Vladimir Putin, it is fair to say, was glad to see him go, but then Blair
would not have wanted it otherwise. What surprised even those close
to the Prime Minister was how, after all the disappointments, Blair
remained loyal to Bush.
The world stage was the place where he escaped the bitter rivalry with
Gordon Brown that so often scarred the government. Summitry, with its
mix of negotiation, strategic judgement and badinage, entirely suited
Blair’s temperament. Abroad was the opportunity to deploy his persuasive charm and display his thespian skills. The bargains at the Gleneagles
Summit between the world’s leading industrial nations on debt relief for
Africa and on action against climate change were personal as well as political triumphs.
The doctrine of humanitarian interventionism that Blair espoused at
the time of the Kosovo crisis was tarnished in the minds of some by the
experience of Iraq. Yet his 1999 Chicago speech remains one of the best
analyses of the implications of global interdependence and of the case for
liberal interventionism in defence of civilised standards. The United
Nations has reaffirmed that citizens must be afforded basic human rights
that transcend the sovereignty of nation states. The experience of Iraq
may well tempt politicians, in the US as well as Europe, to retreat into the
comfort zone of isolationism. The realities of global interdependence,
understood by Blair better than most of his peers, will force them to act
otherwise. The West can no longer ignore chaos and inhumanity beyond
its borders.
The bitter debate about the decision to join George W. Bush in removing Saddam Hussein, of course, will rage for many years yet. That the subsequent conflict inflicted terrible bloodshed on Iraq was self-evident. So
too was the startling incompetence of the Bush administration in the
conduct of what was supposed to be the peace. Yet the commonplace
charge that the Prime Minister lied and cheated Britain into an illegal war
by falsifying evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction failed the test
of myriad independent inquiries.
Blair’s mistake was rather to invest too much in the significance of
NATO’s success in Kosovo. The victory against Slobodan Milosevic, he
concluded, could be repeated in Iraq. But his war to topple Saddam was
not the same as Bush’s war. Blair saw in the removal of Saddam an extension of the doctrine he had enunciated at the time of Kosovo: a determination to uphold the will of the international community. The US
President had something quite different in mind – a raw demonstration
of American power that defied the spirit of the same international rules
Blair had wanted to strengthen. The British Prime Minister never
resolved this contradiction. Nor did he properly understand that in
joining the US in a war of choice, he assumed responsibility without
power. From the beginning his own reputation was thus a hostage to US
hubris.
The central assumption of Blair’s foreign policy – that Britain serves as
a natural bridge between Europe and North America – buckled under the
weight of the divisions in Europe about Iraq. Forced to choose, Blair
sided with Washington. Yet in other respects he could claim some
progress. Britain no longer sits on the margins of influence of the
European Union. It is now something approaching a ‘normal’ member of
the club, even if Brown denied Blair his wish to join the single currency.
As far as Europe goes, the big failure was at home: the Prime Minister
never properly confronted voters with the necessary compromises
demanded by engagement, and influence, in Europe.
Historians will argue too about his attitude to the extreme Islamism
that brought the destruction of New York’s Twin Towers and subsequent
attacks in London and cities across three continents. Faster than most to
grasp the geopolitical consequences of 9/11, there has been too much of
the clash of civilisations in his response to radical Islamism. Right to insist
this will be a long struggle, waged both at home and at a distance, he was
too ready to see the many difficult conflicts in the Muslim world as part of
a single ideological confrontation between political Islam and the West.
What stands above all the reckonings – positive and negative – of
Blair’s premiership is the extent to which he became the reference point
for the nation’s politics. Like Margaret Thatcher, he filled almost all the
available political space. For all the troubles that beset his many cabinets,
his colleagues were essentially supporting characters, and quite often
bystanders, in the drama. Even Brown, a formidable politician, and quite
often Blair’s only real opponent, spent much of the decade in the
shadows. Blair, in other words, can blame no one else for the judgement
of history. Iraq will always cast its shadow, but that judgement will be a
great deal kinder than most of the first drafts that now confront him.
