Blair

So Blair’s leaving; finally! He certainly hung onto power for as long as was humanly possible. It’s pretty clear that most people had had enough, both in and out of his caucus. Sure, he was an effective and charismatic leader, but after ten years of power and a fiasco like Iraq, it was time to move on.

It’ll be interesting to see how Labour fares in the next election. I could be wrong, but if I were to base myself on the similar situation faced by the Martin Liberals a few years ago, I would conclude that the Conservatives will have a pretty easy ride to power. It’s funny how the current British political situation seems to be three years behind the Canadian one; if, in newspaper articles, we were to replace the name Labour with Liberals, Blair with Chrétien, Brown with Martin and David Cameron with Stephen Harper, the we’d be turning them into Canadian history books.

But you know, despite all his faults, I really like Tony Blair.

He just strikes me as a perfect leader: charismatic, innovative, efficient and pragmatic. His ability to balance policies and to make compromises is unequalled, and his communication skills would make JFK blush (well, maybe I’m pushing it, but you get the point).

I’m not going to say anything much about his long reign, as any attempt to cover it in a single blog post would be incomplete and misleading. Instead, I’ll just tell you one anecdote which I feel summarises the Blair government better than any expensive book or movie.

As you may know, the Labour Party published on YouTube a set of interviews with the Prime-Minister in which he talked about the highs and lows of his mandate and his experience as leader of the UK. At one point, the interviewer asked Blair to explain the widening gap between rich and poor, which he had promised to tackle in each election. I was expecting some Question Period gibberish or an accusation that the Tories would have fared worse, but instead, Blair gave a simple, concrete and believable answer.

He flatly told the interviewer that this figure was simply due to a minute percentage of the population getting infinitely rich, which is an undeniable reality of capitalism. That was all fine, but there are lots of other capitalist countries in which the gap is narrowing, so why not in Britain. But that was the heart of his argument. He explained, in his trademark casual style, that though the government could decide narrow the gap by taxing the very rich more heavily, like in the sixties, this would simply cause them to leave the country. Instead, he had decided to leave them alone and let them contribute to the economy by spending their riches, while focusing on narrowing the gap between the relatively poor and the relatively rich. Thus, he explained, if we compared the top thirty percent to the bottom thirty percent, which would erase the impact of the few extremely wealthy individuals, we would find that the gap had actually narrowed.

That’s what the Blair government was all about. Like the Clinton administration: well presented pragmatic ideas.

So you can say all you want about Tony Blair being unethical or addicted to power, it’s undeniable that he has been a gift for his country.