Heaven help us... Blair's considering a political comeback

Fretwired

ICBM said:

I'd put Major down as much less incompetent than Cameron. Heath is a bit before my time really so I'm not as sure about him - I was just a child when he was PM - but wasn't brilliant. Worse than Major definitely. Eden was extremely poor too (and was another Tory).

The point about Blair is that he was a strong, competent PM… who did an enormous amount of serious harm to the world in general and the country to an extent. He might not have been that bad as *our* PM, but from a global perspective he is.

The Iraq war is the single most catastrophic episode in British foreign policy since at least before WWII, if not much further back than that. The long-term damage is immeasurable, both for the region itself and also the impact it's had on Europe and Britain - it's led directly to the Syrian war and probably to the tension between the US, EU and Russia which resulted in the Ukraine war. Who knows where those will end.

And it was Blair's decision alone, in his one-to-one meeting with Dubya.

The Iraq war wouldn't have happened without support from the USA and corporate America. Blair can't be given all the blame. Cameron has done long term damage to the UK and basically lied at every turn. When the going got tough he simply jumped ship. The man's a grade A c**t.

ICBM

Fretwired said:

The Iraq war wouldn't have happened without support from the USA and corporate America. Blair can't be given all the blame.

I think it's the other way round - the war wouldn't have happened without Blair no matter how much Bush, Cheney and corporate America wanted it. The US was in the driving seat but knew they couldn't go it alone in the face of not having UN authorisation, and they needed a collaborator to give them some apparent legitimacy.

We'll probably never know for sure what was said between the two of them, but the evidence seems to be that Blair told Dubya that he would do whatever necessary to support the US.

Fretwired said:

Cameron has done long term damage to the UK and basically lied at every turn. When the going got tough he simply jumped ship. The man's a grade A c**t.

I'm not disagreeing with you there .

Gassage

'And tonight, we're proud to present Tony Blair with the Lifetime Self-Awareness award....
'

HAL9000

Surely Gordon Brown, even though he wasn't in the job for long, must rank as one of our worst prime ministers.

Evilmags

Can't really see any long term damage from Cameron that is not contingent on his preceding governments and the financial mess he inherited. Osbourne was a much more damaging figure. Brown's destruction of pension funds will have the hardest felt consequences of any domestic policy I suspect. Blair, in terms of international damage and war mongering is going to take some beating, but at the time people loved him. 

ICBM

HAL9000 said:

Surely Gordon Brown, even though he wasn't in the job for long, must rank as one of our worst prime ministers.

He certainly does. The main damage was probably done when he was Chancellor though.

Major now ranks as the best living former PM, which is a worrying reflection on the state of modern British politics.

Evilmags said:

Blair, in terms of international damage and war mongering is going to take some beating, but at the time people loved him. 

A lot of that is because by the end of Major, the country was so desperate to get rid of the Tories that anything Blair did was bound to be seen as an improvement. I admit to being one of those who voted for him in '97 - or technically for Alastair Darling, who was my MP at the time and lessens the guilt slightly.

In hindsight it wasn't a good decision to give Labour such an unassailable majority, although the consequences didn't really become obvious until his second term.

xSkarloey

There's a lot of revisionism going on here. 

The fact is that any judgement of Blair simply HAS to be nuanced, because he was in office so long. Iraq casts a long shadow which stretches far into future, but it is simply wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater and condemn his entire premiership. 

The domestic political agenda he pursued and policies enacted were not perfect. Ultimately he didn't properly follow though on the intentions  of  that first term, and a lot of social policy ended up less socially progressive and became Tory-lite.  But in terms of positive intention, and specific intervention in our society then Blair deserves- and will get in the longer run- more credit than he currently gets. But at the moment the Iraq debacle sours everything. 

(I speak as someone who hated the smarmy bastard from the first time I heard the 'tough on crime...' speech.)

Fretwired

Evilmags said:

Can't really see any long term damage from Cameron that is not contingent on his preceding governments. 

Brexit vote - it has divided the country and brought out the worst aspects of the Tory party which looks to me like a shambles.

Call me Dave boasted - "I'll go to Brussels and get the deal that's right for Britain." He thought he'd get some concessions so that he could have gone to the country and got a resounding Yes vote in the referendum.

He got the square root of bugger all and was forced into a referendum campaign that scrapped depths that not even Trump would go near. He said he'd stay on to steer the ship, but got into the first lifeboat and abandoned HMS UK the moment the iceberg with Brexit written on it hove into view. He supported Hunt and his various NHS reforms, brought in bedroom tax, cut the armed forces to the bone yet expected them to fight and gave his mates gongs.

