Thursday, 10th May 2007

The Tony Blair decade

Ten years is a long time in politics

by Christopher G D Tipper <chris.tipper@hotmail.co.uk>

Revision History
Revision	Date
1.1	Sunday, 16th September 2007
	Mention was added of Tony Blair's achievement in Northern Ireland

Tony Blair holds ice-cream (c) Press Association

TONY BLAIR is set to announce his resignation today, after ten years in office. It seems appropriate to look over the last ten years and review his achievements.

Broadly speaking New Labour has presided over rising prosperity, rising economic inequality and declining social mobility. State education has seen an avalanche of legislative initiatives which seem to have resulted in lower standards of numeracy and literacy amongst school leavers and paradoxically witnessing an unprecedented increase in University admissions. “Grade inflation” has been a regular refrain with each year’s release of GCSE and A-level results. Children complain that schools have become exam factories with less and less education and more and more prescription by central government of the content of lessons.

Blair has also presided since 2001 over an unprecedented spending binge on the National Health Service (NHS), whilst reform has been piecemeal. The salary bill has increased by 60%, waiting times have reduced, but there is little evidence of improved treatment outcomes and stories in the media have perplexingly revolved around funding crises and the rationing of care.

Blair was originally keen on taking Britain into the euro. However, Chancellor Brown very skilfully sabotaged the project by conceiving five economic tests that were carefully specious and probably unattainable. There was an argument about a referendum (which looked set to be unwinnable for the Government) and then the Treasury published its verdict. An excellent example of the British Government closing ranks and kicking an unpopular policy into the long grass. It is interesting that the exchange rate has barely budged in almost three years, as if there is an agenda to revive the issue when the tides of public opinion shift, if they do.

Other features of the last ten years have been the rise of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). This is an illiberal measure to control disruptive teenagers and bolshie grandmothers.

The last ten years have also seen several examples of petty-minded government like the fox-hunting ban. This involved a lot of furious class envy and the passing of legislation that seems to be rather toothless and ineffectual. Perhaps that is for the best.

Then we have had the steady persecution of smokers, with a ban on the practise in working places and pubs coming into force on 1st July. Cigarette prices are now astronomical, with their impact falling disproportionately on the poorest members of society. This is apparently what New Labour thinks about social equity.

The rest of the changes we have had under Tony Blair have been instigated at the behest of his colleague, Gordon Brown. We have had a £5bn per year tax raid on pensions with the abolition of tax relief on share dividends. This seems to have contributed to a crisis of funding for pensions to the tune of £100bn over ten years and a closing of numerous schemes, though the dot-com crash and actuarial changes also contributed to the weakening of pension funds. The Bank of England has been cast loose with the creation of the Monetary Policy Committee, but its independence has not been fully tested. And the UK tax code has ballooned to over 9300 pages, longer even than India’s and the introduction of a complex and costly system of tax credits.

Perhaps when the time comes to write the history books one achievement of the Blair government that will stand out is the Good Friday Peace Agreement and what seems to be the end of the centuries long saga of communal strife in Northern Ireland. The effort to co-opt Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists with the carrot of power-sharing and the stick of reforming the Ulster Constabulary certainly seems to be working. Northern Ireland now has its own devolved powers from Westminster, and the Catholics and the Protestants are finally settling their disputes through dialogue rather than through the barrel of the gun. The fact that this has been achieved with the liberal use of economic redevelopment grants from central government (the public sector accounts for 60% of Northern Ireland’s GDP) should not detract from the real progress that has been made. The dynamism of the Republic’s own economy to the south following EU-inspired liberalisation was also probably not lost on the various factions in Northern Ireland.

When the time comes to examine Tony Blair’s legacy the war in Iraq will loom large. It does seem that he did actually believe the flawed Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). From my own point of view the Intelligence looked rather implausible and I remember remarking such back in 2003. It turned out to have been a complete fabrication and I think history will comment on Blair’s credulity in this regard (although he was by no means alone, and John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister was particularly outspoken). And I am still perplexed that this centre-left politician should be so in-thrall to a Republican President, and I feel that history has not had the final word on the true nature of the understanding that must have existed between Tony Blair and George Bush.

However, we now have to live with the facts on the ground, and the consequences of premature withdrawal are not properly understood by Tony Blair’s critics. A failed state in the heart of the oil producing region of the Middle East would suck in all the actors in the region and Iraq could be the spark that sets off a regional conflagration. We cannot fail in Iraq and in that sense I support the US Administration’s current ‘surge’ to crush the insurgency.

I don’t believe that it will be possible to draw a definitive judgement on the original decision to invade Iraq for another decade. It is quite possible that the Iraqis will rescue themselves and that Iraq will be an economically stable polity in a decade. If so, George Bush will have been vindicated. With a long history of political repression it is probably not surprising that Iraqis are unused to settling political disputes peacefully through the ballot box. The insurgency is as much a legacy of Saddam Hussein’s brutal reign as it is a comment on American interference. Let us hope that reason prevails. Stop

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