The Blair legacy 25 years on
This Monday, Mayday 2022, marks the 25th anniversary of the general election landslide on 1 May 1997. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” the new Prime Minister Tony Blair declared rhetorically to crowds outside the Festival Hall as the sun rose the next day on the New Labour government.
I covered all of the Blair years as political editor for Sky News, I even wrote a book about them Tony’s Ten Years. Twenty-five years on, here are 25 thoughts on Blair and his legacy on this quarter centenary.
There are more than 5,335,000 young adults in the UK population aged between 18 and 24 who were not born when Blair was elected. The Electoral Commission reckons that only around 3,575,000 of them are registered to vote in next week’s local elections.
It really was a landslide victory under UK Election Rules. Labour won 418, or the 659 seats in contention. It was a net gain of 146 MPs while the Conservatives, who had been in power since 1979, lost 178. Blair’s 179 seat majority in the Commons was the largest enjoyed by any Prime Minister since 1935. As usual, this was a First Past The Post election. In percentage share of the vote, Labour won 40.7 per cent, Conservatives 31.7 per cent, Liberal Democrats 18.3 per cent and SNP 2 per cent.
When he took office aged 43 (by a few days) Anthony Charles Lynton Blair was the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. He had no ministerial experience in government.
Blair would go on to win two further consecutive outright General Election victories in 2001 (413 Labour MPs elected) 2005 (356). He is the longest-serving Labour Prime Minister and the only Labour leader to win three elections.
He left office undefeated after 10 years on 27 June 2007 following internal party ructions which resulted in Gordon Brown becoming Labour Leader without a contest. Brown’s premiership ended when the 2010 General Election delivered a hung parliament with Labour the second largest party. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats formed a coalition government.
In hindsight, there are mixed feelings about the Blair premiership. In opinions polls, he is rated bottom of recent party leaders by Labour members but is still approved of by a narrow majority. In a poll this year the general public did not place him in the top 20 most popular Prime Ministers, even though every other one from Harold Macmillan featured (except Sir Alec Douglas Home).
Yet in ratings of modern Prime Ministers by academics and historians, Tony Blair consistently appears in the top three, alongside Margaret Thatcher and Clement Attlee. He is judged to be one of the few transformative Prime Ministers who changed the nation indelibly.
Blair campaigned in 1997 with a 5 point pledge card promising: “Cut class sizes for 5, 6, and 7 year olds. Fast Track punishment for persistent young offenders. Cut NHS witing list by 100,000 patients initially. Get 250,000 under 25 year olds off benefits and into work. No rise in income tax rates.” “Education, Education, Education” was his most hyped campaign slogan, with the ambition of more than half of school leavers going into tertiary education.
Blair subsequently bemoaned the paucity of ambition on the card and claimed opportunity had been wasted in his first term. Over the decade his government succeeded in slowly increasing the tax take without screaming from the middle classes. There were qualitatively significant increases in spending on the NHS, Schools and pre-school through Sure Start.
There was continuous economic growth throughout the decade. Labour introduced a national minimum wage. But Blair claimed to have “scars on his back” after dealings with the public sector. There was a partial walkout by the RMT when he gave his last speech to the Trade Union Congress joking “this is my last speech to you, probably as much to your relief as mine.”
Blair’s approach to government was managerial rather than ideological. “What matters is what works” became his mantra. He introduced a “Delivery Unit” in Downing Street to monitor performance by departments. He and his closest allies were prominent members of the global elite and keen participants at the Davos World Economic Forum. Their outlook was perhaps captured by Peter Mandelson’s remark that New Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich provided they pay their taxes”.
Blair transformed the governance of the United Kingdom by implementing votes in referendums for devolved government in Scotland, Wales, London and Northern Ireland.
His single greatest achievement, with the Irish government, was the Belfast Agreement, clinched on Good Friday 1998. This deal on power sharing led to the end of the entrenched sectarian violence of the Troubles. Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol have subsequently made it much more difficult for Northern Ireland to look towards both Great Britain and Ireland but Prime Minister Johnson recently said preserving the agreement is his priority.
