Tony Blair’s reputation has long been in the doldrums. As Glen O’Hara notes, you “cannot mention the former prime minister on social media without vituperation”. The contributors to the comments sections of both left- and right-wing publications still seem to think that substituting “Bliar” for Blair is the height of wit.
When I have pointed out to some Irish people that no British prime minister had shown such commitment to securing a settlement in Ireland since Gladstone, I have been told, absurdly, that the peace process was all down to Mo Mowlam. At a book signing in Dublin in 2010, one individual from the “anti-war” Irish left predictably attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of Blair for alleged war crimes.
The argument against Blair from the left goes something like this. Blair was an unprincipled interloper with no ideology who took out all that was good about the British Labour Party, including socialism, and replaced it with neoliberalism in everything from economics to an aggressive foreign policy. From the right, you get claims that he opened the doors of Britain to a tidal wave of immigration to which the British people never consented.
In New Labour, New Britain, O’Hara seeks to move the Blair years on from news to history, while acknowledging that it is still too early to make a definitive judgment. He is motivated by reason rather than emotion. This is, mercifully, not a polemic. It relies heavily on archival material, interviews (including with Blair), statistics, and is, crucially, fair-minded, more concerned with “understanding rather than judging”.
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It is no whitewash, but it points to a picture that was far more positive than its critics would have you believe. Somewhat regrettably, it focuses almost entirely on domestic “bread and butter” issues and has little to say about the foreign policy successes, Ireland, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, or the signal failure, Iraq, where the focus is more on its impact on Blair’s trustworthiness and diminishing popularity than on how it happened.
Nonetheless, this is an interesting and clearly written book that argues convincingly that the 1997 to 2007 government was not a mere continuation of Thatcherism. It also suggests that the cautious, incremental progress and moderate reform pursued by Blair and his ministers left Britain a better place than they found it by 2007. Yes, it was a light finger placed on the progressive side of the scales, but it made a positive difference in significant public policy areas such as crime, child and relative poverty, health outcomes and, surprisingly, inequality, through the minimum wage and tax credits.
Blair also believed globalisation was an “unstoppable force” to which Britain had to adjust and it remains unclear whether a substantially different approach was possible at the time. Despite the pressures of the turbocharged free market, O’Hara notes that “New Labour redistributed income fiercely”. This may come as a surprise to many, and suggests that New Labour had more in common with the redistributionist revisionist right of “Old Labour”, such as Tony Crosland, than hitherto acknowledged.
In contrast, by virtually every socio-economic measure since 2010, the Conservatives have managed to reverse many of these positive trends through both self-inflicted wounds, most notably an overly harsh austerity programme and Brexit, and, in fairness, events beyond their control, such as Covid and the war in Ukraine.
There is a case for the prosecution. Blair rode a tide of benign economic conditions but, as is argued here, his government did “little harm and much good”. The government certainly did not show sufficient concern about those who became filthy rich, often through speculation on property and financial wheeler-dealing. Moreover, and Gordon Brown was more culpable here, Britain was exposed, through slack regulation and an addiction to the tax revenues it generated, to the casino capitalism taking place in the City and on Wall Street.
It was the high street, exposed to rising house prices which Labour never controlled, that bore most of the consequences when it all came crashing down in 2008. Notably, the book takes 2007 as the endpoint for many of its judgments (though not in the tables and figures), which flatters Blair. But, as he has stated, he is willing to take responsibility for his period in office, although he does not see why he should do so for everything that happened afterwards.
There was also a sense that things got done back then. The Blair government, not always apparent at the time, was, in retrospect, good at the “mundane realities of governing”. Now, however, there is a growing public unease that governments in the West cannot get anything done or, if they do, it costs huge multiples of what it once did.
Creeping public disquiet about immigration, particularly among Labour’s bedrock working-class vote, was already visible during the long economic boom of the Blair years. Since then, this disquiet has intensified in our more depressed times and contributed to Brexit and the apparently irresistible rise of Nigel Farage, Britain’s answer to Donald Trump.
The internet was beginning to poison the well during the later Blair years, but this was nothing compared with the bile that now drips from every corner of cyberspace. While New Labour were media control freaks, always spinning and largely to their own detriment, this was mainly about managing and pandering to the right-wing national press. Today, everyone appears to be a keyboard and culture warrior, and spin no longer works.
Blair was often in command of the narrative and popular: Labour led in virtually every opinion poll from 1997 to 2005. He remains the only Labour prime minister in history to have enjoyed a golden economic inheritance. Contrast this with the mess that Keir Starmer faces. Blair was lucky in many ways, but luck is often one of the most underestimated criteria for success in politics.
O’Hara, enlisting the words of Clement Attlee on the postwar Labour government, tentatively concludes that it “was likely better to be born, to grow up, to live, work and even to die” in 2007 than in 1997, which certainly cannot be said for any of Blair’s successors.
- Robert McNamara teaches international history at Ulster University
