Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Thu May 03, 2012 7:51 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote:

Blair damaged his reputation with his wars and his foreign policy was bad and left long standing consequences. To be honest I expect most British PMs would have gone in with America to Afghanistan and Iraq however what grates with Blair is he seemed to be even more enthusiastic for war than Bush and he helped Bush presentationally.

However taking aside his foreign policy and looking at Blair's domestic policy he was a good and effective politician, and Blair's Britain was a big improvement on the Tory Britain of the 1980s and 1990s. I think he was generally in tune politically with where most of the electorate are, centre left but quite close to the centre, and authoritarian on law and order and security. I think there were definitely downsides, excess of reliance on target setting etc, but overall I think if most people are honest, even if they criticise Blair, if you ask them was Britain better under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown or Cameron, the vast majority of people would take Blair's Britain every time.

So why blow it all by not only getting in bed with Bush but also chaining himself to the bedposts with a butt plug in place so he squealed with excitement to boot? Where was his logic? Pure bloodlust or poor strategy?

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Thu May 03, 2012 9:02 pm  

WormInHand wrote:

So why blow it all by not only getting in bed with Bush but also chaining himself to the bedposts with a butt plug in place so he squealed with excitement to boot? Where was his logic? Pure bloodlust or poor strategy?

You have to remember that Blair had miraculously brought peace to Ireland, and was instrumental in a successful Kosovo campaign.....Coupled with his dominance in domestic politics, perhaps a feeling of supreme invincibility took over and his ego got the better of him, or more likely, he naively felt he could bring peace to even the most unlikely places, even if it meant going through a bloody war first?

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Thu May 03, 2012 9:12 pm  

Rock God X wrote:

Less of a dick than Cameron?

What, him a 5 times a night man too?

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Thu May 03, 2012 9:30 pm  

Is that as in 'in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, ahhhhh....'?

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Fri May 04, 2012 12:51 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote:

Blair damaged his reputation with his wars and his foreign policy was bad and left long standing consequences. To be honest I expect most British PMs would have gone in with America to Afghanistan and Iraq however what grates with Blair is he seemed to be even more enthusiastic for war than Bush and he helped Bush presentationally.

However taking aside his foreign policy and looking at Blair's domestic policy he was a good and effective politician, and Blair's Britain was a big improvement on the Tory Britain of the 1980s and 1990s. I think he was generally in tune politically with where most of the electorate are, centre left but quite close to the centre, and authoritarian on law and order and security. I think there were definitely downsides, excess of reliance on target setting etc, but overall I think if most people are honest, even if they criticise Blair, if you ask them was Britain better under Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown or Cameron, the vast majority of people would take Blair's Britain every time.

Bliar was incredibly lucky to come to power at a time when a period of sustained economic growth* was beginning and with an unprecedented level of public goodwill behind him. But his economic policies at least weren't centre-left, they were predominantly to the right of centre, with a smattering of centre-left thrown in.
I can never decide who is more to blame - Bliar or Brown - when it comes to running a fiscal deficit during a time of economic growth, and thus leaving the Treasury piggybank empty when the shatstorm hit and we needed to get the chequebook out to invest in public services to offset the economic contraction.


* built on foundations of blancmange, as it happens

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Fri May 04, 2012 1:13 pm  

Dita's Slot Meter wrote:

For all his critics, if Blair had been Labour leader at the last election, then Cameron would still be in opposition.

I very much doubt that.

Blair left at the right time. He and his party were losing support and he was starting to believe he could do anything. The sheer arrogance in some of his statments, and the high handedness with which he talked people down who opposed him was astounding at times. He knew that the economy was about to go pop, and that Brown wanted his job, so he let him have it, just in time for Brown to get the backlash of the time bomb the pair of them had more than a hand in creating.

I don't doubt Blair thought he was doing the best for this country, and that he is very clever. So clever, in fact, that he knew exactly when the shiit he created would hit the fan, and made sure his scapegoats were in place.

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Fri May 04, 2012 2:26 pm  

ROBINSON wrote:

I very much doubt that.

Blair left at the right time. He and his party were losing support and he was starting to believe he could do anything. The sheer arrogance in some of his statments, and the high handedness with which he talked people down who opposed him was astounding at times. He knew that the economy was about to go pop, and that Brown wanted his job, so he let him have it, just in time for Brown to get the backlash of the time bomb the pair of them had more than a hand in creating.

I don't doubt Blair thought he was doing the best for this country, and that he is very clever. So clever, in fact, that he knew exactly when the shiit he created would hit the fan, and made sure his scapegoats were in place.

Sounds very bitter this. The yanks were always going to do something crazy following 9/11 and maybe Blair could have opted out but to blame him for the financial crash is plain wrong. It was the successful conclusion to reganomics. If you lend money to countrys or people, who have a track record of not re-paying such monies, then you'll soon go bankrupt and this is exactly what happened. Simple.

[DaveO]

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Fri May 04, 2012 2:49 pm  

ROBINSON wrote:

I very much doubt that.

Blair left at the right time. He and his party were losing support and he was starting to believe he could do anything. The sheer arrogance in some of his statments, and the high handedness with which he talked people down who opposed him was astounding at times. He knew that the economy was about to go pop, and that Brown wanted his job, so he let him have it, just in time for Brown to get the backlash of the time bomb the pair of them had more than a hand in creating.

I don't doubt Blair thought he was doing the best for this country, and that he is very clever. So clever, in fact, that he knew exactly when the shiit he created would hit the fan, and made sure his scapegoats were in place.

What poop did he create? He didn't create that 2008 crash. The deficits and debt levels went down as well as up under his PM'ship. Nothing went on under his time as PM out of the ordinary economically compared to any other western democracy. He towed the conventional capitalist economic line to a tee.

So unless you think he should have tried to put the breaks on the kind of economic system the Thatcher and Major years left us with I am not sure what you think he should have done differently from an economic point of view. He behaved pretty much as a Tory PM would have done on the economic front.

If he was to blame then so was every other leader in every other country whether they were right or left.

In general terms without his misjudgement over Iraq I think he would have seen Brown off and would still be PM. There isn't any serious competition and you don't have to agree with his policies to see that.

Re: Just when you think things couldn't get any worse...... : Sat May 05, 2012 3:33 pm  

Exactly, right wingers like to say the crash was caused by Tony Blair's government spending too much on public services, but at the end of the day the crash started in the USA, where they had a Republican government headed by George W Bush....surely Bush wasn't spending taxpayers money on healthcare and paying benefits, and yet the USA ended up slammed with huge deficits and a reeling financial system.

But then to be fair I suppose the lefties are going to blame the current recession on "Tory cuts" so you can always use this tactic, when something goes wrong then just blame it on the part of the other side's policy you don't like.

However I don't think Blair would still be PM. I don't think he would have had the appetite to be PM much longer than a decade, although I'm sure he would have rather gone on his terms rather than being pushed into a corner by Brown and his cabal of plotters. I think Blair might have taken it to the next election and then looked to hand over. I think Blair had his eyes on other things, like his Middle East envoy stuff, and he probably fancies something in the European Commission, and he wanted to leave formal parliamentary politics while he was still young enough to pursue a second career in these things.