein in their unilateralist desire for 9/11 total revenge and failed.

    I am not sure if I buy the "war criminal" label. The British public still voted for him and would vote for him again judging by some more recent polls. George Galloway, the darling of the London Left, is more of a criminal than Tony Blair will ever be.

    He was elected to nullify the 1980s

    I believe he and Gordon Brown did that. The pits might still be closed but Britain in 2007 is a very different place to 1987 and 1997. It is more affluent, in general, unemployment is at an all time low and it has a confidence that was completely knocked out of the country under Thatcher's rule. Heck, Britain seems to be discovering that there may be such a thing as "society" after all. Brown's trick has been to address poverty without scaring the middle-England support base, in this he has been successful.

    I disagree with Rich's comments about them being more Thatcherite than Thatcher. I hear this from a lot of people, but they usually are ones who did not grow up under that lady's regime.

    Finally, for a decade commentators have been predicting the demise of the Blair-Brown partnership. It never happened. It was no doubt robust and sometimes fractious, but ultimately will go down as of of he most successful in UK history.

    Interesting how the NZ situation mirrors UK.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1645 posts Report Reply

  • Ben Austin,

    Well for what it's worth Blair at least did seem like a worthy orator compared to some of his contemporaries, although I guess being compared to Bush probably helped him look good.

    You'd be surprised how many rabid right wingers in the US don't actually realise Blair is the head of what is (or was?) a socialist party. I predict his cult of worship in some parts of US will allow him to eat well for so long as he can stomach it.

    London • Since Nov 2006 • 1027 posts Report Reply

  • Simon Pound,

    bloody nice writing.

    MFAK • Since Nov 2006 • 20 posts Report Reply

  • Rich of Observationz,

    I hear this from a lot of people, but they usually are ones who did not grow up under that lady's regime

    I did. Started uni in1981. Besides, I have opinions on the Asquith government and I was't around in 1910.

    I'd agree that the Blair governments economics were smarter than their Tory predecessors (it helps not to have a party and cabinet at loggerheads over fundamental economics).

    However their social policies were much the same - socially conservative authoritarian. It's just that whilst the Tories wanted to coerce everyone into the model of the rural middle classes, Labour want to coerce everyone to be urban middle class.

    Back in Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 5550 posts Report Reply

  • David Haywood,

    Simon Pound wrote:

    bloody nice writing.

    Hear, hear. Lovely job, Joseph -- great to read such nice prose.

    Dunsandel • Since Nov 2006 • 1156 posts Report Reply

  • simon g,

    Sorry, but Speaker has produced a condescending caricature of opposition to Blair, and it is years out of date. The "anti-Blairs" are not some ragtag, predictable, round up the usual suspects, far left crowd. They are liberals, social democrats, even libertarians. And people who don't like being lied to. You would have to have ignored the UK news very carefully to have missed all this.

    But let's just focus on Labour people for now. What did they want? In short, a Labour Prime Minister.

    Clark has operated under MMP, and has shifted centre/right when pragmatism required (call it expedient / spineless/ smart according to taste). People on the left are often frustrated by that, but she has never had a majority.

    Thanks to FPP, Blair had massive majorities. For many years, he had no electoral pressure from the self-destructing, leader-dumping Tories. He had every opportunity, if not to build the New Jerusalem, then at least - at the very least - to hold the line against illiberal, authoritarian government, and to nudge Britain just a teeny bit leftwards.

    He was not forced into compromise, or "selling out" as left leaders often are. He had overwhelming executive power, and he chose to use that power to sign up to much of Thatcher and all of Bush.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 1333 posts Report Reply

  • Tom Semmens,

    "The pits might still be closed but Britain in 2007 is a very different place to 1987 and 1997. It is more affluent, in general, unemployment is at an all time low and it has a confidence that was completely knocked out of the country under Thatcher's rule. "

    Now, at the risk of drawing to long a bow, lets re-phrase that:

    "New Zealand in 2007 is a very different place to 1999. It is more affluent, in general, unemployment is at an all time low and it has a confidence that was completely knocked out of the country under National's rule."

    Yet we are in the thrall of an angsty middle class victim mentality in New Zealand, just like the U.K...

    A consequence of Tory-lite third way managerialism or a consequence of a quarter century of Gordon Gekko?

