Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the ill-informed comments we often get from the Minister for Foreign Affairs that Tony Blair has no supporters on our side of politics is absolutely a falsehood. It is my view that when Tony Blair leaves office this month, after a bit more than 10 years as British Labour Prime Minister:

… he leaves behind a country far better than he found it—and unimaginably better than it would have been under 10 more years of Conservative rule.

Those are not my words; they are the words of one of Mr Blair’s most bitter critics, Polly Toynbee, of the Guardian. If Labour in Britain is to be regarded as the heir to the old Liberals, as it should be, Blair is clearly the most successful progressive leader Britain has had since Gladstone. If the Iraq war had never happened, the British commentariat—all of the people who have been so vociferous in their criticism of Prime Minister Blair—would be down on their collective knees begging Blair to stay. Under Blair’s leadership, Labour has not only enjoyed a decade of power but also carried through a progressive revolution in social policy in Britain, building on the economic strength delivered by Gordon Brown’s stern economic management to deliver enormous benefits to Labour’s traditional constituencies. It was Brown and Blair who let the Bank of England float the British pound and that led to all of the benefits that has had for the UK economy, which is booming.

Simon Hoggart, another Guardian writer who has been scathing about Blair in recent years, concedes that people in working-class communities such as the former mining town of Sedgefield in Durham, Blair’s constituency, ‘have become noticeably more prosperous, better dressed and better fed’. Not only that, but their health indicators have improved and more of their children than ever before are finishing school and going to university. Some of this progress rests on the radical changes of the Thatcher years—a fact Blair does not deny. Neither do I, but Blair recognises that the Thatcher policy of cutting taxes for the rich and slashing the size of the state could go only so far in generating prosperity. The real issue that Thatcher dodged was investing that prosperity in raising opportunities for working-class families and thus ending the old class divisions.

Tony Blair was a world leader in other fields as well, including the great challenge of the coming decade: climate change. The Stern report was delivered on his watch. He has led the world on this climate change while our own Prime Minister has, sadly, trailed the pack. Blair finally broke through decades of distrust to achieve peace in Northern Ireland. He persuaded Bill Clinton to go to the Balkans and rescue Kosovo from the murderous Milosevic regime. Very interestingly, Britain and the United States were there to save Muslims in that part of the Balkans. He championed humanitarian intervention in Sierra Leone and other trouble spots. The post-invasion situation in Iraq has been badly botched and no-one can dodge that, but to allow Iraq to overshadow all of Blair’s achievements is demonstrably unfair. Tony Blair deserves to be remembered as the best British Prime Minister since Gladstone.