BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007

by ANTHONY SELDON (edt)

  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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