Tony Blair

Almost directly across from me was Blair, looking smaller than life. According to the press his handlers had ordered him to ration his tic-like smile. So, solemnly, tight-lipped, he stared, one by one, at the TV cameras all around the room. Yet when a mildly sharp question was asked, the ghost of the rictus smile, like a negative undergoing slow exposure, would appear and Blair would say, gently, 'Trust me!' That was that.

Sir Anthony Charles Lynton "Teflon Tony" "Bliar" Blair, a.k.a. "Cheshire Cat" and "The Smiler", was Leader of the Labour Party from 1994-2007 and Prime Minister of Britain from 1997-2007. At the time, he was the youngest Premier since Spencer Perceval (1812), and the first Labour Leader since Jim Callaghan (1979) to get elected. He was very popular before 2003, his legislative achievements ranging from a national minimum wage to a right for gay couples to seek a civil partnership. On the other hand, Blair does like a bit of war profiteering, human misery and hanging out (no pun intended) with dictators, which is ironic given what happened to Saddam Hussein after the illegal Iraq War. In contrast, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, his two immediate predecessors, were involved in only one war each. To be fair though, he went into Afghanistan with Parliament's overwhelming support.

Towards the end of Blair's term, he became fixated on setting up a surveillance society, or whatever. Over a decade later, all the good stuff is forgotten, but nobody will ever forget the sleaze, the scandals, the Iraq War... and that spot on Bush's lap that he got to sit on for his compliance.

Fun fact, "Tony Blair, PM" is an anagram of "I'm Tory Plan B." This reflects the fact that he is a "Red Tory" by ideology, even though he was not in the Tory (Conservative) Party.

New Labour
We forced our opponents to change.

Britain had been under Tory rule for 18 years ('79-97). In that time, democratic socialism was dismantled and sold off to private enterprise, and the groundwork was laid for the Great Recession. (The current crisis is as much to do with Thatcher as it is to do with Blair and Brown.) From that narrow perspective, New Labour's unambitious manifesto was necessary to win Middle England.

But the Tories dropped the ball. There had been Black Wednesday in '92, which showed their economic model was flawed, and a series of scandals and infighting made Major look "weak." Labour, who had been in the wilderness for nearly two decades, came out of nowhere with the right policies, tone, and leader.

Labour was the party of the hard-left, but the Blairites and Brownites purged them, and so Labour started looking like the Slim-Fast Tory Party. Labour's manifesto had promised to re-nationalise the railways and reform the voting system, among other things. Those did not materialise, and hyper-bureaucratic liberalism ruled out a return to Marxism. There was no functioning leftist party, and Conservatives didn't even play the token gesture of being in opposition; they also failed to find a leader who wasn't either a placeholder (William Hague, Ian Duncan-Smith) or Michael Howard (That's Lord Howard to you, peasant!). As you can imagine, the left was not exactly thrilled about that. Most remember Clinton and Blair at twin podiums talking about the "Third Way" —though it wasn't so different from your Keatings, Schröders or Jospins who came into power at around that time. They all talked the same. Instead of improving the conditions for the working class, they pulled people out of the working class into the middle one. There is a good movie called The Special Relationship which explores some of this.

All in all, the first two terms were about curtailing the excesses of Thatcher. The third term was the most desperate, as the boom years ended and scandals began to pile up. Iraq was to Blair what the Falklands was to Thatcher —the difference being that the Falklands ended better for Britain.

In 2007, Blair mercifully stepped down, and Gordon Brown took over as shepherd of New Labour. Nobody liked his face and he just happened to come to power as the recession hit.

