UPDATED:  JUL 29, 2007

THE END OF BLAIR (2) 

In concluding my first contribution to TPJ dealing with the resignation of Tony Blair, I said that I intended to attempt a serious assessment of the record of Blair and New Labour. In the saturation media coverage of his departure from the stage of British politics, it was widely claimed that he was the most successful Labour prime minister of all time. This claim went completely unchallenged. Let’s take a look at it. 

Was Tony Blair the most successful Labour prime minister of all time? If success is measured in terms of years in office and successive election victories, undoubtedly he was. But why should we measure success in this way? It can be plausibly argued that Clement Attlee, Labour’s first post war prime minister, who only completed one full term in office, was far more successful than Blair. The distinctly uncharismatic Attlee was the butt of frequent quips, usually from the Conservatives. Responding to the remark that Attlee was a very modest man, Churchill is supposed to have riposted “He has much to be modest about.” But, in a series of reforms unprecedented in their scope, his government (1945 – 1950) laid the basis for Britain’s welfare state, which remained the bedrock of Labour’s achievement for the following 35 years. 

Since the demise of the Liberal Party in 1922, Labour has been in office for 30 years; the Conservatives (Tories), for 50 years. For five years (1940 – 1945) there was a genuine wartime coalition led by Churchill. Excluding Gordon Brown, there have been only five Labour prime ministers compared to the Tories’ ten. Blair, who was in office for ten years, is the longest serving Labour prime minister ever, and is beaten only by Margaret Thatcher (1979 – 1990) as the P.M. with the longest period of unbroken office since the Earl of Liverpool (1812 – 1827), who was one of the last Tory premiers in the unreformed (i.e. with very limited voting franchise ) parliament. It is highly likely that Blair was hoping to beat Thatcher’s record and become the longest serving prime minister for nearly two hundred years – but a public admission of such an ambition might have seemed, well -rather unseemly! 

Compared to his Labour predecessors his time in office has been extraordinary not only for its longevity. Some might wish to compare Blair with the first Labour prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, whose de facto defection to the Tories in 1931, to become leader of the ‘National Government’ which ruled Britain during the depression of the 1930s, is still regarded by Labour loyalists as the greatest betrayal in the history of the party. MacDonald’s treachery reduced the parliamentary Labour Party to a rump and cast it into the wilderness for fourteen years. It can be argued – and I shall argue – that Blair has done comparable damage to the Labour Party. The ‘modest’ Atlee had the distinction of leading Labour’s recovery and subjecting the Tories, led by the charismatic Churchill, to resounding defeat at the 1945 election.  Blair cared less for the party than MacDonald, who at least had an honourable record as leader prior to his defection. Like MacDonald, who remarked in 1931 that he would now be ‘the darling of every dowager in Chelsea’, Blair was dazzled by the wealthy and powerful. Tragically for the Labour Party, whose membership in the country has virtually collapsed, too few of its parliamentary representatives appear to have understood what terrible damage his leadership has done.  

It is not possible to discuss Blair without reference to Iraq. His decision to take Britain into war alongside Bush has proved to be an unmitigated disaster with long term global consequences of incalculable proportions. The decision was Blair’s. None of his cabinet colleagues would have pressed for it, though none of them can escape their share of responsibility for that disastrous decision and all the consequences that flow from it. With the one or two honourable exceptions who resigned in protest, members of the cabinet – including Gordon Brown – supinely supported or acquiesced in it. Culpable also are the majority of Labour MPs who, in alliance with the Tory opposition in a House of Commons vote, ensured a parliamentary majority for an illegal war. 139 Labour MPs, together with the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Nationalists and one or two defiant Tories, voted against. If the majority of Labour MPs had done likewise, Blair would have been unable to take Britain to war. He would have been forced to resign. Those who voted for war have a lot to answer for. Quite a few of them lost their seats in the 2005 election, drastically reducing Labour’s majority. 

There is a great deal more to be said about the Iraq fiasco and Blair’s disastrous relationship with Bush. I shall return to this later, but for the moment I want to relate it to the claim that Blair has been the most successful Labour prime minister ever. The claim is made most often by those who have served him most loyally. Former cabinet ministers such as John Reid, Charles Clark, David Blunkett and Peter Mandelson, remain effusive in their praise, as does his former director of communications, Alasdair Campbell (of whom more later ). These, to name only a few, are all unapologetic about their support for the war. When they praise Blair as the most successful Labour prime minister, they clearly intend it to be understood that they consider him to be the best Labour prime minister of all time. 

I consider him to be the worst Labour prime minister by far and amongst the worst prime ministers in British history. It should go without saying that he can hardly be considered the worst and also the most successful Labour prime minister. He may be compared to Anthony Eden, who succeeded Churchill as Tory PM in 1955. Just as Blair’s legacy may be summed up in a word of four letters (Iraq), so Eden is forever remembered for another disastrous military engagement in the Middle East fifty-one years ago, expressed succinctly in a four letter word – Suez. As with Blair in Iraq, Eden also took Britain into the Suez imbroglio on the basis of lies and deception. But this last roar of the imperial lion evinced a negative response from  US  President Eisenhower, who, having his own agenda for the Middle East once the sun had set on the British empire, failed to come to the support of his ‘closest ally’. Unlike Blair, Eden was forced to resign only months after the collapse of the Suez fiasco. The Labour Party, to its credit, strongly opposed the attempt to overthrow Nasser who was regarded by Eden as a latter-day Hitler. 

But there is another prime minister with whom Blair has been compared: Neville Chamberlain. The historian Richard Gott, (co-author with Martin Gilbert of The Appeasers, one of the most penetrating studies of Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany), considers Blair to have been the worst prime minister since Chamberlain. This is what he wrote about Chamberlain in an article in the Guardian a few years ago: 

Chamberlain was a supremely confident and arrogant politician, an excellent speaker and a deeply religious man with a hotline to God. He had an unassailable majority in parliament, was popular in the country and presided over a cabinet stuffed with nonentities. Unfamiliar with the outside world, he conducted his own disastrous foreign policy with the help of backroom advisers as ignorant as himself. By seeking to appease the German government, the principal threat to world peace at the time, he only succeeded in encouraging that country’s appetite for aggression and expansionism. His egregious errors played a not insignificant part in the outbreak of  the second world war, the principal tragedy of the 20^th century. 

Blair has followed in his footsteps, and is destined for the same place in history’s hall of infamy. Like Chamberlain he is an arrogant and God-fuelled appeaser.’ 

Gott argues that Blair could have led “a coalition of the unwilling” against the US drive to war that would have included the Europeans, the Russians and the Chinese. Instead he chose to become Bush’s principal cheerleader in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. He concludes “Today’s Labour Party has been a supine collaborator in this policy of appeasement, just like the Tory party in the 1930s.” 

Needless to say, this interpretation will not please Blair and the Blairites, who like to cast themselves in the role of defenders of democracy against dictatorship, tyranny and terror. But, in my view, it is an interpretation with much to commend it.  

More next time.

NEXT- JUNKIES SPEAK

Last Update: 08/05/2007