Even Blair’s harshest critics have praised the social transformations in the UK during his Premiership. There were record numbers of women in parliament after the 1997 election, most of them (101), Labour MPs. Blair would promote more women and people from ethnic minorities in his government than previously, including the first female foreign secretary. He introduced civil partnerships.
Backed up by Tessa Jowell, Ken Livingstone and David Beckham, Blair won the Olympics for the UK. After the false start of the Millennium Dome, London 2012 really was the celebration of diverse Cool Britannia, ironically by then it was presided over by David Cameron and Mayor Boris Johnson.
The greatest controversies of Blair’s premiership concerned foreign policy. He entered office planning a referendum on whether the pound should join in the launch of the Euro. But any plans were abandoned after Gordon Brown argued participation was not a viable option for the UK. This and the vast underestimation of the number of people who would come to the UK from the new East European EU member states fuelled anti-EU sentiment in the UK.
Blair was an advocate of “Liberal Interventionism”. As he put it in his famous speech in Chicago in April 1999, “ We are all internationalists now…we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and violations of human rights in other countries if we wish to remain secure”. He ordered successful limited UK military interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. That was then, this year he pointed out, “The West is no longer the centre of the World.”
Blair forged deep personal bonds with American Presidents: first the Democrat Bill Clinton and then the Republican George W. Bush. After the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, Blair strove to be Bush’s closest ally. He rallied international support to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan. But major European nations did not share his enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq. The Blair government ultimately failed to persuade the United Nations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). In spite of one of the largest ever street protests in British history, the invasion went ahead. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in the two countries since then as well as hundreds of lives of British troops lost. Two decades after 9/11 neither country is at peace with a decent democratic government.
The official Iraq inquiry chaired by Sir John Chilcott found the case the government made for war was far from satisfactory, that planning was inadequate and that the UK overestimated its ability to influence the US and that the military action did not achieve its goals. But the government was exonerated in a separate inquiry under Lord Hutton into the suicide of David Kelly, a weapons expert who fell foul of government spin doctors. Blair remains defiant, telling me, “I do not regret either the strength of our alliance with the United States or standing by the US president in the aftermath of 9/11 and I’m never going to do that.”
With slurs such as “Bliar” and “War Criminal” ringing in his ears, Blair said several times after leaving office that he would prefer to live abroad were it not for his children here. He embarked on a lucrative private consultancy career and is estimated to have amassed as much as £100 million. More recently he has abandoned commercial activities to put his earnings into the not-for-profit Tony Blair Institute, which produces respected research on a wide range of issues.
Gordon Brown remains embittered against Tony Blair for not handing over the Premiership earlier but the two men have recently been ready to appear together in public at formal occasions, such as the recent funeral of Jack Dromey MP. Blair’s Conservative successors were much warmer. David Cameron on occasion referred to himself as “heir to Blair” and his Chancellor George Osborne referred to Blair as “the Master” and kept Blair’s Memoir A Journey to hand. Blair donated the £5 million proceeds from the book to military charities.
The Queen made Sir Anthony Blair a knight of the Garter at the end of last year — somewhat belatedly by the precedent for Prime Ministers. According to YouGov, 63 per cent of the public said they disapproved of the award, of these 41 per cent strongly disapproved.
For anyone wishing to learn more “The Blair Years” is an academic module for postgraduate study at King’s College London. The project was started by Dr Jon Davis and Blair biographer John Rentoul in 2008. It has an extensive archive which was used for the recent TV documentary series Blair & Brown: The New Labour Years. Blair recently held a seminar with the students. The Strand Group have produced a podcast featuring it.
Tony Blair became the first Prime Minister in office to father a (legitimate) child born for one hundred and fifty years. David Cameron and Boris Johnson both subsequently followed his lead. Leo, named after Blair’s father, is now a 21-year-old Oxford graduate. At the last count, Tony and Cherie have five grandchildren from their other children, Euan (born 1984), Nicholas (born 1985), and Kathryn (born 1988).
Tony Blair has something else personal to celebrate in the coming days. His 69th birthday is on 6 May, his landmark three-score-years-and-ten comes next year.