The end of Blair era in British politics

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Syed Fattahul Alim
The Blair era in British politics has ended. Being the prime minister of United Kingdom, one of the leading and most advanced countries of the world, Tony Blair's impact was felt not only in Britain, it was felt also in other parts of the world. That is so because, Tony Blair's government remained a staunch, rather loyal, ally of the world's lone superpower, the USA during his two terms in office. To be more specific, he remained loyal to the US president George W Bush, who, too has been elected as US president for two consecutive terms. Blair supported Bush in his war on terror, in the invasion of Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban, in the Iraq war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and at all conceivable places of engagement on the world theatre where the US has been involved. Such devotion to Bush earned him the title Bush's lapdog. But such title could not dampen Blair's spirit of going gung ho with all the US-led adventures on the global theatre.
Despite his many successes on the home front, it is due to his foreign policy in particular that Blair had to take a lot of flak both at home and abroad. He was even hated for his joining the Iraq war and sending troops in Iraq.
His successes and failures, foibles and fortes apart, Blair was undoubtedly an extraordinarily charismatic leader. Now that Gordon Brown has succeeded him, how is he going to fare in the British, or for that matter, in world politics? How does Conservative leader David Cameron look at the pre and post-Blair developments?
Britain's prestigious weekly magazine Economist looks at the development in the following manner.
"For more than a decade the relationship between Mr Blair and his ally and rival Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has shaped-some would say distorted-British politics. Since well before Mr Blair swept into Downing Street in 1997 with the biggest majority for over 60 years, there has been talk of a secret agreement to cede power in time to Mr Brown. For the past year and a half of this interminable handover, the strains of that relationship have deflected direct confrontation between the chancellor who helped create the "Blair legacy" and David Cameron, the newish Conservative leader who claims to be its true inheritor.
Now, as Mr Blair leaves the Commons to bestride a bigger stage as Middle East peace envoy, the real contenders are squaring off at last. "Tony's going, and the phoney war will be over," said Mr Cameron on June 18th. "The British people will have a clear choice. A choice between two different visions of society...And a choice between the new and the old politics. Us against Gordon Brown."
The choice does not, it seems, include the possibility of complete sentences: much of Mr Brown's speech as he assumed the leadership of the Labour Party on June 24th was similarly verb-free. But everything else is up for grabs.
Mr Brown promises fresh policies and a new, more inclusive style of government-a curious pledge for a man who played a crucial role in the last one, and was famed as a closed and clannish operator. Mr Cameron, who is trying to wrench his recalcitrant party from the unelectable right field towards the centre, promises to be more Blairite than Mr Blair, to say nothing of Mr Brown. Mr Cameron is betting that under Mr Brown Labour will lurch to the left; Mr Brown is hoping that Mr Cameron's Conservatives will collapse under the weight of their internal disunity.
Thanks to coincidental Tory disarray as well as to a "Brown bounce", Labour no longer trails the Tories badly in the polls: Mr Brown and Mr Cameron are running neck-and-neck. There is implausible but exciting talk that the new prime minister will call a snap election. Politics in Britain is about to get intensely interesting.
What happens as a result of this gloves-off tussle matters, and not only to Britain. New Labour has done well by the country, building on its predecessors' work. Stable economic growth has created 2.5m new jobs and pushed GDP per head above the figures for Italy, France and Germany. There have been social gains as well: fewer children and pensioners live in poverty than ten years ago.
Crime is broadly lower. Society is officially more tolerant of difference than it was, thanks to anti-discrimination laws. And as a result of massive investment in public services and some reform of them, health care and education are better than they were, though still less good than they should be.
With prosperity has come renewed political influence abroad. Britain's much-vaunted role as the bridge between America and Europe creaked near-fatally under the weight of the war in Iraq. But the country remains a halfway house between the naked free-marketry of the former and the social safety nets of the latter; its experience offers lessons, perhaps, for both. And as the one big country in the EU to open its labour market to workers from most of the new member states, Britain's future direction may be more important in forging a new European identity than any number of constitutional mini-treaties.
Mr Brown and Mr Cameron are now at war, and style, policies and electoral arithmetic all have a part to play. Start with style, for most voters do.
Mr Blair, once he had shed the wide-eyed sobriquet "Bambi", was consistently seen by Britons as both "strong" and "charismatic". Mr Brown has inherited his perceived strength, and Mr Cameron has bagged his charisma.
"Dave" comes across as a sports car, fast and faintly glamorous; Mr Brown as a tank with a maximum, crushing speed of 37 mph."
Jonathan Freedland of Guardian writes:
"Rarely has form reflected content more perfectly. Gordon Brown used his first parliamentary speech as prime minister to announce a grand plan to change the balance of power in our country - one that would give greater weight to the House of Commons - and he did it in, of all places, the House of Commons. He had not outlined the key points at 8.10am on the Today programme, nor had they been splashed in selective chunks all over the Sunday papers. As if to ram home his point that the Commons should matter, the Commons got to hear it first.
That he chose to make his maiden prime ministerial speech on this subject was replete with significance. For many long years, constitutional reform has been the poor relation of British politics. Academics liked it, nerds in anoraks loved it, and the odd celebrity could be lured into it - but the mainstream steered well clear. Yet now Brown has declared that it counts, that he means to spend serious political capital on it.
Why? The wide-eyed will say that Brown's a true believer, that he was giving Charter 88 lectures on this subject a full 15 years ago. They'd be right. But it pays to remember that Brown is all politician: he may be a philosopher, a man who used to bust his airline limit on excess baggage with a holiday suitcase packed with books, but he is more interested in being a king.
That's the context in which he comes at the constitution, starting with what he regards as the Blair government's greatest weakness, the quality it lost and which he is determined to regain - trust. Brown reckons that the surest way for a politician to win back the public trust is to give away power. He thinks back to the economy of the mid-1990s, and the cynicism that greeted all politicians' decisions on interest rates, especially after Black Wednesday. The only remedy, he concluded, was to give away that very power by making the Bank of England independent.
Now it's political trust that needs to be repaired, after it was shredded by spin and Iraq. And once again, Brown believes, it will be the ceding of control that will do the trick. Hence yesterday's list of 12 executive powers whose pleasures he will deny to himself, from the power unilaterally to declare war, ratify treaties, and dissolve and recall parliament, to the power to appoint bishops and judges. Much of that list amounts to a promise not to repeat Blair's missteps: no Downing Street rush to war, though MPs had the chance to vote against the invasion of Iraq but voted for it; and no more cronyism, with all public appointments coming under "effective scrutiny".
But his aim is not simply to shed some of Blair's negatives; the ambition is larger than that. Brownites used to speak of their determination to establish Labour's economic competence not as an end in itself but to "rehabilitate tax and spend". They needed to restore public belief in the very idea of activist government. The constitutional project outlined yesterday is in the same vein. If people can be persuaded to believe once more in the legitimacy of government, then Brown can get on with deploying it as a tool for political change.
There is a third motive, one that would have been missing back in the early 90s. Brown believes that a constitutional settlement serves far more than its direct, mechanical purpose - that it can act as a binding agent, a cultural document that ties islands of individuals together into a society, a nation. He sees the magic that the Bill of Rights, the constitution and the Declaration of Independence have worked in the United States over the past two centuries, turning waves of immigrants into the American people, and wants some of that same alchemy here. Forging a "stronger shared national purpose" was essential, he said the other day, for dealing with "the new challenges of security ... of communities under pressure". That was a coded way of expressing Brown's hope that a new, written constitution will serve as a statement of British identity, one that British Muslims, among others, will be able to sign up to.