May 10th 2007
From The Economist print edition
For all the disappointments, posterity will look more kindly on Tony Blair than Britons do today.
FEW Britons, it seems, will shed a tear when Tony Blair leaves the stage on June 27th after a decade as prime minister, as he finally announced this week he would do. Opinion polls have long suggested that he is unpopular. On May 3rd local and regional elections gave voters a last chance to give Mr Blair a good kicking. They took it with both feet, handing power to Conservatives, Scottish Nationalists, Welsh nationalists, anybody but distrusted Labour. Most wish he had gone last year—an opinion shared by his likely heir, Gordon Brown, who now faces a mighty struggle against David Cameron's Tories.
Either Britons are an ungrateful lot, or Mr Blair deserves his shabby send-off for having delivered too little and disappointed too much. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.
You used to love me...
On most measures, Mr Blair has left Britain a better place than it was in 1997 (see article). Uninterrupted economic growth has made the average Briton substantially better off, even if the tax burden has risen. There are fewer tatty schools and run-down hospitals. Although many exams lack rigour, more children are getting respectable grades and going on to universities. Thanks to the minimum wage and tax credits for poor working families, the forces relentlessly pushing up income inequality under Margaret Thatcher have been blunted.
These things are measurable; less easy to prove, but just as valuable, are the ways in which Mr Blair has helped make Britain a more tolerant, more cosmopolitan place. There is a human-rights act now; civil partnerships for homosexuals are recognised. Self-government for Scotland, Wales and now even Northern Ireland has extended democracy: peace in Ulster must rank among Mr Blair's greatest successes (see article). Class matters less: the fact that the Tories are gaining popularity led by an Old Etonian is, strangely, a sign of progress.
Under Mr Blair, fusty old Britain has become an international exemplar of openness. Large-scale immigration, especially from the former communist countries of eastern Europe, has boosted the economy without triggering a serious backlash of resentment. Embracing globalisation, London has become one of the most dynamic cities in the world. Mr Blair has changed the debate in Europe (Nicolas Sarkozy is another right-winger in his debt—see article) and he has also done more than any other Western leader to force people to pay attention to climate change and poverty in Africa.
You can go through this list, adding asterisks and footnotes: on the economy, not enough credit goes to the Tories who came before Mr Blair; on immigration, for every happy Czech waitress in Covent Garden there are several angry Muslims in Leeds; on civil liberties, he helped gays but not prisoners or young louts. Still, Mr Blair has improved Britain, on balance, and he has usually stood on the side of liberal progress. This newspaper, for one, has no regrets in having supported him.
Why then does Mr Blair leave a sour taste in Britain—and not only in the mouths of the old socialist left and the xenophobic right? For millions of people, only one word is necessary: Iraq. But the disappointments go further back than that.
This, after all, was the most gifted politician of his generation—certainly in Europe and (depending on your opinion of the foxier but less disciplined Bill Clinton) perhaps wider than that. Before coming to power Mr Blair already had one enormous achievement to his name: dragging the Labour Party to the electable centre. In 1997 he had not just a big parliamentary majority but a country that wanted what he wanted—an economy that combined the hard-won gains of Thatcherism with a greater emphasis on social justice and modernised public services. How could he fail?
By being astonishingly ill-prepared. In retrospect, it is hard to exaggerate the waste of Mr Blair's first term. Under the visionary rhetoric, the new government had little notion of how to improve public services, other than by dismantling its predecessor's successful attempts to raise their quality by injecting more competition. With one or two exceptions (among them primary schools), more harm than good was done to health and education. Unable to show solid progress, Mr Blair fell back on the techniques of opposition, spinning the news to convey an impression of activity and progress. His popularity continued to defy gravity, but authority was squandered, and public cynicism grew.
In his second term Mr Blair did eventually work out a model for public sector reform—one that involved refining the internal-market policies pioneered by the Tories, but with far more money from the state. But by then September 11th and soon Iraq were upon him. From the invasion in 2003, with his party squabbling and Mr Brown all too often sniping from the sidelines, public-service reform lost momentum. To his credit, Mr Blair tried to push ahead, risking his job over variable university tuition fees, for instance. But the fact is that, although services have got better, they are still worse than they should be; and a lot of cash has been thrown away. Britons will rue those wasted years as much as Mr Blair now does.