Reasons to love him

 * Independence for the Bank of England: The Tories' constant fiddling with the interest rates had been a political tool and a failure. Allowing a body of experts to set the interest rate was an important move that in no way, shape or form contributed to a housing bubble.
 * The Good Friday Agreement: Ignoring Gerry Adams, John Hume and David Trimble. And John Major who really got the ball rolling. And Mo Mowlam who lead the negotiations. And all the actual Irish people involved, and pretending that British involvement in Ireland was somehow legitimate or needed. But Blair played a small part in bringing peace to Northern Ireland, so that's like, at least one checkbox. (He was even polite enough to wait until leaving office before announcing he was a Catholic.) Successive British governments played a huge role in actually causing and worsening the conflict.
 * LGBT rights: Blair's government lowered the age of consent for homosexual sex in line with heterosexual sex and repealed Section 28. They removed all bans on gay people serving openly in the military. Gays were given the right to a civil partnership, protection from hate crimes, protection from discrimination in the workplace and the right to adopt. Meanwhile, transgender people were given the right to legally change their gender.
 * Schools & hospital building programmes - From 1997, spending on rebuilding schools and hospitals increased enormously, and a decade-long rebuilding programme was begun.
 * Minimum Wage Act: Despite massive opposition, he stood for and forced through his plans of a national minimum wage, now £6.50/hour ($10.24, August 2015).
 * Education, education, education: His most important legacy. Large increases in education spending has improved exams results at 14, 16 & 18, and has significantly increased literacy and numeracy levels. Britain has achieved the stunning position of 20th in the OECD rankings of educational systems.
 * Third World debt write-offs: The British Government under Blair, wrote off a whole load of debts from really poor nations.
 * Climate change policy: Could've done better, but set Britain on the way to achieving its Kyoto targets.
 * Devolution: Blair gave power to Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland to make some (or all) of their own laws. The populations wanted this, and it was (and still is) very successful.
 * Gift Aid: Allowed higher-rate taxpayers to donate to charity, and get the tax added back to their donation. Worth nearly £1bn to UK charities.
 * Winter fuel payments: Giving fuel payments to pensioners saved lives and made people a lot more comfortable.
 * Animal testing: Banned testing of cosmetic products on animals, while resisting calls for controls on medical testing on animals.
 * Constitutional Reform Act 2005: Established the British Supreme Court and largely moved responsibility for appointing judges for the highest court in the land out of the hands of the Lord Chancellor, preventing biased political appointments.
 * Double jeopardy: Blair's Ministry of Justice changed the rules surrounding double jeopardy so that murderers, rapists and robbers specifically can be prosecuted again if they get off and are then proven to be guilty. This resulted in several criminals who would have gotten away with it otherwise going to prison, including in high-profile cases like the.
 * Sexual Offences Act 2003: Among other things, established the UK's current sex offenders register, expanded the definition of rape to include oral sex, legalized group homosexual sex and outlawed sex tourism.
 * Free entry to national museums and galleries: Well, that was nice of him.

Good intentions, but not entirely successful

 * Human Rights Act 1998: A step in the right direction, but the Human Rights Act's application has, in many quarters, seemed bloated and stupid. "Criminals' rights" are criticised greatly.
 * House of Lords Act 1999: Removing many hereditary peers in favour of appointed members of the House of Lords was a fantastic step, but the House of Lords reform has packed the Upper House with Labour Peers. Political appointment of the upper house has led to multiple accusations of "Cash for Honours" and "Loans for Honours." However good it is to decrease hereditary peers, if you replace them with people who gave you money for the favour, you (kind of) lose all credit.
 * London Assembly: since the UK was already one of the most overcentralised states in Europe, giving London more power and money seems a mixed blessing. On the other hand, London had had no city-wide governance since the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986.
 * English regional devolution: Attempts to provide devolution in Northern England failed. This was arguably worthy, but also equated Scotland and Wales with English regions while splitting England, a nation, into various separate regions. Cornwall, which actually has some demand for an assembly, was ignored.
 * Fox-hunting ban: Even bringing up fox-hunting in the house of Commons is a giant waste of time and money. It's something which 90% of people are against, and only 1% of the population can participate in. Ironically, that's why the ban was put through in the first place: to appease the Labour backbenchers (who didn't appreciate Blair's drift to the centre) by 'sticking it to the toffs'.
 * Northern Irish devolution: While devolution worked out pretty well in Scotland and Wales, the unique political situation in Northern Ireland means that the Republican and Unionist sides have to share power constantly. This naturally means that the Northern Irish Parliament is incredibly dysfunctional and regularly suffers government shutdowns.

