Lobster’s writers say farewell (in approximately 250 words or less)
In alphabetical order:
Richard Alexander: Good riddance.
Dan Atkinson: Prediction is a mug’s game, but here is one forecast for the early, troubled years of the next decade: Tony Blair’s ten years in power will be widely seen as a golden age of cheap consumer goods, full employment, glorious weather, inexpensive flights abroad and social tolerance and gregariousness. Which will be a bit rich, given the inevitable dark times ahead will result directly from the delusions that have marked his premiership. Mr Blair’s ‘legacy’ is a seedy dream-world mired in debt and bankruptcy, drifting into a crisis of employment and employability, hallucinating into existence a diplomatic and military role that it cannot possibly afford and kidding itself that a series of opposites adds up to a coherent ‘third way’ position. Thus we fight wars on a peacetime budget; plan for a ‘knowledge economy’ with an education system marked by illiteracy and low standards; assume ever-cheaper, or even free, goods and services alongside rising income levels; and urge workers to be more ‘flexible’ to fight the competitive threat from emerging economies while simultaneously making paid employment ever more legally protected and regulated. And that is without mentioning the hugely costly bureaucratic restructurings that have passed for ‘reform’ in the public sector.
More seriously than any of this are two master-delusions: the one suggesting individual debt can be run up seemingly without end and the one that assumes protection of the environment is entirely compatible with limitless economic growth. Someone else will have this ‘legacy’ to deal with as Mr Blair heads off into his well-paid ex-premiership status. The ten-year long weekend from reality will be over.
Jonathan Bloch: The day after Blair was elected in 1997 I joined the Liberal Democrat Party. His election led me to take this step for two reasons: firstly, I feared for the state of civil liberties in the country and also, with the Lib Dems obtaining more parliamentary seats, they had graduated from been a fringe political party to a more serious player. What caused me to fear for civil liberties was the ruthlessness that Blair and his cohorts had shown in fighting old labour. Also, New Labour’s love of money and the elevation of those with money to the high altar made me fear for public services and the gains of the labour movement since 1945. New Labour could not be counted on to defend our civil liberties or the social gains made through struggle. Unfortunately how right was I to be.
Ironically it might be this worship of the ‘wealthy’ which might be the undoing of Blair as he ends his period in office mired by the honours scandal.
The reason that the Economist gave for backing his re-election, that he was the best conservative on offer was totally true; but even die-hard conservatives must have been shocked at his totally supine attitude to the Bush administration. He provided legitimacy to the Bush regime’s worst excesses and made them an easier sell to sceptical Americans. Propping-up one of the most repressive and imperialistic regimes (Iraq, Guantanamo Bay etc.) that America has ever had is probably Blair’s legacy to the world.
Michael Carlson: It has been odd, as an expatriate American, to watch the Britain I’ve lived in for thirty years morphing in the past decade from a quaint Orwellian land to a much more American dystopia in the style of Philip K Dick. In Dick’s novels, doors refuse to open because your swipe card lacks the necessary credits; they lecture you in a mechanical voice, devoid of emotion, repeating endlessly their own market logic: it is the voice of Hazel Blears, speaking from the interactive surveillance cameras that will soon oversee all our lives. The Mr. Blobby face of Blears represents the next step in the Blairite evolution of Thatcher’s Britain, into a never-never land where up is down and left is right.
Winston Smith is now the prototypical Englishman. As a foreigner, I haven’t even the rights Winston enjoyed. I can be taken away, held without knowing what, if anything, I am charged with. If my wife puts my picture on a placard to campaign for my release, she will be arrested if she walks within half a mile of Parliament Square.
Blair’s Britain is the logical outgrowth of Thatcher’s; a Stalinism complete with Orwell’s endless war, obsessed with the enemy within – the idea of enfranchising the working class. Blair’s McKinsey-trained hordes accelerated Tory transformation of public service to private profit. New Labour abrogated the responsibilities of democratic government, leaving even the waging of war to private enterprises who profit even as they balls-up contract after contract.
