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Tony Blair has unquestionably been the most remarkable politician of his generation, in the UK and across Europe. His hat-trick of election victories is historic. His gifts, as a quick and intuitive politician of charm and tenacity, are formidable.
His and Gordon Brown's stewardship of the economy over the past decade has very nearly established Labour as the natural party of government. His attempts to reform public services such as health and education have not so much failed as disappointed. A socially tolerant government
defended the rights of gays, mothers and women in the workplace, yet illiberally attacked civil liberties and retreated into secrecy. Mr Blair deserves accolades for achieving peace and
power-sharing in Northern Ireland. Yet the misjudgment and misadventure in Iraq will forever soil a record that could have been so much better.
That dawn a decade ago broke to the anthem of “Things can only get better”. Quite often, they did. Under Mr Blair, Britain has enjoyed 10 years of unbroken economic growth, with low inflation and low unemployment. This stable prosperity owes much to Mr. Brown as chancellor (and to his Conservative predecessor, Kenneth Clarke). But that should not overshadow the conviction with which New Labour has embraced globalisation and kept the economy and the country open to trade, investment and immigrants. The Blair government has not managed to create a noticeably fairer society, as the beginnings of a backlash against the bonus and executive pay bonanza in the City attest. But, as a result of increased public spending and measures such as the minimum wage, there has been no increase in the inequality opened up by the Thatcher decade.
While Mr Blair and Mr Brown moved boldly to, for example, make the Bank of England independent, they took too long to shake off the habits of opposition as they concentrated on winning re-election. They badly underestimated the task of public services reform.
They have poured money into the National Health Service and schools, as though infusions of cash alone could trigger and shape change. In this as in some other policies, Mr Blair's insight was right but the execution was a mess. The Blairite view that design flaws in the provision of welfare and public service entrench inequality and hold back the disadvantaged is basically valid. It is, indeed, the core of Blairism: the search for modern means towards social democracy's traditional ends of social justice. But choice in the NHS, for example, is crushed by the conflicting approach of decentralising competition while imposing central targets.
Such disconnects arise partly because the flipside of Mr Blair's intuitive grasp is that he is not a details man who thinks things through. That trait is exacerbated by his style of government, presidential yet informal, with little use for ministers, MPs or mandarins, preferring an inner circle of like-minded special advisers. As the Butler report on the Iraq war intelligence tellingly observed, this document-lite, sofa government reduces “the scope for informed collective political judgment” by
leaving all but close aides out of the loop.
Certainly, Iraq was a catastrophic error of judgment. As well as breaking a state and dissolving a society, the invasion and occupation have created an incubator of terrorism far more dangerous than the Afghanistan of the Taliban, proliferated jihadi totalitarianism around the globe, and made the Islamic Republic of Iran the dominant power in the Middle East. Western and Sunni Arab panic at Shia Iran's advance has created a diplomatic vacuum and flung Mr Blair's and George W. Bush's
vaunted “freedom agenda” in the region (tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism) into headlong retreat. |
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发表于 2007-10-6 00:57:43
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