The Bagdad blues
By contrast, on Iraq, the source of so much misfortune, history may be a little kinder to Mr Blair than his countrymen currently are. Nobody denies the manifest disaster of the past four years. It would be convenient for supporters of the war, such as this newspaper, to claim we were tricked into it by Mr Blair; convenient, but unfair. He did indeed put more weight on the scanty intelligence evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction than it could bear. But there is little doubt that he (and many others) believed in it at the time. Nor was it a bad thing to want to rid the world of a brutal tyrant. After all, Mr Blair had built the American-led coalition that ended the genocidal career of Slobodan Milosevic; and the invasion of Afghanistan had at first been a success.
As for the catastrophic mismanagement thereafter, Mr Blair should have insisted on far more in terms of post-war planning. And, yes, a bolder friend of America might have publicly pushed for Donald Rumsfeld to have been removed, for the nightmarish Guantánamo Bay to be closed, for George Bush to have tried harder to create a Palestinian state. But the greater fault lies with Mr Bush for refusing to listen to somebody who plainly knew more about the Arab world and indeed terrorism than he did. Given that obstinacy, Mr Blair had two real choices: to leave Iraq and America to a still-worse fate; or to stay in, hoping to repair some of the damage Britain had helped cause. On balance he did the right thing.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Mr Blair is that neither Mr Brown nor Mr Cameron wishes to change fundamentally the course he has set. Both will stay in Iraq, for a while, and Afghanistan. Despite his initial scepticism, Mr Brown is unlikely to unpick Mr Blair's public-service reforms. Mr Cameron's popularity is based on occupying the Blairite centre ground.
If Margaret Thatcher, in much more testing times, gave the country what it needed, Mr Blair can at least claim to have given it much of what it wanted. It is unlikely that he will ever be thought of as the great prime minister he could have been. It is almost certain, however, that Mr Blair will come to be seen as a better one than he is today.
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Mr Tony Blair will step down after 10 years as prime minister of Britain. There are speculations that few Britons will be disappointed at his resignation. Many have criticised the efforts spent on Iraq, the over-enthusiastic help given to America and the lack of fulfilling his potential throughout the 10 years in office, amongst other things. However they have only seen the down sides of Mr Blair’s term in office. Few have bothered to realise the contributions that Mr Blair has done for Britain. Why is this so?
It is like viewing an art piece in an art gallery. There are many angles to view the painting from, but because it is right ahead of us, we look at it straight on. Perhaps, the painting is best viewed from the sides, but most people do not know that. And so one after another, looks at the painting straight on, finds it rather disappointing and dismisses it. How many people would have actually bothered to look at the painting from another angle after getting a disappointing first impression? Would you? This is what is happening in Briton. The most apparent thing people have noticed is the faults of Mr Blair. And therefore, without considering his contributions, they have criticised his faults. It is the same for most scenarios, even if we are criticised for the most minute things by our friends, teachers, parents or anyone. We never seem to be praised for our contributions but always criticised for our faults. While, from our own angle, we often blame the other party for criticising you without due justification, perhaps we should just look at it from yet another angle.
Instead of insisting that your painting looks perfect, if you were to edit your painting such that it looks equally beautiful straight on, as it does from the side, then how many more people would enjoy your painting? It is not just for the sake of others enjoyment, but that others actually appreciate your work and that gives you a sense of self-satisfaction. Mr Blair has done the same as well. Instead of always rejecting his people’s criticisms, he has made that effort to improve on them. It is this attitude that Mr Blair has that has allowed Briton to progress.
Sometimes, you may feel that the other party is not justified in criticising you. Yet, if you would to just bow down and accept their arguments, not for the sake of ending that argument, but because you agree with them, then it would give you that determination to prove to them that you have changed from your mistakes. Ultimately, if you can change your mistakes, even though it to you it may not be there, only you, yourself, would stand to benefit from it and become even better. The issue here is not whether you agree or not with other people’s arguments, but to accept it and change from it, whether it is true or not.
(494 words)
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