By redefining the state as a corporation, British ‘subjects’ (you’ve never been ‘citizens’) are transformed into ‘consumers,’ then milked for the benefit of the corporation, or its apparatchiks; politicians who exempt themselves from legislation, civil servants hiring quango consultants, like corporate executives handing themselves bonuses. Blair’s legacy is that Thatcherism is now accepted as the fabric of British life. To the apparatchiks, concerned with survival, self-aggrandisement, and self-protection, society exists only as far as it facilitates those aims. Nothing is free, and everything has its price.
Colin Challen MP: It has been customary to pronounce his betrayal of socialism six weeks after the election of each Labour prime minister. But Tony Blair sought to get his betrayal out of the way well before kissing the Queen’s hand; and the expurgation of the old Clause Four from Labour’s constitution confirmed his ambition. Since the birth of Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman no-one but a few die-hards have cared about socialism anyway.
Judging Blair thus became a reckoning measured in terms of Labour gaining a political MBA to see whether its management of the country could make it the ‘natural party of government’ once again. Giving independence to the Bank of England to set interest rates is cited as an exemplar of good management, but was about as inspirational to the masses as might be the adoption of low fat margarine in their diet. How could the idea of ‘sound management’ ever inspire the political realm? When did the phrase ‘natural party of government’ first emerge, after all? Technocratic government was not invented by Blair; he simply sought to perfect it by removing any thought of an ‘ideological agenda’ (sic).
Our economic stability has not come without a price: a record balance of payments deficit (who cares?); record levels of personal debt built on housing market inflation; record public expenditure too, which must be welcomed but much of which was concealed behind the veil of the PFI. A looming environmental disaster which threatens to destabilise not only us but the whole world has been recognised by Blair, but like Canute, one knows he is no more master of the tide than the old king. Labour has given succour to a golden age of consumption, and consequently (from my perspective) the underlying fundamentals look rockier now than at any time in post-war history. In this sense, Blair is a true and faithful prisoner of the contradictions of our age. As Mephistopheles told Faustus, ‘Why, this is hell nor am I out of it.’
Roger Cottrell: Well, its good bye from him – and good riddance from us. Tony Blair, the man whose little clique, backed by the British American Project, by Rupert Murdoch and the Demos think tank, hijacked the Labour Party in violation of its own constitution in 1995 and managed to squander the biggest election landslide in history.
Always, Tony was Rupert’s man and Washington’s man. His contempt for the Labour Party was matched only by that for British democracy itself. In the end, it was the war that finished him but the rot had set in long before that. He privatised where Tories feared to tread. While nobody seemed to care much about cash for access in 1998, it was cash for honours that brought the cops to his door in the end. His claims to government transparency were as fake as his claims to an ethical foreign policy. His friendship with Silvio Berlusconi was perhaps the biggest obscenity of them all. Faced with the death of David Kelly he managed to turn the Hutton Inquiry into a witch hunt of the BBC.
Blair’s legacy? Well, Tony saved the Tory Party from oblivion through his failure to deliver the socialist goods. He also enabled the BNP to appear radical to the socially excluded white working class, by saying that the class war was over and proclaiming the free market inevitable. Bye Tony, and please don’t ask for a reference.
Tom Easton: Tony Blair’s persistence in bringing peace to Northern Ireland will be seen as one of the few achievements in a largely wasted decade. Elsewhere his record is one of administrative incompetence in almost every field. The Labour Party is massively in debt. It is dead as a progressive political force in much of the country where it has descended into being largely a payroll shadow of an organisation kept going by those holding, or aspiring to, national, local and quango office.
The May elections have left it very weak in most parts of the country and any organic link the party had with local communities as a focus for protest and reform has gone. Those progressive instincts are now largely directed against Labour, from opposition to city academies to foreign policy, from the rapid extension of surveillance to Labour’s scandalous penal and housing policies.