Conclusion
The net Blair effect, 1994–2007
This short concluding chapter will attempt to answer just two questions:
what did Blair achieve and why did his achievement come so late in his
premiership? Tony Blair’s first three years as party leader while in opposition (1994–97) had been principally directed to sweeping the party clear
of unpopular and outdated ‘Old’ Labour policies, on the economy, tax,
trade unions, defence and Northern Ireland, and then embedding the
‘New’ Labour style and policies. The hard thinking on policy was put in
not by him, but by Gordon Brown. For this was to be a very different kind
of premiership to anything previously known in British history: to a significant extent it would be shared, with Brown being primarily responsible for economic and welfare policy and Blair responsible for the rest. The
‘rest’ did not initially amount to much. But Blair did benefit from four
legacies from John Major: a strong economy to provide surpluses to fund
increases in spending, embryonic work taking Thatcher’s reforms into
the public services, Northern Ireland moving in the direction of peace,
and the Maastricht opt-out, which made his European policy viable.
In his first term, (1997–2001), Blair’s principal achievement, shared
with Brown and Peter Mandelson, came at its very outset: the electoral
victory with a majority of 179. The remarkable fact for Blair personally
was quite how bare the first term was of personal domestic success,
beyond providing the stable platform for others to achieve. Constitutional reform (including devolution to Scotland and Wales), economic
vitality and welfare reform were the achievements principally of others,
with the legacy of John Smith and the work of Derry Irvine primarily
responsible for the first, and Brown for the latter. The Good Friday
Agreement in 1998 was Blair’s main domestic achievement, while his
bold decisions to deploy British troops in Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra
Leone in 2000 were his chief foreign achievements. In Chicago in April
1999, he outlined his philosophy justifying military
intervention in sovereign countries on humanitarian grounds, which later underpinned the
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the most important speech of
his premiership. Towards the end of the first term, No. 10 developed a
narrative which was that the first term was merely ‘laying the foundations’ for radical reform to follow after a ‘historic’ second election victory.
But as I stated at the end of The Blair Effect in 2001: ‘The edifice may
prove more difficult to erect than the foundations to lay.’
The second term (2001–5) began in June with a 167 majority for
Labour, with honours shared equally between Blair and Brown. At home,
Blair achieved more himself in the second term, despite his authority
being weaker, and Brown more obstructive, than in his first term. He
extended choice and competitiveness unevenly into education and
health. The two most controversial pieces of legislation which passed
with wafer-thin majorities were to introduce variable top-up fees for universities and foundation hospitals, which was much watered down by the
Treasury. He invested great personal energy in law and order, and particularly in immigration and asylum, with some positive results. After the
cap on spending came off after 1999, huge investment began to be
pumped into the public services, especially the NHS, and he insisted that
extra money should be matched by reform. Abroad, his first term successes were not matched. His decisive leadership on the world stage in the
days following 9/11 appeared vindicated by initial military success in
Afghanistan. Convinced of the threat to world peace from WMD and that
Saddam could not continue to flout the UN, and in order to stand with
the US, he went to war willingly against Iraq, but the war soon turned
sour. He invested considerable capital and time in establishing a relationship with the Bush administration every bit as close as he had with
Clinton before January 2001. But for what? Despite Bush committing
himself to a ‘two-state’ solution in June 2002 and the ‘road map’ in April
2003, he was unable to persuade the Bush administration on the Middle
East Peace Process, which he saw as critical to winning the ‘ideas war’ in
Iraq. By the end of the second term, his relationship with Bush and the
lack of apparent gain to Britain damaged him greatly.
The second term stands out as a period of disappointment in many
areas: little was achieved on transport after Brown made his opposition
clear to road pricing and to increasing expenditure. Constitutional
reform, including to the House of Lords, local government and regionalism, all failed to make headway, while his proposals in mid-2003 to
reform the Lord Chancellor’s department and create a Supreme Court,
were damaged by his chronic ineffectiveness at managing reshuffles.
Northern Ireland stood still. In Europe he agreed an unfavourable CAP
, –
budget deal in 2002, and he failed in 2003 for a second time (the first was
in late 1997) to convince Brown of the case for Britain joining the euro
(Brown was right: Britain did better by not joining). His principal
second-term achievement came in mid-2004 when he prevented the federalist Guy Verhofstadt from becoming President of the EU Commission,
and secured in his place the free-market José Manuel Barroso, and his
push on ‘enlargement’ to Eastern Europe.
The gains from reforms to public services were far from evident, and
many questioned whether they were right. I concluded the volume on the
second Blair government by saying that Blairism had yet to establish
itself, and consisted to date of a ‘crazy salad’, mixing traditional Labourite
beliefs in high spending with a Harold Wilson belief in managerialism
and a neo-Thatcherite antenna to markets. The book was nearly subtitled A Failed Government? It was a fair question to pose.
