Some of you must have voted for Tony?

As a life-long Labour voter ... until a year or two after Labour won the 1997 General Election ... I was somewhat bemused by a witticism handed down at a financial seminar I attended shortly before said election in which Labour's victory was generally accepted and how its likely management of the economy, then booming, was unlikely to cause any immediate issues ...

... because as the presenter stated:

If you re-arrange the letters "Tony Blair, MP" ...

... you get "I'm Tory, Plan B"

The speaker could not have known how right he was.

Mitch

SJB

Your perspective is really interesting. Would you not credit John Major with some of the big steps toward NI peace? I accept TB did also have a considerable impact.

Would another PM have lead Britain to war in Iraq? Good question. I wonder if another individual (another Lab leader for example) would have sought more of an international consensus-and if they found it lacking would not have signed up wholesale to such action. Impossible to know.

Some of the TB dislike now is about his post PM activities. He is perceived as grasping with his hugely paid consultancies and speeches  and his faith-based peace work has come in for much criticism. I think you'll also see from this thread that the longstanding Lab supporters recognise his huge electoral successes, and perhaps accepted then and now that this was worth the ideological price whilst those who came to him at the start from non-Lab background such as me felt betrayed by his tenure in general, not just Iraq.

Bruce

John Major and Albert Reynolds certainly moved things forward with the Anglo Irish Agreement but that's exactly what it was, an Irish and British agreement. It did nothing for the visceral hatred between what can be loosely called nationalists and Unionists.

I'm no historian but I do believe if we did not have the confluence of Blair, Ahern and Clinton with all their obvious faults (but undoubted talents) we would not have got the Good Friday Agreement and everything that has flowed from it.

I have never voted Fianna Fail in my life, am an avid critic of Bertie Ahern, but as I said I don't think there was any other politician in Ireland who could have done what he did. I think posterity will be much kinder to him than we are at the moment.

A strange parallel really both Thatcher and Blair, the 2 most successful prime Ministers in the last 40 years both being so reviled. I remember relating so strongly to "Tramp the Dirt down" Costello's song about Thatcher at the time however it leaves me cold now.I suppose it's some of that type of feeling that's coming through on this thread.

SJB

I think it is also the case that folk in the USA love our politicians (and our Royals) rather more than we do.

I'm sure Cameron will fashion lucrative lecture tours in the Sates at some point.

Bruce

First: You had to have lived through the paradigm changing UK politics of the 1980s which tore the country apart and gutted it. It's a love or hate thing. It was difficult to be indifferent.

Second: Can't remember and No.

It is also worth remembering that Tony Blair was a hero to many ordinary Iraqis because of the war. It is very interesting that people in Iraq were so positive and people in the UK so negative.

Iain Duncan Smith

No!

Maybe, if the UK had had some form of proportional representation, a more controversial discussion regarding the notion of going to war would have taken place in parliament. I doubt it would have changed the outcome but at least there would have been stronger opposition. 

I never quite understood why the British public voted agains this in the 2011 alternative vote referendum nor why about 60% of those eligible to vote didn't bother to cast their vote. If ever there was an important referendum, this surely was it. 

When Tony Blair first came on to the political scene as leader of the Labour party I saw him as a very clever persistent door to door salesman.  To stand for Labour and to borrow (thats how he would put it!)  Tory ideologies  on financial issues and call it all 'New Labour' he managed to show Labour with a modern friendly face to the unsuspecting public and made the whole prospect of Labour kind of inviting.  At the time I found him a very dangerous adversity as I was definitely not a Labour follower. 

Whether you like him or loath him, for me he was one of the most capable politicians to come out of Labour Party. He was very difficult to pin point in public political interviews and seems to have an answer for everything (even if it is not answer for the rest of us).  A typical politician who can talk a lot and say very little!   I just like to know what really was agreed between him and Bush in relation to world affairs.

The Blair government failed to get the next stage of nuclear power stations under way, because of this laxness we are at risk of power outages during the winter due to lack of generating capacity.

The second major error was the cancelling of the roads program in the early part of the decade.

The Blair government failed in their role of ensuring that the country would continue to operate and function.