    Sevilla, Espana • Since Nov 2006 • 2217 posts Report Reply

  • simon g,

    And on Iraq, really this is tosh:

    Then there's Blair's involvement in Iraq, described by one British journalist as an 'utter disaster'

    Or by the vast majority of the British, the media, the analysts, the world ...

    I can think of no British equivalent of the Abu-Grahib scandal. And local repercussions – the bombing of the London Underground in 2005 – succeeded in closing down the Tube system for less than twenty-four hours.

    So there's nothing to worry about then? Why Blair's increasingly authoritarian anti-terror laws?

    If, heaven forbid, you still have nothing better to do with your time, you can question the wisdom and efficacy of the invasion of Iraq, but wasn't the British who screwed up.

    Thanks for your permission to question the greatest disaster of our time. I'll carry on doing so, if that's OK. Blair won't be around to deal with the consequences.

    After all, Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War. Stupid as it sounded at the time, their foreign policy worked. So might Bush's. So might Blair's.

    Evidence? If 'might' is all you've got, everybody wins, every time. You can't argue with stuff that hasn't happened yet.

    Why do you think invading Iraq might work?

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 1333 posts Report Reply

  • 81stcolumn,

    For all the wittering about "hopes and dreams", furthermore, nobody to my knowledge has deliberately addressed the question of what sort of sad, romantic twerp attaches that sort of emotional and intellectual capital to a mere political party.

    Or indeed to an individual........


    And yet the cult of fresh faced Tony with his bait and switch policies that pandered to the the urban 4wd drive to another school class was nothing short of despicable.

    The emotions may be ill placed but the the causes are not. How about this; he squandered a mandate through lies, bullying and sheer lack of intellectual capacity.

    Lies - Lets talk about ethical foreign policy, in particular arms sales.

    Bullying - To win the vote on Iraq he deployed the party whip, in so doing a number of politicians voted against the clear wishes of their constituencies. At a stroke Blair disenfranchises whole communities across the country.

    Lack of intellectual capacity - This was a man who really couldn't figure out that the levers didn't just go backwards and forwards. With education for example, he is almost at the point of defending the indefensible with the mantra "test and report.....". The man cannot tell the difference between testing and education.

    Nawthshaw • Since Nov 2006 • 790 posts Report Reply

  • Craig Ranapia,

    Don:

    Well, you do have a point - very few politicians are quite as bad as their detractors would have you believe, or as saintly as their fans claim. (Since Thatcher has been mentioned in dispatches, I'd recommend John Campbell's excellent biography as a careful attempt to separate the myth of the 'Iron Lady' from the reality.)

    And like some folks up-thread, I don't think you have to be some mad Hooray Henry or Old Lab class warrior to ask what exactly have people got for the erosion of civil liberties, the increasing politicisation of the civil service and concentration of power away from Parliament and into Downing Street, questionable improvements in core public services and infrastructure, etc. But, simon, it's just not good enough to cop out with 'Thatcher made me do it.' Not after seventeen years.

    If even asking those questions is signs of political immaturity, then I'd respectfully suggest the Queen isn't the one who needs saving in the UK.

    North Shore, Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 12370 posts Report Reply

  • giovanni tiso,

    If, heaven forbid, you still have nothing better to do with your time, you can question the wisdom and efficacy of the invasion of Iraq, but wasn't the British who screwed up.

    I'd have to take issue with this. Sorry if some of us with nothing better to do still feel like questioning the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq, but it isn't as if a country hasn't been devastated in the process, for reasons that have never ceased to pass understanding. It may be the Americans who brought most of the heavy artillery and pig-headedness to the task, but Blair has enormous responsability concerning the overall mess, not just the parts of the country overseen by the Brits, which at any rate look good only in comparison to the carnage elsewhere. No doubt (well, possibly a little doubt) Bush would have invaded anyway, but Blair was a very valuable ally also in the months leading up to the invasion, not least in the doctoring of the case for war. And it's not as if hundreds of thousand of people haven't died and millions haven't been displaced as a result of those decisions. Sorry if that bores you, though.

    Sheesh...

    As for the argument that the Bush-Blair foreign policy might yet work, it of course depends on what you mean by "work", and whether the success will be worth its human cost. Of course the stated aim of the war was to rid the West of an imminent threat, and the threat was simply not there, so in a very important sense that policy has failed already. If the actual objective was to spread democracy in the middle east, since we were never told this at time it would seem that the task involved suspending democracy in the middle west, which is more than a little ironic. But who right now would bet the guest bedroom, let alone the house, that this "other" aim will actually be achieved?

