I became very disappointed and disillusioned with Tony Blair -- as so many people did -- but I still couldn't resist his charm and communications skills when he talked. I listened to him announce his resignation this week and was once again amazed by how beautifully he does it.
And I took a special interest in this analysis of his terms in office by Doug Saunders in The Globe and Mail. I have quite a lot of insight into how things work behind the political scenes -- and here's some more stuff to consider:
quote:
"There was often too much attention paid to focus groups, to ensuring that our policies were electable, and there were times when this forced us to abandon our principles or to move too slowly."This leads to the first deep secret of Tony Blair, the thing neither he nor his advisers wanted to say, lest it destroy their electoral success -- that theirs was a left-wing administration, one that redistributed striking amounts of wealth from the well-off to the poor.
He and his advisers were deeply committed to keeping the loyalty of the readers of Mr. Murdoch's Sun and Daily Mail tabloids, with their deep obsessions with crime and immigration. The phrases "social justice" and "progressive change" were banished from the lexicon of New Labour, replaced with talk of "customer choice."
Yet historians, looking at the effects of the 10 Blair years, will probably list these changes:
The reduction of poverty: Six million people have been lifted above the poverty line; 700,000 children are no longer poor, and the eradication of child poverty seems a realistic goal in the next few years.
This was partly due to massive (and unpublicized) increases in state spending on welfare programs by the Blair administration - and partly due to Mr. Brown's introduction of a minimum wage, which now stands at $11.77 an hour, one of the highest in the world.
Britain's health system, which in 1997 was compared to that of Eastern Europe and parts of the developing world, saw its public investment triple to $207-billion a year, on par with the best in Europe. Waiting lists were almost eliminated, 118 public hospitals and 90,000 public doctors and nurses were added, and the private hospitals in Britain's two-tier system lost tens of thousands of patients who decided that public medicine offered better service.
Its schools, which had been an embarrassment, saw spending double to $11,000 a year per pupil, and learning standards increased dramatically. University attendance increased to 43 per cent of the population, even as tuition fees were introduced for the first time. And the number of state-subsidized child-care places doubled to 1.28 million.
The crime rate fell by 35 per cent, with violent crime dropping by 34 per cent, burglaries by 55 per cent and car theft by 51 per cent. Public arts spending has more than doubled to $907-billion. Sports funding has almost tripled. Importantly, foreign-aid spending has doubled to almost Scandinavian levels.
And the economic story is well known: For the entire decade, Britain has been one of the world's top-performing economies, seeing solid growth in every quarter. It has one of the lowest jobless rates in the world. Government debt has stayed low, below 40 per cent of GDP.
Much of this has been done almost by stealth: Focus groups showed Mr. Blair early on that voters want to hear about crime and social order. Helping the poor was to be done, for moral reasons, but it wasn't to be said, lest the voters of Middle England hear it.
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posted 10 May 2007 03:24 PM