Reasons to dislike him

 * The spin and sleaze of New Labour: He made much of the "Tory sleaze" surrounding the Major government, but Labour's image has taken a bit of a hit now that new information has come out about how Blair ran his cabinet, his ties to The Sun, etc. Meanwhile, John Major has been reassessed in a more positive light.
 * In a break from conventional campaigning, his team focused on soundbites. The logic went that the average voter isn't gullible, but they are time-poor. They're not going to have time to read through your manifesto or watch a long interview with one of your MPs. What you need is for a common soundbite or phrase to be repeated often enough that it permeates the news they half-watch in the morning before they go to work, it gets into the newspaper articles they skim on the train, and it's there on the news when they get home. So you get, for example, "Education, Education, Education." That was repeated ad nauseum and it worked. Even though the pledge amounted to not that much cash for universities, it still sounded good. An unfortunate side-effect of this is that people still don't know what he actually believes in, such as the God thing, which he suppressed for electoral gain.
 * News Corp more or less ordered Blair to jump into war with Iraq. Everyone in the ministry was connected one way or another to Murdoch, just to make sure that it's an incestuous party up in there.


 * Pulling a Clinton: Blair did it to show he was serious—started out by cutting single-parent benefits or something like that. He knows the Tory psyche has a deep need for karma. Can't do something nice without shedding some blood elsewhere.
 * Immigration: People blame him for the immigration issue as he didn't have a transition period like other EU leaders, and left a pretty wide gate open for non-EU members, too. It was brought up at the time, but Blair's government predicted migration would be in the tens of thousands. Instead up to 500k a year came, and only about half ever went home. Around 3 million net over the following 12 years.
 * Presidentialism: His premiership was defined by a centralisation of power within the executive.
 * The cabinet office, which by his time was essentially an extension of the Prime Minister's office, was strengthened. Unelected favourites, like Blair's chief of staff Jonathan Powell and his director of communications Alastair Campbell, were given power to sit in on cabinet meetings and boss them around. The number of special advisers increased, particularly within the Prime Minister's office, and they were given greater powers. These were implemented to increase the oversight that the Prime Minister had over the rest of Parliament. It was reflected in Blair's personal style: Instead of holding cabinet meetings in which different MPs could debate and question, Blair dealt with individual MPs one-on-one, in what become known as "sofa cabinet".
 * He wanted to take the country to war without a vote in Parliament, and though this was his prerogative as Prime Minister acting on behalf of the Head of State, this is another reason why people disliked Blair: all the decisions fell directly on his shoulders.


 * Private Finance Initiatives: Actually cooked up by the Conservatives but implemented by Labour. PFIs allow private companies, building firms, etc. to invest in public infrastructure and then lease them back over a long period of time. This means that future taxpayers have to pay the debt, which is not recorded by the Treasury due to it not technically being public money. Blair's bright idea was to raise funds for education, health and other services by bringing in Big Business, who proceeded to run things with a bad delivery but a decent profit. The Department of Education didn't trust the government in the Blair years; they were very much micromanaged. PFI is still sucking money out of the education budget, and academies turned out to be the thin end of the wedge as predicted.
 * Boasting and grandstanding: Recently after a succession of Electoral Defeats for Labour, Blair Has developed a bit of habit of boasting about how he won three elections and was the only labour leader to do so almost every interview. Whilst this is a great achievement he doesn't really propose a soloution to help labour get out of this electoral hole they are stuck in other than going back to Being Tory Lite
 * Faith-school programmes: The coming out as a religious nutcase at the end was the icing on the cake. In defiance of Labour's inclusive policies, Blair saw fit to publicly-fund faith schools and allow them greater autonomy from standard curriculum.  Richard Dawkins fronted the opposition: he released Faith School Menace?, a documentary detailing the horrors against reason that manifested as a result.