    Wellington • Since Jun 2007 • 7473 posts Report Reply

  • giovanni tiso,

    Okay, I know see that other posters (esp. simon g) beat me to it. It will teach me to refresh more often or write more quickly.

    Wellington • Since Jun 2007 • 7473 posts Report Reply

  • Roberto Corona,

    This is the worst piece of writing I have seen on Public Address. Almost every assertion is wrong. Young has completely misread British public opinion over the last 27 years. I wonder where he got his information from, or perhaps he just made assumptions? Clearly he spent none of the the Thatcher or Blair years living in the UK or following its media.

    Very, very disappointing.

    Dunedin • Since Jun 2007 • 1 posts Report Reply

  • Simon Grigg,

    After all, Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War. Stupid as it sounded at the time, their foreign policy worked

    And there was I thinking it was actually Gorby who decided not to play the game anymore, it was Gorby who repeatedly tried to wind back the Cold War to no Nato response, it was Gorby who offered unilateral disarmament in Iceland, before Reagan and Thatcher's policies had kicked in, it was Gorby who allowed the walls to tumble in Eastern Europe......

    Just another klong... • Since Nov 2006 • 3284 posts Report Reply

  • Simon Grigg,

    The portions of Iraq they patrol are among the most peaceful.

    ohhh, you mean aside from things like this

    Just another klong... • Since Nov 2006 • 3284 posts Report Reply

  • Don Christie,

    the increasing politicisation of the civil service and concentration of power away from Parliament and into Downing Street

    Well, that was Thatcher. Took apart the regional governments and vested all power in Downing Street.

    You may not have noticed, but Scotland and Wales just had Assembly elections. The NE of England was given the option of devolving but voted not to take that option. Civil Servants are always moaning about politicians making decisions on their behalf but Labour have done a lot more for the regions and devolution than Thatcher ever did.

    Rich, I kind of assumed you had grown up under Thatcher. That comment was not directed at you. Nor is this one...At the time (80s) I also remember how bullies and thugs such as Militant Tendency and Arthur Scargill tried to take over the Labour party and union movement for their own ends. These folk are still alive, kicking and sorry that Labour's policies do not match their own extreme agendas. I am not sorry that they failed back then, although they did succeed in making Thatcher look like a moderates, and as we see, the perceived centre usually wins :-)

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1645 posts Report Reply

  • Don Christie,

    No doubt (well, possibly a little doubt) Bush would have invaded anyway,

    Well, the Brits had no doubts about US aggressive unilateralism and wanted to control it. They also thought removing Saddam was "a good thing". They also thought that by removing Saddam they would force the US and Isreal back to the negotiating table. That's the context.

    However, I had some stand up rows with close friends about Britain going into Iraq, it was the wrong thing, done at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 1645 posts Report Reply

  • WH,

    Supporters of Tony Blair recognise that he has made important mistakes, but believe we should retain a sense of perspective. As Blair recently noted in a slightly different context:

    The final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media. Things, people, issues, stories, are all black and white. Life's usual grey is almost entirely absent. "Some good, some bad"; "some things going right,some going wrong": these are concepts alien to today's reporting. It's a triumph or a disaster. A problem is "a crisis". A setback is a policy "in tatters". A criticism, "a savage attack".

    This may enrage his more impassioned critics, but Blair was not elected to fulfill the agenda of the far left. The success of the Third Way and New Labour movements lay in the perception that a reformed Labour Party would address the needs and concerns of the wider electorate, not just the faithful. Although much of the left criticises Blair for what might fairly be regarded as missed opportunities, we should not trick ourselves into believing that the public was ever buying what the far left was selling.

    Since Nov 2006 • 797 posts Report Reply

  • simon g,

    Don C:

    Yes, the far left did enormous damage to UK Labour in the early 80's. But putting Blair up against them is like suggesting everybody should now support Helen Clark to save us from Brian Tamaki.

    There was a decade of Kinnock and Smith before Blair. The battle was won long before 1997, and Blair wasn't part of it.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 1333 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    WH, did you see The Independent's reply?

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

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