Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair turns 70 today, and his political legacy is still going strong
Saturday 6 May marks the age of 70 for Tony Blair, one of the most influential politicians in recent UK and European history. Blair, who was Secretary of the British Labor Party from 1994 to 2007 and Prime Minister from 1997 to 2007, is considered one of the most important reformers of the European left and a leader who was able to bring his country considerable economic growth. At the same time, he is now an extremely controversial figure, both because of some questionable decisions, such as the decision to support the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and because his extremely dovish and centrist approaches to economic policy are now sharply opposed by one consisting of become the European left.
So influential is the figure of Tony Blair that to this day the word ‘Blairism’ is widely used in both the UK and Europe, by which we mean a strong centre-left approach to politics inspired by the reforms of the Blair implemented in the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Blairism” has recently made a comeback in British politics: after the Labor Party had been dominated for the last decade by the more radical wing represented by Secretary Jeremy Corbyn, who pursued a policy of outright rejection of Blairism, in the In recent months, new secretary Keir Starmer has said in various interviews that the party must not reject Blair’s legacy and has indicated that he is inspired by his moderate and centrist reforms.
In addition, many political leaders across Europe are more or less explicitly inspired by Tony Blair, and his political and economic approaches continue to attract a wide following in the media and among analysts.
New job
Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh in 1953 and was a lawyer before becoming a career politician. He joined the Labor Party in 1975 and was first elected to MPs in 1983. That period – the late 1970s and 1980s – was one of the worst in Labor Party history.
The traditional left model up until then pursued by the party, which had led to the expansion of workers’ rights, the creation of the “welfare state” and a general expansion of social justice, had fallen into turmoil by the end of the economic boom of the 1960s and onwards By the late 1970s, British politics was dominated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party, which drastically realigned British politics and society.
Together with the American President Ronald Reagan, Thatcher promoted a trend that dominated the entire West in those years and wanted to reduce the role of the state and bureaucracy in the economy and society: she advocated enormous liberalization of public transport and health care, reduced the power of the unions, relaxed financial rules to make the City of London one of the world’s largest stock exchanges, cut taxes, and dismantled many key elements of the welfare state that had been built over the past few decades.
In the late 1980s, however, Thatcher’s political success also began to tarnish. In 1990 she was forced to resign to leave the post of prime minister to her party colleague John Major, who continued to lead the country until 1997 with mixed success.
Meanwhile, Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labor Party in 1994. Blair understood that to achieve electoral success in a society heavily influenced by Thatcherism, it was necessary to abandon traditional Labor socialist policies and resolutely move the party more towards the center by embracing the liberalization and market policies that Thatcher promoted , but not the time itself through increasing attention to social justice.
Blair in 1996 (Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Blair, along with a group of colleagues, intellectuals and political communications experts, dubbed this project of profound change in the British left ‘New Labour’ and quickly achieved enormous success. Contributing to this was Blair’s personal charisma, who was seen as a young politician, a great speaker and the ideal figure to rejuvenate a political landscape then dominated by more gray people, starting with Major himself. Blair presented himself as a reformer and modernizer.
Between 1994 and 1997 Labor Party membership rose by 40 per cent after more than a decade of decline and in the 1997 general election Blair won the largest election result in Labor Party history with a large majority of 418 seats out of 650. This victory was won by unmatched by any other Labor leader and was repeated first in 2001 and then in 2005.
Blair’s first years as Prime Minister were his busiest and probably also his most successful and enthusiastic.
Blair did not deny Thatcher’s privatizations and deregulations, but deepened them in some cases, such as the financial sector, which developed tremendously in the UK in those years and became one of the most important in the world.
At the same time, he introduced some reforms that succeeded in restoring elements of social justice to the extremely rigid and hostile labor policies of Thatcher and Major. He introduced a minimum wage and passed a major reform of tax breaks for the poorest classes. Public spending on education increased by 83 per cent between 1997 and 2010 and on health rose sharply from £64 billion to £136 billion over the same period.
Blair was also fortunate in his economic reforms: his ten years in power were extremely successful for the wider world economy, and New Labor was able to take advantage of an exceptionally favorable economic climate for growth. By resigning in 2007, Blair narrowly escaped the Great Global Financial Crisis, which instead brought down the economy and forced the next Conservative-led government to implement tough austerity measures.
In any case, the results of Blair’s economic reforms were remarkable: during the decade of Blairism, the economy grew significantly and the poverty rate fell. At the same time, however, economic inequalities began to increase significantly, particularly in the final years of the Labor government.
Blair also achieved some historic successes: he approved important constitutional reforms (known as “devolution”) that gave the local governments of Scotland and Wales great autonomy and greatly increased their powers. He was also a signatory to the Good Friday Agreement which ended thirty years of bloody struggles between independence and trade unionists in Northern Ireland.