The City and arms industry have been hugely encouraged, with the inevitable impact on inequality and corruption of the legal process. Much of the economy is now in overseas ownership – from US-owned local newspapers to continental control of our utilities. It is difficult to imagine a British foreign policy that is not heavily influenced by the interests of the United States or Israel, with a dangerously free hand given to the Russian oligarchs in London.
Revitalising the country that ran the world’s largest empire was never going to be easy. Blair fluffed the challenge and we are paying a heavy price.
Tony Frewin: Tony Blair? Easy! Fifty per cent fool, fifty per cent knave.
Terry Hanstock: I underestimated Blair. His first interviews after the Tories were ejected in 1997 revealed little depth and even less in the way of intellectual argument – a veritable hollow man who would be replaced within a year or two. Or so I assumed. However, instead of realising that the electorate at large would have voted in a monkey up a stick as Prime Minister if it meant ridding Downing Street of Major, the Labour Party made a fatal error. Believing that its 187 seat majority was entirely due to Blair, it stood back as its ideals, beliefs and principles were relentlessly whittled away by the deadly combination of Blairism, modernisation and reform.
Blair’s legacy? A country with its public services denigrated and run into the ground; a government mired in accusations of sleaze; civil liberties that are at crisis point; and two main political parties each virtually indistinguishable from the other.
Blair’s tribute to his predecessor, John Major, highlighted ‘…his dignity and courage…and the manner of his leaving – the essential decency of which is the mark of the man.’ Would that Blair had followed Major’s example.
Robert Henderson: Blair’s personality is essentially adolescent. In his speeches he emotes in the manner of a particularly embarrassing fifth former, while his policies are almost always ill-thought out, frequently vainglorious and often downright dangerous: think Iraq, think throwing money at public services without any coherent idea of how the money should be used.
The man displays many of the classic behaviours of a psychopath: lying without embarrassment, the frequent promotion of himself by himself as trustworthy and moral(‘Trust me, I’m a pretty straight sort of guy’), the constant re-writing of history to absolve himself of blame (nothing is ever Blair’s fault).
My favourite Blair lie occurred in June 2005 when he said at PMQs that the British EU rebate ‘is not up for negotiation, period’ and two days later went to Brussels to negotiate part of it away. The man did not even blush.
He is one of the controlling tendency. Blair’s time in office has seen the systematic destruction of the necessary freedoms of a free society. This he has achieved through an avalanche of oppressive anti-terror and crime and disorder laws and politically correct legislation such as the Race Relations Amendment (2001) Act.
Blair has done to the Labour Party what Thatcher did to the Conservatives, hollowed it out by throwing away all its traditional values. We are now left with a political system in which the only two parties capable of forming a government stand for nothing beyond the desire for office.
Adrian Kozlowski: A handful of vignettes:
1998 — Blair’s photo in a local newspaper headlining Desert Fox, Iraq. An old man comments, ‘That Blair’s a big head. He thinks he’s Winston Churchill.’
2004 — An interview on CNN as the Iraqi insurgency intensifies. The popular nationalist cleric al-Sadr gets mentioned: ‘Well of course he’s a fanatic,’ responds Blair in tones of snobbish disdain. This native (three family members murdered by Saddam) frustrating perhaps the democratic mission of the white man?
Blair reading out a speech to teachers promulgating ‘payment by results’, his minister in attendance. One remark, unreported, remains: ‘You are here to serve the pupils, not the unions.’
Blair at a London school using a pupil audience on which to launch his election campaign. ‘Pack of lies’ comments one pupil to a reporter afterwards.
Education ran through the era, but never as a value in itself, Blair apparently believing that his reforms would release untapped talent throughout English schools; though with typical vanity he once reflected that his privileged background had enabled him to ‘fulfil his potential’. ‘Ambition’ perhaps? Ironically, he never needed to understand or think through anything, or recognise and attend to historical truth. He often fell back on a snub-proof rectitude, as ‘doing the right thing’ became his fail-safe.