Blair’s third term (2005–7) was his most successful. This is paradoxical,
given that his authority was at its weakest of the three terms and he had to
cope with Brown at his most rampant. It began with a general election
victory that delivered a majority of sixty-six, which he tried to win on his
own, although he was forced to bring Brown in as joint leader in the final
three weeks of the campaign. The unpopularity of Iraq and the related
issue of trust damaged the party badly. Yet, in the space of just two years,
Blair achieved far more than in his earlier two terms, with reform extended
across the public services: pushing further competition and choice in the
NHS and schools, with academies reaching a critical mass and a postcomprehensive system established in secondary schools; reforming pensions in the teeth of implacable opposition from the Treasury; welfare
reform, notably to incapacity benefit; pushing ahead on nuclear energy
and modernising Britain’s nuclear deterrent; and reform in criminal
justice. The historic accord between Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams and the
DUP’s Ian Paisley in May 2007 saw the completion of the Northern Ireland
Peace Process heralded nine years before with the Good Friday Agreement.
Over that time, Northern Ireland became less of a ‘problem’ for Britain,
with peace and prosperity slowly returning to the streets of Ulster. In this
term, Blair took the Thatcherite project forward as far as it was politically
possible to push it. Overall he had not repudiated any of Thatcher’s policies
(bar the first-term rowing back on foundation schools and GP fundholding): her privatisations remained and were even added to; no ground
of any significance was given on trade union reform; and PFI was extended.
In Europe, the third term saw Blair making decisive progress, aided
by the disappearance of his arch-rivals Jacques Chirac and Gerhard
Schroeder, and their replacement by Angela Merkel in 2005 and Nicolas
Sarkozy in early 2007, with whom he was far more in tune personally and
politically. Blair’s defining moment was his speech to the European
Parliament in June 2005 which set out a new agenda for the EU: less
obsessed by its inner workings and more committed to economic and
energy reform. Skilfully using the accession of the Eastern European
countries which boosted the EU’s membership from fifteen to twentyfive, Blair oversaw a shifting of gravity away from the traditional powerbase of France, Germany and the three ‘Benelux’ countries. At the
Gleneagles G8 in July 2005, he successfully pushed his chosen topics of
Africa and climate change; a measure of his success was how much of the
agenda Merkel continued with at her G8 summit at Heiligendamm in his
final days as Prime Minister. Blair’s achievements at Gleneagles and
during the EU Presidency in 2005 contrasted starkly with his leadership
of the G8 and EU during the British Presidencies at Birmingham and
Cardiff in 1998. He achieved an acceptable deal for Britain at his final EU
Council on 2 June 2007. Iraq and Afghanistan never came right for Blair,
however, and the former cast a dark cloud over his entire premiership.
B
lair’s ten years saw an economic resurgence. The policies were
Brown’s but Blair was the guarantor of the political and social climate
which permitted his social democratic government to function without
deterring wealth creation and financial investment in Britain. Credit too
is due to Blair for his assurance as a national leader, after Princess Diana’s
death, 9/11 or the 7/7 bomb attacks on London, or in helping win the
Olympics for London in 2012. Central government was modernised and
geared towards delivering policy, often in the face of strong opposition
from the traditional civil service. However, taken together, Blair fell short
of leading the ‘great radical reforming government’ which he had. Few
prime ministers, and none from Labour, were blessed with such unrivalled opportunities, electoral, political and economic. Only in 2006–7
did Blair’s agenda begin to crystallise as a coherent body of reform. But
will his achievements endure?
Great prime ministers need to establish legacies that live on. This is
where contemporary judgements are at their most provisional. It is not
only Blair’s Iraq legacy that is still wide open. So too is his ‘war on terrorism’, Afghanistan, climate change policy, and his handling of the Muslim
question. It is yet to be shown whether his reforms to public services will
endure and produce lasting benefits, and whether the extra money
pumped in since 2000 will have proved of little lasting benefit. Britain is
certainly a more economically competitive country in 2007 than it was in
, –
1997, and in some ways it is more socially just and tolerant too. But
longer-term analysis will be needed before one can fully measure the
impact of Blair on Britain. It is thus not fully clear how he will look in
twenty-five years.
What of his mistakes? His greatest weakness was his reluctance to stand
up to powerful figures. Essentially a kind and courteous man, he had
neither the toughness nor the ruthlessness required for a truly great
leader. His reshuffles were often shambolic and he was not always a good
judge of character. He was at his weakest in standing up to President
Bush, to the exasperation of many in his entourage. He was deeply
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