Reasons to hate him
I will be with you, whatever.

Factional violence across Africa and the Middle East is due to a perversion of faith insisted Tony Blair, writing in yesterday's Observer, after he'd finished washing blood off his hands.


 * Erosion of civil liberties: Typical of Blair's later years. Nick Clegg, then Lib-Dem home affairs spokesman, commented:


 * His ministry criminalized more than 3,000 acts, "one for every day" New Labour had been in power.  Far from just an issue of pace, many of these laws seemed of highly dubious value at best; one notoriously blatant example being the direct criminalization of "causing a nuclear explosion,"  despite existing legislation already rendering such an act de facto criminal.
 * The Civil Contingencies Act 2004, despite massive opposition in the House of Lords, allowed the Prime Minister to suspend any law (except the Human Rights Act) for 21 days. The HoL managed to kill the 42-day detention policy, but we still have 28-days detention without charge. So much for Habeas Corpus.
 * Blair passed legislation to begin an ID Card programme, which was massively against public opinion, and despite Tory warnings it would be cut as soon as they got into power.
 * Several of Blair's anti-extremism laws, the Terrorism Acts and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 in particular, have been greatly criticised for their implications with regards to free speech.


 * Iraq:


 * Blair is a statesman's statesman: ex-barrister, at ease with the media, and wielding an impressive presentation of his case. Problem is, those talents were apparently on loan to the Bush Administation.
 * The now-infamous "45 minutes" claim. The "dossier" from MI6, which apparently needed 'sexing up'. The fact that he (at best) swallowed the falsified evidence. In 2009, he admitted he'd have invaded Iraq regardless of WMDs.
 * Peace demonstrations and marches, petitions, letters, and every other mode of mass participation in democracy was mobilized. Those marches represented about 5-10 million people who did not want to be involved in Iraq without unilateral agreement from the UN, but the agreement never came.  Blair shot back that it didn't matter how many people marched. He also mentioned some crap about praying to God for answers. It was something like 60 backbenchers who opposed the war, along with the unanimous disapproval of the Lib Dems. Only 2 Conservatives voted against it, but they had an ideological reason to support that war, and not to mention there was something in it for them. Either way, it was a dramatic show of how parochial the government had gotten. At least 100,000 died as a result of his decision, which a UK barrister agrees amounts to war crimes.
 * Iraq and Brexit are two symptoms of the same problem, which is disinformation. Iraq caused a sort of feedback loop, in which the refugee crisis caused by US/UK interference in the ME fueled British xenophobia, which was then projected onto the EU, even though the UK itself is at the source of the war in the ME.  Still not getting it, Blair responds:


 * What's "bizarre" is that an ex-world leader thinks that invading another country, dismantling their national and local government, leaving a much-weaker police and military, and imposing a totally different form of politics doesn't leave it open to invasion and civil strife. How he's an envoy for peace in the Middle East we'll never know. Looks like he's doing a bang-up job, too He's out as of 2015. The Palestinian Authority’s former chief negotiator Nabil Shaath said Blair “Achieved so very little because of his gross efforts to please the Israelis.”
 * The Iraq Inquiry was not a real inquiry; it was set up with the help of many who were involved, and structured such that no one individual would be found culpable. Both parties have much to fear from a conviction. (Cameron would be the next one to walk the plank.) The excrement of New Labour is now trying to poison the well yet again, forcing through a leadership election to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from prosecuting Blair. They're now banning people from voting for fear of having Corbyn as leader. (It didn't work.)  He'd never be successfully tried in court, though; everyone would be too charmed by him.