An epitaph? Best taken from a recent Guardian interview with Seamus Mallon. He eventually realised that Blair’s words were worthless. An unforgiving contempt alone remained: ‘This man with a moral dimension to everything who applied morality to nothing.’
Simon Matthews:
The good things
- Implementation of a minimum wage.
- Parliamentary legislation greatly restricting bloods sports.
- Much higher investment in schools and hospitals – whatever caveats one could make about the delivery method.
- Hereditary Peers removed from the House of Lords.
- Scottish and Welsh devolution.
- An end to the apparently interminable problems and violence in Northern Ireland.
- A huge compensation scheme for those who once worked in the mining industry.
- Bringing back the railway infrastructure into public ownership, albeit by a very roundabout route.
And the man himself? An effective media friendly leader, the most successful in electoral terms that the Labour Party has ever seen.
The bad things
- Britain remains disengaged from Europe. The economy (and manufacturing) is thus hampered by higher interest rates than the other major EU players.
- Many of the increases in spending in domestic policy have been absorbed by imperfect and costly delivery mechanisms – PFI etc.
- An obsession with having a primary relationship with the US despite the UK doing very little trading with that country and being in a different continental block.
- The UK being seen by many other nations as a US proxy state.
- The UK no longer having the capacity to act independently in military or naval terms.
- A fixation with copying inappropriate US domestic policies resulting in large areas of our cities now resembling their US counterparts….depressed, low grade, deregulated and populated by a permanent underclass who no longer matter – they don’t vote, (or aren’t registered to vote), don’t work, have no qualifications and live in a criminal twilight.
- Failing to run public transport as an organised, planned and publicly owned endeavour.
And the man himself? Agreeing (in a restaurant in Islington in 1994) that another person – Gordon Brown – would effectively be the real prime minister wielding huge power over all government policy and strategy whilst Blair concentrated on a presentational, presidential role.
Scott Newton: Tony Blair’s legacy is mixed. There have been some good developments – devolution, public investment in health, education and transport (despite all the moans of the Tory press there have been gains here and it is impossible to see how they would have come about under any other administration). The government has put more money into environmental improvement than any of its predecessors and its role in campaigning for co-ordinated international action has been honourable. There have been redistributive social reforms. The record on economic growth is respectable. The UK does seem a better country to live in than it was in 1997.
However, there are two disastrous legacies. First, there has been a sad intellectual and political failure. When Blair was elected, many genuinely, if naively hoped there would be a real shift to a new political-economic culture: one which refused to buy into the free market orthodoxy of the post 1979 period. But the tax system remains inequitable and achievement in the public sector is assessed on the basis of criteria derived from neo-liberal dogma. Labour’s social democratic achievements have occurred almost covertly, actions and rhetoric often flying in different directions. The result? No thanks from the Right and a political discourse still dominated by Thatcherite claptrap. A magnificent, once in a generation opportunity has been lost by the British Left.
The second disaster? Iraq. This has been a catastrophe for British society and foreign policy and Blair will never live it down even if he lasts as long as Methuselah.
Tim Pendry: Perspective is everything. If some things happen, Mr. Blair is a statesman. If other things happen, he is the man who destroyed his party and contributed to the slaughter of thousands in faraway lands.
To political scientists, he will be a case study in how power can be centralised on a clique. How did he take over successively a party and a state? How did he squander an opportunity to make good use of that power in pursuit of a fantasy of global liberalism that has nearly exhausted the resources of the military?
How do you judge a politician? By saving a country from threat? By changing a country for good or ill? By maintaining a steady ship in difficult economic or political conditions? Blair identified threats in every direction but his actions in support of a renegade American administration have brought the threat of violence closer to our country than at any time since the 1970s.
Today, Great Britain is largely the same country he inherited, only the poor are poorer, the social infrastructure is creaking and its underclass is turning to gangsters for protection. All we have acquired in return are cod progressivism, excessive regulation in people’s lives and political correctness.
