It ain146;t Iraq, stupid

Blair modernised left-of-centre politics. That legacy will survive the mess in Baghdad

Seen from afar, Tony Blair8217;s announcement of the schedule of his exit as British prime minister is an astonishing moment. He prepares to go without having lost a decisive vote within his party or in Parliament. He goes with opinion polls suggesting 89 per cent of Labour supporters think he has been a good PM, with 62 per cent of Liberal Democratic and 45 per cent of Tory supporters in agreement. Most importantly, after ten years it is not just his country that he leaves modernised: its public services are more performance

oriented, its central bank independent, there is devolution to Scotland and Wales, hereditary peerages are abolished, Northern Ireland is on a conciliatory mend. Blair has done something possibly more substantive from an external perspective. He has modernised the very idea of left-of-centre politics.

To understand this, consider his darkest moment 8212; and no, we don8217;t think his Iraq decision qualifies. Blair came closest to embarrassment on the cash-for-peerages issue. It exposed New Labour8217;s complete break from its old party configuration where union subscriptions would assure campaign finance. But it is that very break from old certitudes that has modernised Labour. With Blair, the party did not have to carry the unions8217; agenda. He broke with the past most meaningfully by taking amendments to the party8217;s founding principle, Clause IV of the party constitution. As party chief, he deleted, with endorsement, references to 8220;common ownership of the means of production8221;, and inserted instead the party8217;s aim to gain 8220;a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few8221;.

It is this same modernising mindset that informed his decision on Iraq. It8217;s been easy to caricature him as agreeing to the war over a prayer session with George Bush. But Blair8217;s idea of liberal interventionism was long before at the heart of his articulation of internationalism. In his famous Chicago address in April 1999 he said, 8220;Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter.8221; Saddam Hussein, he reckoned, qualified. And his belief in a special relationship with the US gave Britain a way of asserting its influence globally. It would be a pity if his modernising paradigm were ignored and early appraisals based only on the current operational mess in Iraq.