LABOUR NEED A NEW BLAIR
Party must acknowledge former leader’s role as it seeks to rebuild
TONY Blair has made a lot of money since he quit frontline politics. He is said to be worth £60 million, mostly accrued after leaving Downing Street in 2007.
In his role as Middle East envoy, which he leaves at the end of this month, he has travelled extensively, stayed in lavish hotels, apparently cost the British taxpayer millions in police protection bills and built up a network of super-rich Arab friends.
For this, he is widely vilified. Instead of brokering lasting peace in the world’s most volatile region, he has swanned around, lined his own pockets and achieved, according to his many critics, absolutely nothing – although his remit in the Middle East was simply economic.
Poor (though not literally) Mr Blair. It has become so acceptable to attack him that even what sound like triumphs are presented as scandals. One Sunday newspaper listed among his crimes securing Abu Dhabi millions for Manchester during his eight-year stint as envoy.
He is said to have been involved in proposals for a £175 million student village at Manchester University, as well as a £1 billion housing development in the city.
If anyone else had brought such significant investment to the UK they would be lauded but it is always open season on the former prime minister, whether he is securing road access and water permits for a development in the West Bank, luring Middle East money to British infrastructure, or extending his influence in China.
What must be galling for Mr Blair is that other, arguably lesser, former leaders can work the world circuit without raising attention or hackles. Gordon Brown channels his payments into the Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown and his integrity is beyond reproach. Over the weekend he made an appearance at the Borders book festival; imagine Mr Blair doing the same. Fair or not, Mr Brown carries none of his predecessor’s toxic baggage.
John Major still makes a living from the Number 10 connection, and even Henry McLeish, Scotland’s First Minister for about five minutes, seems to coin it as an ex-international statesman, with several visiting professorships at American universities.
Who would begrudge any of them a life after politics? And if it turns out to be lucrative, good luck to them unless, of course, they are Tony Blair. He alone is said to blur the line between his official position and his business interests but all of the above exploit their former careers to further their current ones.
Mr Blair’s reach is far greater and, therefore, his rewards are too. You probably won’t see Mr Brown staying in a hotel with views of the Persian Gulf and a machine in the lobby dispensing gold bars. And Mr Major doesn’t, as far as we know, have a private jet at his disposal.
Other retired prime ministers may have more modest ambitions than Mr Blair, but his love of lucre is not in itself an offence.
Is there no one now who thinks Britain’s most successful ever Labour leader has something to offer public life, and is there no one willing to defend his record in office?
Well, in fact, there are one or two. First to come out of the woodwork was David Miliband. Last week he re-entered the UK political debate with a loud cheer for the New Labour years.
“We should liberate ourselves from the delusion that running away from three election victories is a route to success,” he said. “It’s 50 years since Labour won a majority at a General Election without Tony as leader. It’s important to have this in mind.”
Is this a brother seeking revenge on the disastrous left-wing drift of his sibling, or could it be the start of a move to rehabilitate Mr Blair?
According to the Guardian, an unnamed shadow cabinet member said last week: “We have got to stop treating the politics of a man that won us three elections like he is dirt.”
In a speech in London yesterday, Jim Murphy, who formally resigned as Scottish Labour leader on Saturday, urged MPs not to forget Mr Blair.
The problem is Mr Blair’s legacy cannot be judged dispassionately because the man stirs the passions so. He has had the same effect on his party as that other extraordinarily successful post-war British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. The Conservatives ditched her after three election victories and then sat on the opposition benches for a generation.
Labour’s losing streak since hounding Mr Blair out of his job has distinct echoes of the Conservatives’ wilderness years, and if the party is to avoid the same fate as the Tories, it must examine what made it electable in its recent past.
David Miliband may have been thinking of his own future when he said the party needed to be more centrist again, but he is still correct.
By pursuing a socialist agenda, the party, nationwide, frightened the aspirational middle classes who were the bedrock of New Labour support between 1997 and 2010. And now the ultra left has its own candidate, in Jeremy Corbyn, as a national leadership option, after nominations closed yesterday.
In Scotland, Blairite Mr Murphy felt he had no option but to move ever leftwards to see off the Nationalist threat. It didn’t work but has his party learned anything from defeat?
As his parting shot, Mr Murphy has introduced a curb on the powers of the unions in electing a Labour leader, as well as overhauling the selection process to make way for new MSPs, in a bid to make his party popular once again.
But it will take not just the surviving Blairites, but the unreconstructed idealists to put the party back on its feet.
The perception that Scottish Labour must be more left wing to reflect a left leaning electorate, and to claim back ground lost to the SNP, is misplaced. New Labour appealed to Scots in large numbers not so long ago, winning 56 seats in Scotland in Mr Blair’s 1997 landslide and increasing its share of the vote in 2001. Not just Mr Blair but Scottish Labour MPs such as John Reid, Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander were part of the project and took Scots with them.
If voters north of the border embraced the reforming zeal of Blairism then, they might be open to a social democrat approach again. There will be many, certainly, who seek an alternative to the tax-raising, business-hating Scottish Nationalists, but are not ready to vote for the Conservatives, even rebranded as they are under Ruth Davidson.
There is no leader of Mr Blair’s charisma waiting in Labour’s wings, and no people’s politician of his calibre to recapture the country. But with both the Scottish and the UK parties looking for a new direction – resuscitation in Scotland’s case – it is time for Labour to acknowledge that the man they now love to hate was also the man who put them into power.
It’s 50 years since Labour won a majority at a General Election without Tony as leader. It’s important to have this in mind