Tony Blair’s governments also took some tentative steps towards greater recognition of LGBT+ rights.
The “Third Way”
The creation of New Labor and its success in the UK were not isolated phenomena. In fact, Blair was one of the main exponents – the most important in Europe – of a political current that was the most successful in the West since the mid-1990s and into the 2000s: the so-called “Third Way”, i. third way”.
Put simply, the idea behind the “Third Way” was the need to find a sensible, moderate, and centrist alternative to both the rigidities of traditional socialism and the extremes of Thatcher-Reagan right-wing neoliberalism: a third way, in Fact. This third way, again simplified, was found by combining the openings to the free market and the deregulations typical of neoliberalism with a greater attention to social justice typical of the traditional left.
The greatest exponent of the Third Way was US President Bill Clinton (1993–2001), who parabled a parable very similar to Blair’s: As a member of the Democratic Party, he centered his party and became with great enthusiasm in a Country chosen had been profoundly transformed by Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal policies, as had happened in the UK under Thatcher. Clinton did not completely deny Reagan’s liberalizations and dismantling of the “welfare state,” but he softened the harshest aspects and managed to create the conditions for a period of extraordinary economic growth in the United States.
Together, Clinton and Blair became major international promoters of the idea that economic policy should not necessarily be left or right, but should be general “common sense” and focused on promoting economic growth and leaving no one behind. The main differences between left and right, according to some Third Way theorists, were not so much economic policies as attention to expanding civil rights for all.
Blair and Clinton in 2018 (Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
This perspective has been extraordinarily successful with all centre-left parties in the West. Among others, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi (1996-1998 and 2006-2008) were proponents of the Third Way, with some differences, and implemented reforms inspired by Blair and Clinton in their countries all differences of the case.
Today, Third Way ideas have greatly faded, although they remain widespread: one could say that French President Emmanuel Macron is a dedicated “Blairian” politician. Over time, however, left-wing analysts and economists in particular have argued that Third Way politicians limited themselves to proposing a soft and sweetened version of Thatcher neoliberalism, which had enormous economic success and was capable of sustaining progressive policies for as long as the Boosting the global economy The situation remained favourable, but failed to protect workers and the most vulnerable once the post-2007 crisis made itself felt.
The idea that the third way is a more moderate continuation of neoliberal policies is well illustrated by a famous anecdote by Conor Burns, a Conservative MP (it is impossible to say whether Burns’s anecdote is accurate, but it is indeed embedded in the British penetrated political culture). In 2002, over dinner, Burns asked Thatcher what her greatest achievement had been. She replied, half ironically, half cruelly: “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”
On the contrary, other analysts and political figures show a certain nostalgia for the Third Way, which was also the last moment of the center-left’s general success in the West and the last moment when it was possible to be progressive, albeit timid Politics before the long twenty years of austerity caused by the 2007-2008 crisis.
Iraq and the end
After the extraordinary success of 1997, Blair’s political support gradually declined in each of the three elections he won, first in 2001 and then in 2005.
After the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency in the United States in 2003, Blair was very close on foreign policy with Republican George Bush, and between 2002 and 2003 he was one of the supporters of the Bush administration’s argument that it was necessary to invade Iraq because that was the case at the time Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was producing “weapons of mass destruction”, ie chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, in order to attack the West.
In hindsight, that theory turned out to be false, and the war in Iraq soon became one of the worst mistakes in recent American (and Western) foreign policy. In later years, Blair was accused of misleading the British electorate and on more than one occasion apologized for his role in entering the Iraq war, which Bush never did.
Blair’s popularity suffered a severe blow, along with a gradual decline in business initiative and a series of scandals, including his association with billionaire right-wing publisher Rupert Murdoch.
Anti-Blair protests in 2015 (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
Blair was set to remain in office until 2010 but was forced to resign due to internal disputes within his party, led by his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who took his place. According to a famous background later confirmed by those involved, Blair and Brown had struck a power-sharing pact in 1997 which stipulated that Brown would not undermine Blair’s leadership and that in return Blair would cede to him the position of Prime Minister after two terms . Blair broke his end of the bargain, and midway through his third term, Brown managed to oust Blair.
After the end of his career as Prime Minister, Blair, while still relatively young, led a fairly active international political life. For a time he was the special envoy of the Quartet for the Middle East, a UN-European Union-US-Russia group campaigning for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has also been a consultant and collaborator for numerous international companies and renowned universities.
Between 2015 and 2020, during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labor Party leader, the legacy of Blairism was flatly rejected in favor of a return to policies closer to mainstream socialism. However, in the 2019 election, Corbyn suffered a historic defeat at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, the worst in Labor history: he resigned shortly thereafter.
After a period of turmoil, the Labor Party is now led by Keir Starmer, who openly extols the legacy of ‘Blairism’.
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