Politics
Good intentions, a terrible war and a man who stayed too long
Published 07 May 2007
The New Statesman's own verdict on Tony Blair is that he should have gone in late 2003 when it was confirmed there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
Tony Blair should not be leaving us now: he should have gone in late 2003, as soon as it was confirmed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the time of the war. Many leaders have been forced out for less. Instead he clung on, surviving the Hutton and Butler reports, but denuded of the authority he once enjoyed at home and around the world. These past three years have been wasted, an exercise in political vanity.
In May 1997, as we marked new Labour's accession to power, the introduction to our leading article read: "Tony Blair can be our best prime minister since Churchill." Such was the euphoria, so big was the landslide, that anything seemed possible. We have had many disagreements with the Prime Minister, as former editors explain on page 44, but it need not have been as fraught as this. The radical left of today accepted long ago the dictum that government is the art of compromise, particularly in a skewed electoral system based around the floating voter. Our critique may have been at times too monochrome. Yet it is one of the sadnesses of the era that Blair saw people concerned with civil liberties, global rule of law, redistribution and poverty as at best an encumbrance, at worst the enemy within.
There have been many achievements. The minimum wage and independence for the Bank of England established the twin pillars of social justice and economic stability. In health and education, while reforms may have been confused and sometimes mistaken, money has poured in and improvements have been made. Child poverty has been tackled, even if ambitious targets are unlikely to be met. Sure Start centres have been a success. Poor pensioners have been better served. Crime has fallen, although violent crime, the public's main concern, has grown.
The main weakness of the new Labour project was most vividly illustrated in the area of inequality. It is shaming that the wealth gap has grown wider, made worse by the housing boom. Social mobility has declined. On diversity, the picture is mixed. Civil partnerships suggest greater tolerance; race relations have been complicated by particular tensions with Britain's Muslims.
With its petty obsessions over consumer culture and celebrity, life in Britain is at least as unedifying as it was in the 1980s, as Suzanne Moore argues on page 40. Blair's predilection for people with money has been dispiriting. From the Ecclestone saga to the cash-for-honours scandal, he failed to heed the warning signs. It is a terrible indictment of Labour that it has allowed David Cameron to argue the case for quality of life as being a more important barometer of well-being than pure material gain.
To what extent do leaders change society, or just reflect it? As Geoff Mulgan points out (page 28), Blair rarely challenged the consensus. On climate change, he moved far too slowly, refusing to temper corporate interest. It was Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, who introduced the bold notion of road pricing. With his huge mandate, the Prime Minister could have shown more courage about Europe in the early years; instead, he buckled under pressure from media barons. A man obsessed with controlling the press became its prisoner. After introducing the Freedom of Information Act and incorporating human rights into UK law, he adopted a criminal-justice agenda dictated by the Sun and the Daily Mail.
On the one occasion when he did take a risk, it had catastrophic consequences. We are proud of our relentless critique of the Iraq war. In his desperation to support the most extreme US government in living memory, Blair not only deceived the public, but undermined international institutions and Britain's role in the world. The war and the occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have wreaked destruction in the Middle East and, with terrible irony, have established a link between Iraq and terrorism that had existed only in the imagination of the White House. While the motives that led Islamists to kill 52 people in London on 7 July 2005 and to plan to kill many more in other terrorist attacks may be complex, it is specious of Blair to claim that Iraq was not a large factor in encouraging Muslim radicalisation.
Iraq, Blair's fifth war in six years, was not an aberration. It was the culmination of an approach to the world defined by hubris (a delusional belief in his own powers of persuasion), naivety (his belief that the UK's status is determined by our ties with the US), but also good intentions. Iraq will dominate Blair's legacy. Everyone knows it - except, apparently, the protagonist. In his farewell message to Labour MPs, the war gets the briefest mention: "removed brutal regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq" . . .
But it is too simple and comfortable to focus all the blame on one man. This was a collective failure. Each member of the 2003 cabinet, including the Chancellor, will also be condemned by history for his or her part.
We wish Gordon Brown well but will be as unsparing in our judgement of him as we were of Tony Blair. As Labour slides in the polls, and as Cameron's support consolidates, Brown will face an arduous two years at the helm.
The man who helped save Labour from oblivion, winning three elections in a row, bequeaths his successor a party in disarray. Brown must rebuild Labour's support base knowing that he has very little time to do it. He must not act on his own. He must not act in defiance of progressive thinking, as Blair seemed to relish doing. The Labour Party, if it wishes to save itself, must listen to a broader left movement whose voice is rarely defined through party politics.
And it must never again succumb, uncritically, to the whim of one man.
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