WP, Dionne: "...deep sadness that Tony Blair tarnished a formidable legacy."

[DeepModem Mom]

A Legacy Overshadowed
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, May 11, 2007; Page A19

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's announcement that he's stepping down won't quell the anger felt among so much of the antiwar left. But my own reaction is a deep sadness that he tarnished a formidable legacy.

As Blair exits, beleaguered by the unpopularity of the war in Iraq that he championed, it's almost impossible to remember the excitement and energy he called forth 10 years ago when he and his Labor Party won their landslide victory.

The mid-1990s were a joyful time to be on a center-left that seemed to be leaving the old conservatism in the dust. Blair and Bill Clinton represented a charmed and charming reformist future that would take us on a Third Way "beyond" -- a big word at the time -- both the "old left" and the "new right." Surprisingly, London and Washington were replacing Stockholm and Paris as centers of the democratic left. The word "socialism" was out, but "community" was in. "Collectivism" was replaced by the smoother word "solidarity."

Everything about Blair's project was "new" (he relabeled his venerable party New Labor) and "modern" (a word used so much that New Labor started to sound like a Scandinavian furniture store).

Labor's 1997 pop campaign anthem, "Things Can Only Get Better," by D:Ream, was cloying to some. But as the astonishing returns rolled in on May 1, the lyrics blaring at New Labor's victory celebration seemed perfectly appropriate to the exhaustion of British conservatism and to the sense of hope Blair inspired.

What Blair built in his pre-Iraq days was not the Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land imagined by the poet William Blake but something more workaday: generally competent government, steady growth built on reasonably orthodox economic policies, fiscal responsibility, some expansion of public services, a rather serious war on poverty....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/10/AR2007051001810.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[indepat]

1. As one of the first to on the DU board to proffer the Iraq war would bring Tony down, was only wrong

by three years or so.

[glitch]

2. Tarnished? You can polish tarnished. The word he looked for and missed is trashed.

Beyond recovery.

[disndat]

3. Now onward and upward

to follow Maggie Thatcher and John Major on the board of the Carlyle Group.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. Yep -- I'm assuming Tony is going to be a very rich man. nt

[BlackHawk706867]

5. Yep, it's really unfortunate that Tony met GWB and fell for his BS...

I still think basically Tony is a very nice guy, and I'm sure down the road we will find out that he is now devastated by his decision to fall in step with the "Devil"!

ww

[LeftishBrit]

6. Not sure about this - Tony is much cleverer than GWB, and if he fell for his BS, it was because it

suited him in some way.

My own theory is that Blair would have liked to be a 19th century imperialist, bearing the White Man's Burden and setting the world to rights, his style. Since we don't have an Empire any more, Blair chose to go with Bush's.

Blair has been bad in other ways besides Iraq. I was against him from the beginning of his first term, when he cut benefits for disabled people. He has always been more 'spin' than 'substance'; more concerned with management than with what is being managed. As a result he has created or continued disastrous policies in health, education, pensions, etc. As I've said in other posts, it's as though we had your NCLB not just in education, but in many other areas of life. The NHS has been deteriorating, because, although he's put extra money into it, it has mostly been into management, not into patient care. His enthusiasm for 'privatization' in many areas has also been worrying.

Though there seems to be some overblown hype in the United States about Blair having turned Britain into a 'police state' (he hasn't and it isn't), it is nevertheless true that he has been much less respectful of the right to privacy than most British PMs, and fear of terra has been used to restrict civil liberties to a worrying extent.

He has pushed the Labour Party considerably to the right, and is in most respects to the right of Thatcher's Tory predecessors, Heath and Macmillan. In the area that I follow the most - education - I think it would be fair to say that all his Education Secretaries have been worse than the *best* Tory Education Secretaries, and three of the five have been worse than *many* Tory Education Secretaries.

On the positive side: the Northern Ireland peace process, Welsh and Scottish devolution, the Civil Partnerships Act, and just not being Maggie Thatcher, though sometimes he's come pretty close.

I just hope that Gordon Brown will improve matters!