Blaendulais

Blair was a strat player what do you expect? Would he have started a war if he was getting a decent humbucker tone - fuck no

ICBM

Fretwired said:

Brexit vote - it has divided the country and brought out the worst aspects of the Tory party which looks to me like a shambles.

Call me Dave boasted - "I'll go to Brussels and get the deal that's right for Britain." He thought he'd get some concessions so that he could have gone to the country and got a resounding Yes vote in the referendum.

He got the square root of bugger all and was forced into a referendum campaign that scrapped depths that not even Trump would go near. He said he'd stay on to steer the ship, but got into the first lifeboat and abandoned HMS UK the moment the iceberg with Brexit written on it hove into view. He supported Hunt and his various NHS reforms, brought in bedroom tax, cut the armed forces to the bone yet expected them to fight and gave his mates gongs.

And that's only some of it. There's also Libya, Syria (even though he thankfully failed to get direct involvement through the Commons), taking the Tories out of the centre-right grouping in the EU where he might actually have had some influence and into a far right group where he didn't, deceitfully offering the carrot of electoral reform but then rigging the choice to ensure it was voted down, privatising the Post Office too cheaply and letting corporate investors make a fat profit on it, stopping the third runway at Heathrow but failing to pick an alternative which means the ludicrous idea *still* hasn't been killed off completely, cancelling the Severn Barrage, subsidising wind farms, giving the go-ahead for fracking…

And I'm sure that's not even the end of it either.

Chalky

Skarloey said:

There's a lot of revisionism going on here. 

The fact is that any judgement of Blair simply HAS to be nuanced, because he was in office so long. Iraq casts a long shadow which stretches far into future, but it is simply wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater and condemn his entire premiership. 

The domestic political agenda he pursued and policies enacted were not perfect. Ultimately he didn't properly follow though on the intentions  of  that first term, and a lot of social policy ended up less socially progressive and became Tory-lite.  But in terms of positive intention, and specific intervention in our society then Blair deserves- and will get in the longer run- more credit than he currently gets. But at the moment the Iraq debacle sours everything. 

(I speak as someone who hated the smarmy bastard from the first time I heard the 'tough on crime...' speech.)

Wis'd. Blair was very popular in his early years, but the revisionists tend to wipe that out. Major, Brown and Cameron never came close to those levels of popularity or pride. Shame he went mad...

xSkarloey

Chalky said:

Skarloey said:

There's a lot of revisionism going on here. 

The fact is that any judgement of Blair simply HAS to be nuanced, because he was in office so long. Iraq casts a long shadow which stretches far into future, but it is simply wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater and condemn his entire premiership. 

The domestic political agenda he pursued and policies enacted were not perfect. Ultimately he didn't properly follow though on the intentions  of  that first term, and a lot of social policy ended up less socially progressive and became Tory-lite.  But in terms of positive intention, and specific intervention in our society then Blair deserves- and will get in the longer run- more credit than he currently gets. But at the moment the Iraq debacle sours everything. 

(I speak as someone who hated the smarmy bastard from the first time I heard the 'tough on crime...' speech.)

Wis'd. Blair was very popular in his early years, but the revisionists tend to wipe that out. Major, Brown and Cameron never came close to those levels of popularity or pride. Shame he went mad...

@chalky We can call it 'madness' of a kind. When he was at his worst I used to call him a zealot. 

If I'm playing armchair pyschology, I'd say Blair had a messiah complex. He wanted to do good, but he thought he had all the answers. Like Cameron, Blair was guilty of bouncing ideas of very, very few people who acted like a brains trust. 

I think in practice it led to social policy which at its best worked well but all too often lacked the  detail to male meaningful structural change while ensuring good old fashioned VFM. 

My feeling is that he lacked proper, constructive opposition which would have forced him to hone and adapt policy through debate. There was no kind of meaningful dialectic in New Labour. It was very much a case of 'yes Tony, no Tony'. The Tories as an opposition were a joke like Corbyn's Labour are now. 


Maybe that's why Blair acted as he did over Iraq. Sierra Leone had gone well. Kosovo earned him some plaudits, and he was too used to getting his own way and not good at listening to people. 

RocknRollDave

Bucket said:

In other news, I agree with everything @ICBM has ever said re. Blair, and I'd suggest there's a serious case for him as our worst ever PM.

But....@ICBM has never even been PM...?

equalsql

Says it all really...

Evilmags

Don't think it matters much. Unless May gave him a lords seat I can't see him getting a platform. And I really can't see that happening. He is out of power and out of domestic admirers. If Shrillary won the presidency him or David Milliband would make good ambassadors.