 * Being Bush's poodle: The UK was (and still is) the SS Great Britain, largest carrier in the US Navy. Captain Blair reported directly to Commodore Bush, who is about as popular in the UK as syphilis. The general feeling was that Blair sold the country out, trashed their reputation, and made them as reviled as America.
 * Rubbing elbows with dictators: Recent documents found in Tripoli demonstrated that Blair advocated releasing Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi due to personal business interests in Libya. He was flown twice to Tripoli on Gaddafi's private jets to negotiate with the then-dictator. He also sent British SAS troops to train Gaddafi's secret police, renditioned Libyan rebel Abdel Hakim Belhaj to the Gaddafi government , and helped Gaddafi's late son write his PhD thesis. Apart from Gaddafi, he gave damage control advice to the Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev after his police slaughtered 14 protestors in Zhanaozen , courted Syria's Bashar al-Assad and was close to Vladimir Putin both in power and long after leaving office. Even advising to forget Ukraine during the 2014 skirmish to fight "Radical Islam". Only changing his mind after the 2022 Invasion and going on as if he had never supported Russia.
 * Being a British chickenhawk: Blair pretty much convinced NATO to intervene in the Balkans. During his time in opposition, he criticised the Tories for isolationism and vowed that a Labour government would take on Milošević.
 * Being a war monger: Not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and particularly in Sierra Leone. Some might say Blair and his government (looking at you Mr. Cook) were more than complicit in causing that part of Africa to erupt into hell with the help of Tim Spicer and his cronies. It's funny how everyone collectively forgets about 30 tones of Bulgarian AK's he sold Kabbah via Sandline, the financing for numerous assassinations, and what about that gunship seen being serviced on a British frigate in Freetown? Very murky, that one. We will never unearth what the hell he was doing down there—or why.
 * We Shouldn't be Transphobic and we should have equal rights for trans people but: Ironically, given that his government enacted the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, Blair has become intensely anti woke. Becoming a strong supporter of J.K. Rowling. Believing despite evidence to the contrary. ... That Labour will never gain power as long as they criticise The J. K. . This has bled into Keir Starmer's policy and influenced his purge of the left.

The golden parachute care package
He is the richest after-dinner speaker ex-PM ever, and uses a series of opaque, secretive companies to funnel his many millions. Blair also has ties to a Korean Oil Company, and accepted millions from a dubious Kazak autocrat. But to draw these lines and see a conspiracy makes you the nut job.

When he left office, he took the opportunity of buying a nice little house in the middle of the West End so far beyond his apparent means so as to raise questions. That is, until they were partly sorted by a generous down payment on his memoirs. On the JP Morgan thing, apparently it was a mere bagatelle at $2M/year or so. Not bad for a part time job. It also means that he can keep his VIP treatment and Diplomatic passport. Never has so much effort been made by a PM to extend their pension.

Comeback?
I actually find myself weirdly nostalgic for the authentic monsters of politics. Even the sly, hollow hustling of Tony Blair would be preferable to the callow bafflement of Nick Clegg, the unnaturally shiny forehead and beta-male posturing of David Cameron, and the... well, whatever Ed Miliband is. His dreams of being Leader of Europe shattered, Blair is threatening to start his own centre-left party, free from the chains of outdated union power. Many Labour MPs would probably jump ship to him. It is ironic because he is the only big-name leader who could make a difference if he didn't have all the baggage. The only well-respected Remainer left is Ken Clarke, but he's a very old Tory who's not really in shape for this supposed counterrevolution.

Cherie Blair
Since he quit as a politician, he and his wife have "rediscovered" their religious faith. Except the Pope told him not to go to war, and he did anyways. For a born-again Catholic, he's broken more than a few Commandments. Porking Mrs. Murdoch for one, complicit in murder and torture for another.

Tony's wife, Cherie, is also a fascinating human being. A prominent human rights lawyer, occasional property developer, and practicing Roman Catholic, she was known for her enthusiasm for eccentric new age practices. When Robert Harris (a former Blairite who hob-nobbed with the family) wrote The Ghost, he made the fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair the sinister manipulator behind the scenes for a reason.

Videos

 * Blair's manifesto
 * The Blair-Hitchens debate on secularism — Even Blair admitted after the debate that he'd lost.
 * Blair's hand gestures — A masterclass in NLP screen presence and charisma.