Andy Rowell, 10 May 2007 

So finally after all the speculation about when he will leave office, Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair has said that he will will step down on the 27 June.

Ten years after he swept Labour to power, Blair will walk into the history books, left at the mercy of the media pundits who will assess his political legacy.

Blair will argue that he has achieved much in his decade in office. “Tony Blair hopes that history will judge him kindly;” wrote the Observer recently, before announcing that “Britain is better off after a decade with Tony Blair in charge. Wealth has been created, and wealth has been redistributed. That is what Labour governments have always hoped to do. It has happened without a brake on global competitiveness. That is what New Labour hoped to do: build a vibrant market economy with a generous welfare state; economic freedom and social protection. That is Blairism”.

“Blairism” will mean many different things to people from Britain to the Middle East. Let’s start at home, in Britain. According to Blair’s supporters in the Observer newspaper, wealth has been redistributed. So has this really happened? The Sunday Times recently published its annual “Rich List,” a listing of the richest people in the country. “Wealthy people in Britain have never had it so good”, reported the paper.

It continued:  “It has been another record-breaking year for the nation’s super-rich with the number of billionaires rising by 14 to 68 and the country’s richest 1,000 increasing their fortunes by 20% to almost £360 billion.” This 20% rise was one of the highest annual increases in wealth ever recorded since 1989. The paper concluded: “The past decade of Labour government under Tony Blair has proved a golden age for the rich, rarely seen in modern British history”.

So the rich have got richer, but have the poor got richer or poorer? There have been some successes for the government in tackling poverty. There are now some 700,000 fewer children in what is described as “income poverty” than in 1998/99, just after Blair took office. Although this represents a decline of 17%, it is well below the Government’s own target of 25%.

There is no doubt that over the last decade incomes have risen, helping lift people out of poverty. However three-quarters of the extra income created over the last decade has gone to richer not poorer households, with a third having gone to those in the richest tenth. There is nothing for Blair to be complacent about: The UK has a higher proportion of its population in relative low income than most other EU countries: of the 27 EU countries, only 6 have a higher rate than the UK.

Moreover, the problem with general statistics is that they hide some horrendous trends that can be masked by the national picture. A decade ago Blair said: “This new Labour government will govern in the interests of all our people -- the whole of this nation”.

But this has not happened. Recent research has shown that two-thirds of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children living in the UK are living in poverty. The unsavourory truth for Blair is that ethnic minorities suffer twice the level of poverty of white Britons, as discrimination and disadvantage blight their lives. Commenting on these figures, Kay Hampton, who chairs the Commission for Racial Equality, has said that there is “an invisible apartheid separating modern Britain”. This is not meant to be the legacy of a Labour leader.

What about education? Blair famously promised that his "government's passion " would be "education, education and education”. Again there have been some successes with the proportion of the population without any educational qualifications falling by a third over the last decade to 13%. 

However, a quarter of 19 year olds fail to reach the “minimum educational standard ”. “Since these people face the highest risk of poverty in adult life” reports the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, that works to address poverty, “one of the major causes of future poverty is not being addressed”. This is not meant to be the legacy of a Labour leader, either.

Another Blair ambition ten years ago was the reform of Britain’s public services after years of financial constraints by the political opposition, the Conservatives.  Last week a close political ally of Blair’s admitted that the government “lost” three years after the 1997 election before Labour realized the scale of the task. Three years is a long time to work out what exactly you should be doing.

As part of this agenda, Blair promised to transform Britain’s National Health Service, which he maintains is much better after his ten years in office. "When I came into office the question was: 'Does the NHS have a future?'. The question today is: 'How can we improve it?'" he said recently.

Once again there are improvements, with doctors’ wages having risen considerably. “I think it's great that we are paying our health workers more”, says Blair. But his critics argue that the rises in wages to doctors have been at the expense of services to patients. Alan Maynard, a health economics expert at York University argues "These pay increases, together with workforce management which has led to unaffordable employment increases, are creating deficits and undermining patient care and the financial performance of the NHS."

Those working in the NHS do not agree. One doctor writing on the “NHS Blog Doctor” website notes that the state of the service “is worse than it has ever been at any time in my medical career. Some waiting lists are shorter. I cannot think of anything else that is better, but could give you an endless list of things that are worse”.

And that is Blair’s problem. Many people in Britain think that life has gotten worse under his leadership.  A poll for the right-wing Daily Telegraph recently found that only 26 per cent of people thought that life had improved under Blair. However, nearly twice that proportion, 48 per cent, thought life had got worse.

More importantly, though for Blair and his personal legacy is the feeling within the British people that Blair could not be trusted.  The poll found that nearly two thirds of voters believed Blair was "fast and loose with the truth". A decade ago 63 per cent thought Mr Blair could be trusted. That proportion has now descended to 22 per cent.

Commenting on the findings the Telegraph reported that: “Never before in British history can a Prime Minister have started so well and ended so badly. A decade ago Tony Blair was a political genius, a man who could walk on water. Now a large majority of voters dismiss him as just another politician: ineffectual, untrustworthy and out of touch”.

And no where more will Blair be shown to be out of touch with his people and of being untrustworthy than over Iraq. No matter how hard he tries, it will not be the improvement of public services that people remember Blair for but for a failed war in Iraq. The war in Iraq will define his legacy. It will continue to haunt him long after he leaves office.

Another public opinion poll for the Independent newspaper last week found that only two per cent of people believe Mr Blair's legacy will be his goal to improve public services. Meanwhile seven out of 10 people – some seventy per cent - believe that Iraq will prove to be Tony Blair's most enduring legacy. Remarkably, his next highest "legacy rating" - just 9 per cent - is for Blair’s relationship with George Bush.

Four years into a bloody war in the Middle East, few people trust Blair or Bush. The reasons are so well known it is repetitious to repeat them – the dodgy intelligence dossiers in the run up to war, the lack of weapons of mass destruction, the lies, the countless deaths and suffering.

Blair may soon be gone but the suffering of those caught up in the Iraq conflict will continue. Take just one example. Gordon Gentle was a nineteen year old soldier killed by a road-side bomb in June 2004. Nearly three years after he was killed the official inquest into his death has still not been held, leaving his family still searching for the truth about his death.

Gordon’s sister, Pamela writes : “We have to keep this fight up to get our troops home. We have Gordon’s inquest coming up soon and I still don’t think we will get the truth. We will just get more and more lies but I'm not giving up … I don’t just blame the person who put the roadside bomb there. I blame Tony Blair and George Bush ... I would like to say to Mr. Blair you have done a great job of ripping families hearts out. I wonder how you would feel if it was you”.

Happy retirement, Tony.