If we use the war to rubbish the former PM's record, we brush aside the still relevant dilemmas he grappled with at home
Tony Blair inevitably cuts a much-diminished figure these days. It is eight years since he last fought an election, and nearly six since he left British politics. He, we and the world have all moved on, thank goodness. Partly by choice, partly through circumstance, he leads an existence remote from the world the rest of us still inhabit. He no longer matters much in the dynamics of British politics, and the remoteness means this is unlikely to change.
The 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion has inevitably thrust Blair briefly back into the national conversation. Even so, his Newsnight interview on Iraq this week felt an oddly ghostly affair, with Blair going through the motions of the old arguments, a bit like an ageing rock star rehashing his back catalogue, but unable and unwilling to say the one thing he should say – that he got Iraq wrong. Doubtless the same thing will happen when the Chilcot inquiry finally sees the light of day.
In many respects it therefore feels perverse and even masochistic to write about Blair once again. Yet it needs to be done. Iraq may have been Blair's great mistake, failure, crime – choose whatever word you are most comfortable with – although it needs saying in passing that, judging by Tuesday's Newsnight special, there is a fair amount of good news coming out of Iraq these days, as well as the bad stuff. But it is wrong to allow Iraq to overshadow or corrupt everything else he did. It is lazy to say that because Blair was wrong about Iraq he was wrong about everything else, because actually he wasn't.
It is important to discuss Blair for three reasons. First, because the Blair era needs to be better understood historically. Second, much more importantly, because many of Blair's political choices and dilemmas still matter today and in the future. And, third, because it does no favours to any serious political project of the left to continue to behave as though Blair was simply unspeakable, and the alternatives obvious and straightforward. The only people who benefit from that closure of the mind are the conservatives of left and right.
The historical aspect of the Blair era matters because it has become fashionable to treat it merely as a continuum from the Thatcher era which preceded it. This simply was not true. The Blair era – and we are really talking here about the Blair-Brown era – was much more an attempt to reassert social values and new forms of solidarity in the aftermath of Thatcher than an attempt simply to embrace Thatcher's possessive individualism.
And it was widely understood by Labour, then and throughout the period of the Blair and Brown governments, as the only serious progressive strategy for the party. There wasn't a coherent alternative on offer and, even if there had been, not enough people would have voted for it.
There is also the matter of personalities. Does anyone think Labour would have succeeded better after 1994 under the leadership of John Prescott than Blair? Or Margaret Beckett than Blair? Or even Gordon Brown than Blair? I didn't think that then, and I don't think it now.
You can certainly argue that there was too much continuity in particular respects between the Thatcher and Blair eras. And too much caution, certainly. Within the confines of a newspaper column it is perhaps simplest to sum this up by saying that Blair never adequately fulfilled the slogan New Labour, New Britain which dominated Labour publicity in the runup to 1997. He did the New Labour bit. He was less successful with the New Britain bit.
There were lots of reasons for this. But that does not mean nothing was done, or that Blair and Brown merely managed the Thatcherite settlement in those 13 years. The depiction of the Thatcher and Blair eras as a continuum is mischievous. It is designed to say that we can forget about all that and get back to the old socialist verities of an industrial Britain that no longer exists and whose demise, in my view, made New Labour, or something like it, necessary – then as now.
This brings us to why Blair's choices and dilemmas still matter today and why they must not be dismissed as a discredited or shameful agenda. Of course, much has changed in the post-Blair years, above all as a result of the financial crisis, the decline of western economic growth and the pressure on low and middle-income households. But not everything has changed. And it hasn't changed in ways that makes the political task easier, as struggling centre-left parties across Europe are finding, most recently in Italy. Being against austerity is not enough. The centre-left has to have a reform agenda, too.
Yet no European progressive party can ignore the relative decline of the west or the hollowing of the industrial base which formed the context for the choices of the Blair years on things like education reform. No progressive party, today as then, can credibly promise Scandinavian levels of social services and public goods, especially on the basis of US levels of personal tax. With health, welfare and pensions budgets eating up so much of GDP, the only options are to improve productivity and modernise systems of delivery, as Blair tried to do. Just as socialism in one country failed in our grandparents' era, so social democracy in one country would fail in our own. Blair and Brown wrestled with these questions, week in, week out. And so must we. There is, as they say, no alternative.
No European progressive party can be blind, either, to the continuing decline of the old solidarities and cultural habits of the industrial era. These things aren't coming back, not in the old forms anyway. So Labour still has to modernise and to win parliamentary seats in places other than the old cities and former industrial heartlands. That still means the need to appeal to voters in southern England, in places like Eastleigh, in terms of the lives these voters actually live, just as Blair did. And it means recognising the need to make political compromises and coalitions too.
Excoriating Tony Blair is easy. But in the end it is both scurrilous and stupid. He got some things wrong and a lot of things right. To pretend that he was and is essentially beyond the pale turns politics into grandstanding. It makes the political dilemmas which face any centre-left leader into a permanent self-fulfilling narrative of failure and betrayal. And it ignores the complexity, thoughtfulness and nuance about the real world with which serious politics must engage and which, as it happens, most of the Newsnight audience displayed so well when discussing Iraq this week.
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