| One should not speak ill of the dead. And, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, recently announced the end of his political life by quitting the leadership of the Labour Party effective next month. This had of course been well anticipated, only the date unknown. This is a sad and untimely end (he is still in his mid-50s) to a brilliant political career. Often described as "the most gifted politician of his generation," Blair is leaving as a highly unpopular leader, primarily because of his unquestioning support of Bush over the invasion of Iraq. His unpopularity also led to Labour losing seats not only in the last general election, but also in the recent local and regional elections. |
| Chances are that it is the Iraq war which will be permanently bracketed with Blair, overshadowing many of his qualities and, indeed, achievements in the political economy. He was the youngest Member of Parliament ever elected, and also the youngest prime minister since as long as 1812. To me, as a student of political economy, Blair represented a synthesis between the dominant themes of the 1970s and 1980s in the UK. The earlier decade was marked by the extreme left in the Labour Party holding veto power over policy "" the trade unions, in particular, enjoyed huge power without responsibility (as, for example, the Left does now in India). They often exercised the power in such irresponsible fashion that in the 1970s, questions were often raised whether Britain was governable at all. (I lived in London in those days and have experienced the chaos.) |
| The anti-thesis was the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and a hard turn to the right, with an agenda of liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation and so on. Thatcher also took on the once powerful National Union of Mineworkers in the early 1980s, and successfully broke the back of militant trade unionism. The Conservatives managed to win four successive elections and it became increasingly clear that Labour would not be able to come back to power unless it made major changes to its economic agenda "" to become electable, it needed to move to the centre. Blair persuaded it to do so, and Labour won an unprecedented three successive elections, the last one despite the unpopularity of the Iraq war. |
| To me, his economic philosophy represented a synthesis. He successfully managed to change the constitution of the Labour Party and drop the commitment to public ownership of the means of production, a central socialist plank, and an article of faith whether for Fabian Socialists or for their more militant cousins. No doctrinaire socialist, he believed in competition and the private sector as engines of growth, competitiveness and efficiency. He also poured huge resources in improving particularly the educational and health systems in Britain, introduced taxation policies to slow down and, indeed, reverse to an extent, the income disparities which had grown rapidly under Thatcher. |
| His initiatives in other areas were also important and progressive. He brought UK to the forefront of the European Union, in sharp contrast to Thatcher's anti-European stances. He also took the initiative in launching international efforts to counteract the effects of global warming on the environment and elimination of poverty, particularly in Africa. Such global initiatives apart, domestically he promoted devolution of power to Scotland and Wales, reformed the House of Lords, and his patience, persuasive powers and charm succeeded in ending the decades-old violent enmity between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. "Blatcherite" leaders in the two largest European Union economies, Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicholas Sarkozy of France, both from centre right, are great admirers of Blair. |
| His big blunder of course was following Bush in Iraq and uncritically supporting his judgements. It has always puzzled me how such a highly intelligent man as Blair became a "poodle" of a juvenile, lazy, and incompetent President like Bush, who was so often in denial of realities like global warming. (One of the more prominent members of his neo-conservative cabal, the President of the World Bank, and well known for his hectoring and bullying of developing countries on corruption, has been forced to leave after he was caught with his hand in the till, helping his girlfriend!) |
| Did Blair genuinely believe in the existence of weapons of mass destruction, linkages between Saddam Hussein and Islamic fundamentalists, or the feasibility of "imposing" democracy from the outside? Was he as susceptible to the "confirmation bias" as most market participants and analysts are prone to? Or was the support aimed at gaining American intervention for solving the Palestinian problem? In my perhaps naïve admiration for Blair, I suspect that he sometimes stays awake, his conscience troubled by the hundreds of thousands of innocent lives lost in Iraq, and the millions of refugees made homeless by the war, his every expectation belied. It is difficult to believe that Bush would lose even a minute's sleep over the tragedies he has unleashed. |
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