Sun, Jun 24, 2007 page9

• Tony Blair---Britain's reformer, Labour's greatest prime minister

  • By Michael Danby
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  When British Prime Minister Tony Blair leaves office next month after a bit over 10 years, he will "leave behind a country far better than he found it and unimaginably better than it would have been under 10 more years of Conservative rule."

  Don't take my word for it -- those are the words of one of Blair's bitterest critics, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, a view apparently shared by 61 percent of Britons surveyed last week who think Blair has done a good job overall despite the chorus of haters such as Pilger, Fisk and most of the BBC who report Blair only through the hatred of his policy in Iraq.

  Now that he is going, the British left is suddenly discovering how much they owe to Blair, the most successful leader British Labour has ever had, the only leader ever to win three elections in a row and seen off four Conservative Party Leaders; John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith and Michael Howard. If Labour is regarded as the heir of the old Liberals, as it should be, he is the most successful progressive leader Britain has had since Gladstone.

  Now, with the revived Tories under the ersatz-Blairite David Cameron snapping at Labour's heels in the polls, the left is facing the awful prospect that they might actually lose the next election.

  If the Iraq War had never happened, the British commentariat would be down on their collective knees begging Blair to stay. Under his leadership, not only has Labour enjoyed a decade of power, it has also carried through a progressive revolution in social policy in Britain, building on the economic strength delivered by Gordon Brown's stern economic management to deliver enormous benefits to Labour's traditional constituencies in the inner cities and the declining industrial areas of north England, Scotland and Wales.

  Simon Hoggart, the Guardian's foreign editor who has been scathing about Blair in recent years, concedes that people in working-class communities, such as the former mining town of Sedgefield in Durham, Blair's constituency, "have become noticeably more prosperous -- better dressed, better fed." Not only that, their health indicators have improved, and more of their children are finishing school and going to university.

  Some of this progress rests on the radical changes of the Thatcher years, a fact Blair does not deny. But Blair recognized that the Thatcher policy of cutting taxes for the rich and slashing the size of the state could only go so far in generating prosperity -- the real issue, which Thatcher dodged, was investing that prosperity in raising the living standards and particularly the opportunities of working families, nothing to end old class divisions. Even the editor of the Tory Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona conceded the terrible error of Blairophobes was always to underestimate his political powers, his capacity to connect with the public and his unexpected reserves of determination.

  The Tories will not be able to reverse this: as Toynbee says, "Blairism has now become the national creed."

  David Cameron's rather transparent attempts to make himself into an imitation Blair have won him some short-term gains in the polls, but they are unlikely to fool the electorate for long. Blair had substance as well as style. So far, Cameron has only managed to copy the style.

  Blair was a leader in other fields as well, including the great challenge of the coming decade, climate change, on which he led the world, especially with the international benchmark the Stern Report, while our own Australian prime minister, sadly, trailed the pack. Blair finally broke through decades of distrust to achieve a peace deal in Northern Ireland. He persuaded former US president Bill Clinton to go into the Balkans and rescue Kosovo from the murderous Milosevic regime. He championed humanitarian intervention in Sierra Leone and other trouble spots. Only he and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown granted independence to the Bank of England to judge and make flexible monetary rates for the British pound.

  But Iraq did happen, and the issue cannot be dodged. Blair's retirement has allowed some behind-the-scenes actors, such as his former advisor Lady Morgan, to come out and say that Blair warned Donald Rumsfeld about the risks of the situation in Iraq following the successful overthrow of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime, but that his advice was ignored by the arrogant Rumsfeld, who was running the war in Bush's name.

  That may or may not be so. The fact is that the post-invasion situation in Iraq has been badly botched by the Coalition, and Blair must accept a share of responsibility for that. He might even be right that a defeat and disintegration of Iraq may be worse than Western withdrawal. But to allow Iraq to overshadow all the other achievements of his government is monstrously unfair. He deserves to be remembered, and in my opinion he will be, as British Labour's greatest prime minister.

  Michael Danby is the Australian Labor Party whip and the federal member for Melbourne Ports in the Australian House of Representatives.
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