The ship of state sailed safely through economic waters but this owes nothing to Blair. Gordon Brown handled the difficult part of state craft, economic success. Blair just wandered off to play with the boys’ toys of foreign policy and military adventurism. Worse, he put us all in danger.
Bernard Porter: A historian should never try to second-guess future historians, but I imagine that Iraq will always be Blair’s albatross. Of course he was a liberal imperialist, as former Labour leaders have been (Attlee, for example), believing it was the duty of the great powers of the world to put right the problems of the lesser ones. It rarely works, for reasons another Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, was wise to. (See my Critics of Empire, pp. 185-9.) In Blair’s case the failure was all the greater because he felt he had to hitch his idealism to the American Neo-cons’ utopian imperialism (a different animal entirely), mixed with Bush’s sheer stupidity and Cheney’s devilry. As a result, his main legacy is at least a share in those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, American and British lives lost. For what it’s worth, I see him less as a villain in this than as a holy fool. But holy fools can be just as dangerous.
Otherwise I guess future historians will credit him with some positive achievements. He won elections. He was admirably diplomatic – very un-Bushlike – over Ireland. There were some small social advances under him. For the rest, let us give him the benefit of the doubt. He might not have been able to do much more even if he had tried. The global march of consumerism, riding roughshod over democracy, looks inexorable for the moment. No-one can resist it. (That’s being charitable.) But it is Iraq that will probably hang round Blair’s neck in the history books.
Corinne de Souza: Related remaining strands of the prime minister’s ten years in office include: Iraq; the undeclared neo-cons embedded in British politics; the religious ‘sensitivities’ dumped on this country. The first is unforgivable. The second have yet to find a home now neo-con originators in the US reel from a Congress under new management. The third denies the secular British public representation, even as the misogynistic, homophobic and bigoted religious are over-represented. Unchecked immigration floods the country with predominantly Roman Catholic young, just as, to curry favour with Islam, the pope reinserts hatred of ‘the Jews’ into the third Station of the Cross at Easter. The prime minister presents himself with a Koran under his arm, collapsing modernisers, moderates and the secular. Meanwhile, in an attempt to understand its Middle Eastern context, he consults Asian Muslims such as Sir Ghulam Noon – which is a bit like listening to Roman Catholic Chinese in order to understand Irish ones. He says nothing about Israel’s bombing of the Lebanon, feeding anti-semitism further; and, yet again, condoning the destruction of a Muslim country, as well as condemning the Middle East’s remaining Christians to even greater peril.
The prime minister was a culturally and internationally ignorant man. Other people, including Britain’s beautiful young arriving home in boxes at RAF Lyneham, have paid the price.
Peter Watson: A man must be guided by firm principles if he is to make choices and decisions that result in a coherent life. Mr Blair’s sole principle seems to be whatever will enhance his popularity and approval at any given moment. This results in a lack of cohesion and good sense, as we now see all too clearly.
Seeking popularity above all, he is ending his term of office the least popular Prime Minister we’ve had. He has shown just how ill-suited he is to leadership, because having no fixed principles by which he governs his own life, he is naturally incapable of setting an effective agenda for his colleagues.
Unfortunately, he has by default, set an unintended and unspoken agenda: use your present position to feather your own nest. All this, whilst the country goes to hell, because he has no plan and no idea how to bring about what he claims to want. Worse still, he believes that which he has spoken has come to pass. There are names for this condition: delusion and megalomania.
The result is he has become overwhelmingly disliked, distrusted and unpopular. Refusing to take responsibility for his own actions, he has a government full of people who do not expect to do so either. He has been instrumental in wrecking the Britain we have known and loved, and the fingers of his government reach like sinister tentacles into areas of our lives that have hitherto been no concern of any government.
Because he has no idea of his purpose beyond power for its own sake, he clung to the trappings when an honourable man would long ago have resigned and left governance to his successor.