Tony Blair146;s final bow

And to be fair to him, it wasn8217;t all downhill. He achieved a fair amount of success, which is generally forgotten in the Iraq debacle. Even in foreign policy, the record is not bad, barring Iraq. Despite his seemingly pro-US stance, he believed strongly in the 8216;European project8217;, and forged closer cooperation with the EU, despite the scepticism of the public, and indeed would have liked to take Britain into the single currency, but for opposition from Gordon Brown. He also did much to bring Libya and Iran back into the mainstream, through diplomacy. His focus on Africa and support for debt relief, through forums like the G-8, were eminently progressive policy tilts.

But the changes he brought to domestic politics will probably have the greater long-term impact. Blair8217;s efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland have borne fruit, with a cessation of violence and an unprecedented power sharing at this very moment between the Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party. This was enabled in the first place by devolution of significant political powers to the Northern Ireland assembly in Belfast, following the historic Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which allowed the volatile region to be governed from within rather than from London.

Blair8217;s progressive policies towards power sharing did a lot for the devolution of political power elsewhere in Britain too. Assemblies were created for governing Scotland and Wales. Power was restored to local government in London 8212; Thatcher had abolished the Greater London Council. He also initiated reform of the House of Lords and began the process of abolishing hereditary peerages, another welcome measure.

But perhaps the biggest achievement was in the economic sphere. The credit for this is often claimed by Gordon Brown, the PM-in-waiting, but undoubtedly some credit must go to Blair. The UK has experienced an economic boom for ten straight years, with consistently low levels of inflation and also the lowest unemployment rate in Europe at around 3 per cent. And there has been significant redistribution, a policy abandoned under Thatcher. Tax rates have risen, minimum wage has been restored and periodically revised upwards, and many creative welfare schemes have ensured that people work and not shirk due to the cushion of welfare, but are supported in case they can8217;t find any work. The government has also poured money into education and the National Health Service while attempting to reform some of the structures without changing state ownership of these basic social services. Figures do show vast improvement in waiting times now.

Above all, Blair has changed the political battleground, by taking it to a territory entirely his own. He has shown that parties must govern from the centre and not the extremes of left or right, if they want popular support in the UK. The resurgence of a more moderate, caring Conservative Party under the youthful, telegenic, hardly Thatcherite, centrist, and often 8216;green8217; leadership of David Cameron, is a tribute to Blair8217;s personal impact on the polity. Everyone, including bitter rival, Gordon Brown, is fighting for the middle ground Blair is about to leave empty.

It8217;s a tragedy for Blair, and his country, that he chose to enter a war over which he was never going to have any control, based on shoddy intelligence reports, and against popular opinion at home and abroad. His decision broke the umbilical cord of trust he had with his people. Anything he would say or do in the future would have been met with scepticism. Pity the timing, under the cloud of destruction in Iraq, because he certainly deserved a more creditable farewell than the one he is getting.

The writer, a research scholar in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, has lived in 8216;Blair8217;s England8217; as a student between 1999 and 2007